Would you move to San Jose from Fort Collins?

So my job has been transferred from Fort Collins, CO to San Jose, CA. I am having a real hard time trying to convince myself this move is a good thing. Just wanting some input from people living in the Bay area. I climb(sport, trad, alpine), cycle(both road and mtn), but backcountry snowboarding is what I can't get enough of.

I guess the biggest issue is moving from 100K people to 1+million and having to live in suburban hell. I know weekends will be good for getting out and exploring a new place but what about the weekdays? Is it just to spread out and congested to play on the weekdays?

Give me your thoughts.

Having lived in the Bay Area for ~15 yrs and given where you rank climbing activities, I would not move to the S Bay. Road biking out there is actually pretty good, especially on the peninsula and there is also decent singletrack at places like El Corte de Madera and Henry Coe. The regional park system is also extensive, but a lot of the trails aren't open to MTBs. Getting out of town to climb/board is a pain and the local climbing areas are pretty crappy (conglomerate choss and coastal sandstone). There are some very motivated S Bay climbers/skiers/boarders and I'm sure you could easy find people to make the drive to Yosemite or Tahoe almost every weekend, but I personally would think twice before doing that again.

p.s Post the same question on summitpost if you haven't already. There are many active Bay Area users.

I wouldn't do it.
California works best when your work schedule is flexible and you ARE NOT stuck to the weekend warrior schedule. If you are a weekender, you are stuck getting out on the same days as the other 32 million other people in the state. It's certainly not impossible, but you'll find yourself working a lot harder (driving, traffic, camping hassles, etc.) than you did in Ft. Collins. If you can hang on there in Ft. Collins, I'd try that route rather than relocating to San Ho.

Also, have you been to San Jose before??

I lived in Santa Cruz for 10 years and worked both in SJ and SC. If you do move, check out the towns with "Main Street" downtown areas (like Mountain View). The extensive suburbs and commuter traffic are horrible(!), but if you can live and move against the main flow of traffic, it can be pretty good. San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Berkeley and Marin County are great places. The road biking is UNBELIEVABLE, particularly if you like mountain road riding. There is always the water as well. I've heard surfing is fun.
We're in one of the great climbing locations in the U.S., so very few places you'll go will be as good as it is around here.
In the other hand, California has everything, it's all 2 to 4 hours away from wherever you happen to be at the moment.
Hopefully, there is a meaningful pay raise involved. Housing is out of sight.

New place to live brings new opportunities. If you don't like it you can always move back. Don't let climbing limit your outlook on life.

The biking is really really good.

Try to arrange some sort of flex schedule with work.

I'll add since some of these guys are posting from Santa Cruz...

I climbed with a guy who lived there (Santa Cruz) and worked in Santa Clara. It's pretty doable, but you will have a commute, but you could live in Santa Cruz which is pretty cool. One downside to that is you are a little bit further from the "good" climbing and skiing, but you are closer to Pinnacles (interesting, fun rock), surf and from what I've always heard fantastic mtn biking. Anywhere along the coast in Northern California has phenomenal road biking too.

Yes, excellent mtb'ing. Check out the redwoods/Russian ridge area; Santa Cruz had some goods behind the university too.

Personally, I do not like SJ, at all. Santa Cruz is pretty cool.
You should embrace surfing if you move (it'll take the place of boarding).

The whole place is ridiculous-busy and congested.

rj-n-foco wrote: I climb(sport, trad, alpine), cycle(both road and mtn), but backcountry snowboarding is what I can't get enough of. I guess the biggest issue is moving from 100K people to 1+million and having to live in suburban hell. I know weekends will be good for getting out and exploring a new place but what about the weekdays? Is it just to spread out and congested to play on the weekdays? Give me your thoughts.

Short answer: if you are super into boarding/close climbing, then just say no to the Bay Area.

Long answer:
A lot of your answers will depend on precisely where you work and live. For instance if you live in San Jose and want to drive to skiing or climbing on the weekends, you will have to PLOW your way through an extra hour plus of traffic every single time you try to drive out to the mountains, unless you don't mind leaving after 8pm. But depending on exactly where you live and work, you could have awesome biking right out the door. Or it could be 45 minutes in traffic (if you are lucky) to the closest spot.

