Allatoona Creek

I ride at Allatoona Creek after work pretty regularly, and aside from crashing my brains out a while back, there's usually nothing noteworthy to say about the trails. But, the last few times I was out there I noticed a few things that qualify as noteworthy.

So here they are.

The Rusty Bucket has been closed since the last major rain. I figured this was temporary, to let it dry out, but it's been dry for a while and the sign's still been up. Now it appears to be fairly permanently closed at the other end too.

I saw what appeared to be new cut trail though, off to the left of the little bit that is open, so maybe reroutes are coming. Rather than speculate, there's actually a number I could call to find out exactly what's going on, but, you know, lazy...

The Mason's Bridge Connector has 2 segments: "out" and "back". The "out" segment seems to be experiencing the same fate as the Rusty Bucket.

I rolled through the Mo Flo too. First time I've been there that it's been open since The Accident. I couldn't bring myself to jump anything, but I manualled the step-up. After rolling through the whoops that I crashed on, I'm still not sure what went wrong. I'd hoped something would stand out, but nope, nothing.

There's a new bridge out there too.

It takes you over Allatoona Creek proper.

No more waiting for the water to get low and crossing on the pipeline support beams.

I don't think there's any trail over there yet though, other than the grasstrack that leads along the creek, so it's kind-of a bridge to nowhere at this point, but according to some signage I saw a while back, funds have been raised and new trail is on the way. I wonder if there are any hills over on that side. It'd be nice to see some elevation out there.

I noticed another kind-of odd thing about the bridge. It's closed to horses. The singletrack is closed to horses too, but as far as I know the grasstracks are open, and there have to be 5 miles or more of those out there, and I haven't even explored all of that yet, especially on the other side of the creek. If so much trail is open to horses, why not build the bridge such that horses could use it too? The steel part doesn't appear to be any more sturdy than the bridges on the Silver Comet that can take horse traffic. Would the wooden part of it have to be a lot more hardcore, and thus expensive? Was the superstructure build such that the surface could it be upgraded in the future? Inquiring minds want to know.

There's some new trail on Voodoo as well, and a new loop off of it. The name escapes me at the moment, but I remember that it fit with the Voodoo/Mumbo-Jumbo theme. I'd actually ridden the trail a few weeks ago without realizing it, or at least part of it. Before it was signed it just seemed like part of Voodoo, and coming from the other direction, I ended up riding it. It seemed new, but I figured they'd just made Voodoo a little longer.

The ride itself was pretty good. I'm getting a lot more comfortable with the 1x11. I did manage to run out of gears a few times though, on the trail, but only for a few seconds each time, so it's probably not a big deal.

I'm excited about the new developments out there. I want to say there's like 20 miles of trail already and 20 more planned. The way things are progressing, it may be possible to do an Allatoona Epic sooner than I expected.