Originally Posted by Steve B.

1st question: If you are going to work in Los Alamos, are you going to be looking to live in the LA area ?, ... Where you end living changes somewhat the advice people (and I) give.

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I lived in the SF area for 10 summers (wife was working at the Opera) and did extensive road and mt. biking from ABQ in the south to Taos in the north, east to LA and west into the Pecos area. The thing about the west is there is not the abundance of road networks to allow a huge variety of routes. If you do a long road ride east out of SF for instance, it's either I25 or Old Las Vegas Hwy. Then I25 to Pecos or Rt285 south for an out and back, literally only 2 roads in the entire area. There are extensive loops to do in the SF metro area as there are more local roads and you can easily do a 40-50 mile "round Santa Fe" loop. The Los Alamos area has essentially one long road loop - Rt 4 and 501. 28 miles around so if you want to go long, you do it twice. You can go down to the Rios Grande and then east or north. From LA you can also go further up the hill and west on Rt 4 but again, it's an out and back. A extremely scenic out and back, mind you as is pretty much all the roads. When I lived in Pojaque, north of SF, I would ride up to Truchas for a hard hill climb. Then it was a screaming downhill with an amazing view across the Rio Grande valley to the Jemez Mountains. It was hard to concentrate on the road as the views were stupendous. Such is New Mexico

As to road or mountain ?. Both. There's just enough roads and road riding to want a road bike. There's also a huge amount of mt. biking in the area, probably a greater variety then road rides. You can ride technical single track in the foothills east of SF, or miles and miles or 2 track/fire roads west of SF in the Caja del Rio. So either a full suspension or a cross bike would be appropriate, or both. The road bike is going to want a triple, as BTW and if you only had one bike, I'd use a cross bike with a triple and 2 sets of wheels, one with 28mm slicks for the chip seal, then a 2nd with cross tires for the dirt roads.

The roads are in generally decent shape, though the highway departments do like to use chip-seal on the more rural roads, which sucks, so a road bike that'll take 28mm tires at 90 psi makes for a more comfortable ride. They also don't spend money on wide shoulders outside of the towns, so you are in the lane a lot, but I never had issues and drivers are very polite (there aren't that many of them).

Hope this helped.