Climbing is all about the gyms (excellent but crowded) or big drives (unless you are into loose/sketchy adventure climbing, in which case Pinnacles National Monument has a lifetime's worth - and maybe 100 fairly solid routes including sport). There is insane amounts of awesome granite within a 5 hour drive, but no granite and very little else within 3 hours.

Biking in the south bay is awesome year round. Mostly XC mountain biking and endless road riding including loads of hills. Mostly a drive to get to riding (most of the better mountain biking spots, particularly if you are into singletracks, are going to be a 45 minute drive without traffic), but it is strongly dependent on where you work & live and what you like to do. Some of the local spots are amazing - you can ride 100 miles at Henry Coe, half on singletrack (way more if you count overgrown fireroads), and never even cross your tracks a single time (you'd be doing 20,000' vertical if you did 100 miles there).

The big issue is boarding/backcountry. Nothing close at all, big to huge traffic issues on weekends, and it is just going to get worse (particularly as Sacramento gets bigger and bigger - it's between the Bay and Tahoe). If this is your priority then a big NO.

My 2 cents.

If you don't mind spending a ton of time driving to do the things you like, yes. If not, no. I lived in SF the first two years I climbed and it's about a 100 times better than SJ and I had a flexible schedule but most of my partners didn't, so I wound up driving 200 miles each way to the Valley every week or longer to get to the alpine. That totally blows--not matter what anyone says to the contrary. Bad you for, bad for more traffic, bad for the environment--a tragedy of commons in every respect. And that's just the long haul stuff. Try driving from Santa Cruz to SJ as a commuter and I'd wager you'd sell your left nut to be back in FC.

o no way man! ft collins is where its at! best people in the world. Climbing and biking a second away and ski fairly close.

Lived in Santa Cruz because that was the closest place to get a rental we could afford-in the ghetto.Drove to work in Santa Clara;on a bad day, the 30 mile trip could take 2-3 hours.Traffic jams always,and people,tons of people,everywhere.I don't want to be a bummer,but if you have any alternative,I would recommend plan b.

Wow, yet another Santa Cruz - Colorado (Boulder) transplant here.

I would say the stuff you like to do is better in California (all of it) but it's so much farther away you would have to be willing to drive a lot. I used to commute to the mountains almost every weekend - 4 or 5 hours of driving each way. In Santa Cruz, the local road and mountain biking is awesome, but you wouldn't want to commute to SJ. I had an 8-mile commute and that was OK. In my last year in the Bay Area I lived in Walnut Creek and commuted to Fremont it it was horrible - all i ever did was work and drive. DOn't set yourself up for that. You need to live near work.

You could live in the south bay foot hills - Los Gatos, Saratoga - and have OK access to cycling, 1.5 hours to Pinnacles, 4 hours to Yosemite & Tahoe (or more, depending on traffic). I don't back-country ski/board, but I hear it's a lot more stable in CA and there's a LOT more snow.

But you really have to be OK with driving.

Born in San Jose, moved to Santa Cruz in 1975, left California in 2004. I love Calif. I miss the ocean (lived on a boat 10 years), I miss the redwoods, I miss the Sierra's, I miss the wine country.... but I don't miss the 5 heart attacks and stress. Everything you do will have to take into consideration traffic patterns. There's people everywhere. The state is closing some of the most popular beach's on the coast which is only going to congest things more. If you don't mind tons of traffic just to head down to the local supermarket it might work for you. If the idea of heading to Yosemite on a Friday after work and sitting on the mission grade outside of Fremont for two hours to travel ten miles sounds like your cup of tea... well, I hope you get my point. Anything you do in Calif now days is determined by traffic density and crowd conditions. Climbing at Castle Rock in the summer is like waiting in line at Walmart. I truly love the Calif geography, but not at the expense of living in a quagmire of people and cars. Do yourself a favor. Jump in your car right now, drive to San Jose. Stay in a hotel 2 weeks and shop for your food and cook in the room on a camp stove (just to see what it takes to go shopping), and drive to Yosemite on a Friday afternoon, the beach at Santa Cruz on a weekend, and the crags at Castlerock on a weekend. If you do that and feel like it would work you will have your answer. Good luck. EDIT> I just got a laugh. Almost every post here mentions the traffic... does that tell you something?

