3949dxer

I hope to ride Sulphur Mountain Road in the next couple of weeks. It really looks like a beautiful ride.

I wonder how do-able this is on a road bike. I plan to start from the northeast end, near Ojai. I know that the first 5 miles are quite steep, but paved all the way up to the summit. Then it's 10 miles of downhill dirt, with a grade ranging from about 5-10%.

I'm pretty comfortable riding my road bike on dirt and would prefer the road bike for the steep uphill, and also for the bike trail up to Ojai from Ventura.

For anyone who's done this ride, is that dirt section very rough? From the descriptions I've found I get the feeling it's not, but haven't seen photos of the dirt sections and don't know for sure.

There's a good description here and the post has a link to a nice photo report. https://www.bikeforums.net/southern-c...de-report.html But while the info is well written and very helpful, it doesn't quite answer my question.

Thanks in advance for any info.

mjdwyer23

I do it on my roadie all the time (2014 Cervelo S3 w/ Zipp 808s). I always descend the other side as it is paved unless I'm on my cx bike with 32's. Because we don't get much rain, the dirt pretty much turns into pavement, albeit rough pavement. It's a great ride, start early in the cool shade and see the sunrise!

I'd recommend rolling down the bike path from Ojai and going up the dirt side unless you want to carry like 20 tubes for pinching all the way down. It's smooth and hard, but there's rocks and a few gravelly patches that will mess up your day.