Biking Catalina Island
Last weekend, my husband and I headed to Catalina for the first time. We traveled there on a Friday, did a day of cycling on Saturday, and came home on Sunday. In the process we saw an incredible number of microcars and kei trucks, which I'll write a second blog post about. This one is about the cycling!
Catalina: expensive tourism crucible
Originally home to the Tongva, Santa Catalina Island fell under the control of various groups of European and American settlers throughout the 1800s, many of whom tried to turn it into a tourist attraction. In the early 20th century, the Wrigley chewing gum guy became the first to successfully extract cash from the place over the long term. In he 70s, his son gave most of the land on the island to the Catalina Island Conservancy, a nonprofit which now controls basically the entire island outside the main town of Avalon. Meanwhile, the Santa Catalina Island Company - also once controlled by the Wrigleys - controls most of the resort properties in town.
The result is a bizarre, Disneyland-like tourist community managed by those two allied organizations. The Company owns most resort facilities in town, and the Conservancy completely controls hiker/cyclist access to the interior of the island. If you become a "member" of the Conservancy - a 35-dollar-a-year recurring cost - you get a permit to bike in the interior. But you can't just buy the permit alone… you just gotta buy this scammy membership thing, and remember to cancel it afterwards.
A lot of stuff on Catalina is like this. The Catalina Express will sail you to the island from Long Beach for 40 bucks, but to get your bike on the boat, you gotta buy an additional 8 dollar ticket which isn't actually offered online… only over the phone. To get into the botanical garden in Avalon, if you aren't a member of the Conservancy, you gotta pay 15 dollars and give them your entire phone number and email address. Most meals on the island cost about 20 dollars for the entree alone.
This isn't a cheap trip and I don't recommend it to anyone who needs to know exactly how much their vacation is going to cost. Every time we had to eat food in Avalon, I found myself thinking: really?? Really?????
But if you're looking for the kind of trip that's easy to access from Los Angeles, anyone within bus or bike distance of the Metro can get to the Catalina Express ferry terminal for a $1.75 metro fare. And that's as good as travel gets in LA! For us, it was a good choice for a weekend trip which didn't involve cars or planes, and which didn't require us to disassemble the bikes for travel.
Our cycling plans
We are what I would call "aspirational scrub" level sport cyclists - we can do a 50 mile day with a light touring load, but it tires us out pretty bad. We don't have a lot of practice climbing, and we don't typically do multi-mile climbs. If you routinely do big mountain climbs over 2000 feet or days over 50 miles, our trip is something you can easily surpass. If you're looking at those numbers and saying "oh boy, oh howdy, absolutely not for me," then I recommend just renting an e-bike on the island. The views are really fucking cool. I have no idea what the Conservancy's humvee tours are like, but I cannot imagine that the experience in a car is better than one on two wheels. Being able to stop and enjoy the view whenever you like is incredible. An ebike could get you those views if you're not up for the climbs on this route.
I planned our cycling trip based on examples I saw on Youtube. We aimed for a 20-30 mile day out to the airport in the center of the island and back to Avalon. I saved two routes to my bike computer: a 20 mile trip out to the airport and straight back, and a 27 mile loop out to the airport and then back through a loop across the middle of the island. The airport has a restaurant in it, so I figured we'd stop there, eat lunch, then choose whether we wanted to do the full loop.
Pictured here is all the stuff I brought on the trip--including stuff I didn't bring on the actual bike ride into the interior. Not pictured: the clothes I wore in, and some of our dried fruit, which my husband was carrying. We also brought two light bike covers to keep our bikes from getting drenched with salt spray on the ferry.
We had to pack a lot of snacks. I have Type 1 diabetes, and exercise can drive my blood sugar low, so on trips like this I always over-pack foods with a lot of sugar or carbohydrates. We brought several pounds of dried fruit, four Fillo's Walking Tamales for emergency meals, five sticks of chicken jerky, two flats of the gummy fruit straws they sell at my local Sprouts, and a sack of Lifesavers gummies. I ended up eating all the fruit straws and a good deal of the gummies. A freak accident also ended up losing half our snacks, which I'll get to later… so overpacking snacks was justified.
We started the day with 5 liters of water. Brendon carried a Camelbak bladder with 2 liters, and a water bottle with 1 liter in a bottle holder on his frame. I carried two Nalgenes with a little under a liter each. We filled the bladder with water, but the water bottles all held a 50% water, 50% orange juice mix. On a tough biking trip, you generally want to be constantly consuming calories. OJ provides that… plus electrolytes, which I must grudgingly admit are Real and Important. I tend to be able to go a lot farther when I'm sucking down OJ concoctions than when I'm not.
5 liters of fluid is honestly too much, but I'm always afraid that getting stuck with low blood sugar will make us waste time, which will lead to more fluid getting drunk in the hot sun... and this did happen to us! Paranoia justified, once again!