We moved from the Bay Area to Ft. Collins 18yrs ago and never looked back. I echo everything people said above.

I would only suggest that you talk to your manager about a work from home (i.e. Ft.Col) situation. It's significantly more expensive to live in the Bay Area. Are they planning to give you a raise to cover that expense? Maybe you could work a deal whereby you'd keep the same salary, but they'd pay for some travel when you really need face-time. They could do it on a per-diem basis so you would have the incentive to stay/eat cheap while you are there... don't lead with that last idea, but maybe it would be a negotiation point.

As an aside if you decide to make the move - there's a very cool new gym just opening in downtown SJ. The Studio is part of the Touchstone network of excellent gyms. And there are a myriad of other great gyms around the bay. I know that's a poor exchange for Boulder Canyon/RMNP/Eldo/Vedauwoo/Flatirons all being about an hour away... but it's something positive about living there.

Thanks everyone for the discussions.

So some details are; I get a good raise to move there (30%) so cost of living is taken care of. The job is good, I'm a mechanical engineer in the semiconductor area. The job is right downtown San Jose, less than 5 minutes from the airport.
I spent a week there last week to check the area out. I was looking at the Los Gatos, Campbell, Saratoga area to live. Went to Santa Cruz, went to the San Fran, drove around SJ at rush hour, hiked around the santa cruz hills. Yes, my biggest concern is traffic and people.

I know I live now in one of the great places in the States. but with todays job market and all, turning down a good career job is hard to do. I keep trying to convince myself it won't be that bad, that CA has alot to offer, but I do hate traffic. I lived North of Atlanta for nine years and did the 45min-1hr commute. I hated it.

I'm actually considering selling off my house stuff and living in my van for awhile. A nice long road trip sure would be good!

Are you single? Cali is way better for that.

If you decide to move and hate traffic, and if your job is truly downtown San Jose, then go for Campbell. You can take light rail and avoid any car commute at all, then a shortish jaunt on the Los Gatos creek trail takes you to the mountains on your bike - both road and (fireroad) mountain biking. More reasonable cost of living relative to Los Gatos (but way higher than CO as you know by now).

This assumes that your job is actually in the downtown area, since a lot of places are not too near light rail (and light rail takes a long time to go through the downtown area to the other side of downtown from where you start).

You can bike downtown too but it's not the best route - not too bad.

I'd stay in CO if climbing and boarding are your priorities. If biking is number one and occasional traffic-intensive 5-hour each way trips for boarding and climbing are OK, then consider it. Job market is getting better fast in high-tech so you can probably stay in CO one way or another.

I don't think 30% is going to cut it here. From what I have seen of the housing market in FC, it's more like double here, at least for housing. Not to beat a dead horse about the traffic and crowds but everything everybody else said is absolutely true. The last time I went to Tahoe for the weekend it took me 8hrs to get there because of all the traffic. I grew up and still live in Santa Cruz,which is IMO the best part of the Bay Area but it has gotten so expensive and crowded here that I pretty much am biding my time to get the hell out of here. I have a flexible schedule which has helped me keep my sanity but there are a lot of places I won't go on the weekends because there just too crowded. So on the note what do people think of moving from Santa Cruz to CO?

have been living in the South Bay fro 12 years now - weather is great, job market and work opportunities are great. Good local biking (road and MTB) but driving for skiing and climbing is really wearing me off.
If I were able to (a) persuade my wife and (b) find comparable job I have now somewhere else where I could curt my usual weekend driving times by half or more, I would probably move. High cost of living and high state taxes don't help either.

Love Cali, grew up in San Jose. All of the above about traffic is true. Longer drive to good climbing... but it is GOOOOD climbing. Nothing compares to Yosemite for its particular kind of climbing.

Santa Cruz is weird. Weird people. Weird attitudes. They even have "Keep Sant Cruz Weird" bumper stickers. Very backward thinking commmunity with respect to progress and improving their city. (obviously my opinion, but based on living there and dealing with the city government extensively). The upside of living in the Cruz is you get out of the hustle and pollution of the "valley". Great climbing gym and trees/beaches are beautiful.

Good luck. I think anybody could be just as happy there as in Colorado (where I live now). You would just have to work a little harder to get to the mountains.