Plans were a bit up in the air originally but I think what we settled on was pretty perfect. I tried to create a route that would work with Ant's post-surgery recovery and Emily's need to make to her dad's evening event and my desire to do something dirty and sendy! Originally Rey and Marisa were going to come but something came up. It would've been nice to do birthday celebrations for Rey, Suzanne, and I two weekends in a row. I saw today that it was National Hiking Day but it was actually National Trails Day (which I should've remembered because it's always the first Saturday in June so often coincides with my birthday ride). Well the trails were pretty busy. There were more hikers in Purisima Creek Redwoods today than all of my visits this year and last year combined, maybe even the year before. And when I got to HMB, I was shocked to find street parking that's normally empty was almost completely full. I didn't realize there was a soccer tournament. I was happy that it was sunny at the coast but it was also quite windy and the wind chill nearly negated the warmth. We had a slightly late start because we ended up going to Moonside Bakery first. It worked out because I was hungry and only brought one bar which I was eating when Emily suggested going to Moonside. When we got to the Coastal Trail, I took the first opportunity to get on the dirt at the cliff's edge. I had to do a sharp turn around a mound to get onto the cliffside singletrack and I guess there was loose dirt over the hardpack and I did a two wheel drift but stayed up right. Moments later though, I heard a thump and turned around to see Peter had gone down hard, probably in the same place I drifted. He has beefy tires on his gravel bike but they're full slicks. Peter cut up his knee pretty badly - it looked so angry - and was bleeding from his thumb. Luckily Emily had a band-aid. Not a great way to start the ride but the Peter was okay to ride and we were incident-free the rest of the ride. I was surprised that there were still wildflowers along the coast. And Purisima seemed more overgrown and lush than the last time I was there only a few weeks before. Climbing Purisima Creek was not fun. Chasing Peter, Emily, and Irene was a bad idea as I blew up halfway up the final steep section. I did PR the climb however. Ant was feeling good enough to climb it so we didn't have to split up the ride like I was anticipating would happen before the ride. The steep first descent from the North Parking, there were a lot of hikers. Peter made it down with his slicks but nearly took Suzanne out when he couldn't really slow down at the bottom and came right for us as we were waiting. Luckily there was just enough of a gap between the bikes. Then Ant ripped past the trailhead for Whittemore. A hiker told us he had gone down North Ridge Trail. We waited for a while for him to come back up and Peter, Suzanne, and Irene each tried going after him. I had forgotten that the trail reconnects since I don't normally go that way since it's a steep fire road that dead ends. Whittemore Gulch actually only had a couple hikers and surprisingly we almost had a completely free run of it. It was so good. It was also great to see how far Irene has progressed from doing Whittemore on her first gravel ride when we did our, winter in July, Fifield-Cahill Ridge ride and screaming the whole way down to sending it today. I saw the forecast for Dad's was going to be cloudy and windy. Glad I saw that so I could warn people to bring jackets because it was pretty chilly. Zoe couldn't make it for the ride but rode out to meet us for lunch and got there right around the time we got our food so the timing worked perfectly.