Clothes-wise, I wore a cycling jersey, bike shorts and a sun shirt. My husband wore jogging pants and a Uniqlo Heattech long-sleeved undershirt. I don't know that I would personally recommend this strategy, but it worked for him until the temperature rose in the early afternoon. But by that point we were indoors eating a burger! So it didn't matter.
Our bikes are both steel touring frames. I ride a Kona Rove almost everywhere, and I do not have a closet full of cool tires, and I knew the road to the airport was mostly paved, so I was just riding on the same Gravelking lightly textured tires I use for all my cracked-pavement commutes in LA. (This turned out to be a poor choice). Brendon rides a State 4130 All-Road - also his commuting bike. We both had rear racks with rack-top bags. I used a Topeak "MTX Trunkbag EX" and matching rack. Brendon used an REI Beyonder rack trunk which attaches with velcro loops. This did not work out, which I'll get to in a bit.
Here's my full tour load test setup from the night before the trip:
If you're going to do something like this, I think the exact type of bike you have matters a lot less than the tires you have and whether your plans match your kit's carrying capacity, your bike gearing, and your personal strength. You could do this on a gravel bike, a mountain bike, or any old bike frame capable of fitting wide and knobbly enough tires and big enough climbing gears.
The ride
I deliberately winged a lot of this trip. I planned the route ahead of time, but I didn't want to stress over it. I knew that I could climb anything if I had enough time, and we had a whole day, so I didn't want to freak myself out studying Youtube videos or elevation maps too closely. Still, I knew that the first few miles out of Avalon headed north would be straight climbing.
Well, there were four of those miles. Four straight miles at 6-13% grade is pretty fucking tough for us! We stopped frequently, partially because the views were incredible and we wanted to photograph them… but partially because my blood sugar didn't behave.
We started the morning with a big meal, but I'd taken (reduced) insulin for it. In retrospect, I should have taken zero insulin. I ended up flatting out at around 78 mg/dl after the first 1000 feet of climbing… which is low enough to make me feel like I have absolutely zero gas in the tank. We stopped in a few different places halfway up the first big climb and I inhaled close to 120 grams of carbs.
My blood sugar stayed flat. This is pretty insane behavior for my blood! 120 grams is like… two bagels. I guess I was just barely heading off a severe low with that. My blood sugar didn't start climbing until almost two hours after we'd left town.
On a trip like this, I'd rather have elevated blood sugar than "normal" blood sugar, because when it falls, it can fall pretty fucking fast, and getting stuck out in the wilderness with a severe low is very dangerous. I can feel when my blood sugar is high enough to make all-out cycling safe for me - I begin to feel extremely strong, truly engine-like! After our final 30 minute rest, I began to feel strong in that particular, glucose-rich way again, so we took off at max speed.
We got to the top of the big starter climb around noon and finally found ourselves at the fun part - around 6 miles of rolling hills along the top of the island's interior mountain range.
We stuck on Airport Road and headed inland. The Eco-Tour trucks visit the airport, too… and I'm not sure what else they visit, to be honest. Most of the paths on the island are not fit for cars, and this is one of their only options. There was a lot more traffic than we expected, and we were constantly getting passed by the tour trucks, minibuses serving the airport, and workers in lifted pickups and SUVs. The roads were largely pavement, but there were dirt sections as well, and the cars were throwing up massive dust clouds every time they passed.
The pavement sucked, honestly. I found myself wishing that more of it was gravel or sandy dirt. This road is clearly very ancient, and there's heavy trucks driving on it all day, every day. There are sections of this road which have been patched and mended so many times that the entire surface is a quilt of lumpy asphalt patches… and a lot of these sections are on slopes. Going downhill on this stuff sucks!! It's zero pits, all lumps. This photo is of a relatively tame section, and this stuff always looks way tamer than it feels in action.
I'm certain that one of these sections defeated the velcro on my husband's rack bag. 2 miles from the airport, we realized that it had just disappeared. We raced back the previous 3 or so miles to look for it on the road, but couldn't find it. I was certain that someone in a truck had picked it up. With it, we lost half our snacks and the liter of water remaining in the Camelbak bladder.
We decided to press on to the airport anyway, because it was the closest source of water. I split my remaining water with Brendon and we pushed on. The final few miles were very difficult - we were not feeling so awesome after losing the bag and redoing so many miles of road, and I think we were getting a little too careful about drinking. In the end, we walked the bikes up the last quarter mile to the airport, then rushed inside to the restaurant to recover.
At the restaurant, we made the call to do the shorter of our two planned routes. Not only had we lost 2 liters of water capacity and half our food, but my less-gravelly tires were having trouble starting from a dead stop on some of the steeper and sandier gravel sections. We decided to just do the road we knew.
With that decision out of the way, getting home after our late lunch was easy. Biking is extremely mental. My performance improvements over the last two years have been less about building physical strength and more about building mental focus and resilience. With full water bottles on our bikes and burgers in our guts, it took us around a quarter of the time to get home as it had taken us to get out. We were doing more downhills, but even the uphills were easier. Territory you know is always faster than territory you don't.
