Thomson Trails

Billy called me (or texted me, I forget which) I think Thursday night, mid September, curious if I wanted to accompany him to Macon to buy a Jeep. He'd found a really good deal but needed a ride down so he could drive it back. That sounded fun to me, but he sweetened the deal futher by suggesting that we ride the Thomson Trails while we were down there. "Thomson Trails" rang a bell, but I couldn't figure out which bell, right away. I eventually decided that they must be the trails at the Industrial Childrens' Home, AKA Pig Trails, that I'd raced at several times, but somehow never GPS'ed. Even better! Yes, I was in, and that Saturday we headed down to Macon.

The Jeep looked good, the sale went down, and we grabbed some pretty good pizza at Stoners Pizza, across the street. Stoners and Mellow Mushroom... I'm not sure how they get away with these names. I guess if your pizza is good enough, nobody wants to shut you down.

With full bellies, we headed over to the trail. The neighborhood looked less and less familiar as we got closer though, and as we came around the last bend, I realized my mistake. The Thomson Trails aren't the Pig Trails, they're trails on the Thomson factory property. Thomson, the manufacturer of stems and seat posts, whose products I rode exclusively until 2020 when I started riding DIY carbon knock-offs. I'd never ridden there, but always wanted to. Awesome!

We parked near the back of the lot and got ready to ride.

The entrance to the trail was clear, so we spun up to the kiosk...

...to check out the semi-confusing map.

Kevin Haywood made that map! That's a name I hadn't heard in forever. He was one of the first guys mapping Georgia trails and putting them online. I met him once at a Co-Trails event way back. Super cool guy. It was really cool to run into his name again.

The map was a little out of date though. We could see an entrance ahead of us that just didn't appear to be on it at all. A guy was about to take off running as we were pondering though, and gave us some info. There were three stacked loops of successive difficulty - green, blue, and black. They're very well marked, and there's an R on the signs if you're riding the reverse direction. So, pick a direction, and follow the arrows. We saw people coming off the trail behind us, so we figured we'd get onto it ahead of us.

There was also a large group of kids, like 20 of them, with a couple of parents, all heading out for a ride soon, so we figured we'd better get ahead of them.

The guy was right, the trail was super well marked and easy to follow, for the most part.

It was mostly sandy singletrack...

...which was great because it had rained recently, but that only made the sand grippier.

The trail reminded me a lot of Dallas-area trails. It was pretty twisty, mostly flat, but punctuated by difficult features. For example, here's Billy struggling with a steep and badly eroded hill.

Just like you'd find in Dallas.

We rode an "outer loop" of all 3 trails, then rode another loop of green/blue/black, another loop of just green/blue, and another loop of just green. It turns out that the loops are stacked, but not like most stacked loops where the send/return are like 40 feet apart. You actually skip a good bit of trail if you don't ride the loops individually.

The back of the property butts up against a local air field, and there's a radar tower back there that you can see from the trail.

There's also this witch, I guess, at one of the major intersections.

The intersection is super tricky to understand too. I want to say there are trails going off in at least 5 directions, though you can't really tell in the photo.

It later occurred to me that the witch might be a pun on the word "which". Like: "Which way do I go at this confusing intersection?" If it's not, then they missed out on a good pun.

We ran into the runner guy again, and later him and some lady with him. There were a few other mountain bikers on the trail too, but only one passed us. The rest we randomly saw through the woods, going some other direction than we were. Somehow we never ran into those kids at all, but I could hear them from time to time.

After thouroughly exploring the woods, we rode around this big field to the left of them. There was a bit of a road leading around it, and in the back corner there were some jumps.

They'd seen much better days though, and even the center, less lippy line was sketchy and bumpy. I kept getting pinged and bucked, so I didn't even try the left line. There was a big mowed spiral through the field too, which, while not too exciting, was still kind of fun to ride, if only for the novelty of it.

I'm glad I finally got to ride those trails. I don't think I'd drive back down to Macon just ride that system again, but if I lived there, I'd be hitting it all the time. Pretty good for being a local trail.

On the way home, it stormed on us. Like only a few minutes after leaving, we were really caught up in it.

Our timing was perfect.