We got back to Avalon at 4 PM. I am not used to long, steep descents. I was descending with almost all our supplies loaded up on my bike, and with very sweaty hands, since I'd forgotten my gloves. I finished with two bright red stripes on my palms from death-gripping the drops on my way down. I even bruised the base of my thumb by hitting downhill "washboard" bumps in the dirt road while my hands were resting on my brake hoods.
All in all, we did around 25 miles. We took a different route down into the town than we'd taken out of it, and got some great views on the narrow, winding road down behind Avalon's Casino performance hall. Then we headed back downtown via the Casino road.
Behind the scenes
This wasn't the end for us. In my mission to bike as many road miles as possible, we also fit in a couple more sedate rides purely to cover miles in the town. I ended up getting around 31% of the bikeable roads in Avalon.
Avalon is a unique place in Southern California. For the average person, owning a full size car here is extremely difficult. There is an additional local level of vehicle regulations which strictly curtails the number of cars on the island. Almost every local gets around with golf cart or a microcar. Many of the businesses use kei trucks instead of pickups. The Island Company owns plenty of full-sized cars, but mostly uses them for bussing tourists into the interior. Most people on Catalina are living in a world where personal cars basically do not exist.
This makes it a fantastic place for bike nerds to explore. If you head to Avalon with a bicycle, I highly recommend doing going off the beaten path and poking around in the non-tourism-focused parts of town. If you rent a golf cart to get around, you won't be able to see the weirdest urban infrastructure - including Pebbly Beach, which is where the island's helipad is, and where the city parks its weird, tiny delivery trucks. It's also the location of the island's Southern California Edison power plant--a power plant so small, it can't actually handle that many electric vehicles. (Most of the transportation in town is done via loud, stinky 2-stroke engine.)
Going there feels like looking behind the scenes at Disneyland. We also made sure to bike to the K-12 school, the hospital, the city hall, and the sheriff's office - where, on Sunday, we discovered that someone had dropped off my husband's missing bag!
Avalon is a tremendously weird town. Standing by the shore on Friday night, we looked up at the steep hillsides over the harbor. Almost every single window in every single mansion or condo building above downtown was completely dark at 9:00 PM. It's late September, which is still summer in LA… but the off-season for tourism. You could easily see that the place had been largely abandoned for the fall by its richest landowners.
During almost every meal we ate, I found myself poring over census data on my phone, pulling my hair out about how expensive and strange this place is. During one meal, a couple sitting near us awkwardly asked our server how she affords to live on the island. She explained that her other job provided her housing. In 2020, Avalon had less than 3500 residents. In 2010, it had 3728, and 2266 housing units. Only 383 were owner-occupied. I bet a lot of those were the empty ones we were seeing on the hillsides. This seems like a place where the class distinctions present in every tourism economy are particularly sharp. It also seems like the same racial divisions that exist on the mainland re: who does service labor were present here, too--a lot of the locals working tourist-facing jobs were Spanish-speaking people of color. Despite the things that make Catalina feel unique, "like another country," it remains very, very, American, and very Los Angeles, in every way you might expect.
It was usually easy to tell which golf carts on the island belonged to locals rather than tourists. Locals often had elaborately customized or decorated golf carts. They were carrying their dogs, their kids, and boxes full of stuff for their jobs or businesses. Locals also ripped past us on ebikes and hauled loads of laundry after dark on foot to a half-hidden downtown laundromat. It seems like a completely bonkers place to live - maybe a great place to raise kids, though? I don't know. Your kids certainly aren't going to get run over by a yank tank here, and they have plenty of access to nature. A friend of ours is a high school sports coach, and he had to take his team to Catalina for an away game this year. "They gotta play someone," he said.
I would love to come back here and film the main seaside road downtown for my series of LA area bike infrastructure recordings. I'd also love to bike up into the north side of town, where the hills defeated my tired legs on Saturday evening. Every inch of this place is fascinating. I'd kill for a good documentary about the town's microcar culture and vehicle regulations! I'd love to see conversations with workers about how the local economy affects them. And I'd love to see some interviews with kids who grew up here about what it's like to live in a tourist village where you get your housing from your job, all the burgers cost 20 bucks, and everyone drives an ancient golf cart.
All in all, I was glad to visit - this part of greater LA is so out-of-the-way and bizarre. We'll have to come back someday and bike the rest of the route we planned… or go even further, to Two Harbors, the only other town on the island. Two Harbors used to have its own one-room schoolhouse, but was forced to close it in 2014 when only two students enrolled. Despite that... when we were in line for a meal, we overheard two guys working at the place talking about visiting the Grove in Fairfax on their day off.
A one-room schoolhouse! Days off at the Grove! What the hell! LA is so weird and cool and expensive and horrible. Truly a land of contrasts. I'm glad to have seen some of those weirder contrasts here!