Woodring Branch

I woke up Sunday with the previous day's Allatoona-Blankets-Rope Mill fiasco still fresh in my head, and I was still a little sad about it. Ok, lets try something completely different.

There are a bunch of trails, scattered around, that wouldn't be good destinations on their own. Like, I wouldn't generally want to drive all the way out there just to ride that one 3 mile trail. I mean, I have done that, but I don't do it regularly, at least not on purpose. What I will do though, is make a loop out of a few of them. If they're near each other, then I'll park at one, ride it, ride to the next, ride it, etc. and eventually loop back to the car. I did this in Cumming once. In Texas, I've ridden one, driven to the next, ridden that one, and so on, but I'm not sure I've ever done it in Georgia.

At any rate, that was my plan. There are 3 trail systems up in North Georgia that I'd never ridden - Woodring Branch (AKA Amadahy), Fightingtown Creek, and Matt Community Park. They're all fairly short, and you can make a driving loop out of the three.

Let's go.

I first heard about Woodring Branch from either Alex Nutt or Jim Parham. One of their books (I can't remember which) mentioned that it was going to be constructed soon, and gave a prospective location of the trailhead, but as it hadn't yet been built, there was no track yet. Those books were written in the late 90's. I picked them up in 2000, and always meant to check out the trail. Fast forward 23 years, and I was finally getting around to it.

So, Fisher Creek and Woodring Branch are two creeks form inlets on Carter's Lake. There are a couple of knobs on the point between the inlets. The Woodring Branch trailhead lies just off the main road at the head of the point, and the Amadahy trail circles the point.

I'm not sure why the trail is called Amadahy. It's probably Cherokee for something, and I'm probably pretty ignorant for not knowing, but hey, that's how it is.

A couple of hikers left ahead of me, but I caught and passed them pretty quickly. From then on, most of the way around, I was on my own, and man was I lucky. The trail was just staggeringly fast.

If there had been a lot of traffic, it would have been a shame, but all by myself, I could really enjoy it.

I did take a little side trail down to the lake, to get a good look at it.

You can see it through the woods as you're flying by, but to get a good look, you really have to drop down to the edge.

If memory serves, it was one of the first "Sorba Trails" in North Georgia. That is, one of the first trails built by the book. The book being the IMBA Guide to Building Sweet Singletrack. Outsloped, 3-foot wide sidehill, with rolling dips, grade reversals, and overall grades under 10%. The trail has been around for over 20 years, but it looks like it was built last year, and it rides like it too. These days, we know that trails like that last and last, but at the time, it was experimental.

The detractors would argue that it's not very technical, and therefore sucks. "Stop dumbing down the trail!" I used to argue that ripping fast XC trail is great, and if you really want technical trail, find rocky terrain and build a trail through it, rather than relying on erosion to constantly expose new rocks, which eventually ruts out the trail and makes it suck. In the early 2000s though, mountain biking hadn't been mainstream long enough for a lot of popular trails to eventually suck, and there weren't many (if any) well-built, technical trails in Georgia. All of that has changed though. Now there are both, and along with them, some amount of vindication for Sorba trail design. Actually, there's a third factor now, too. A modern XC bike has 120mm of travel front and rear, 29 inch wheels, 2.4 inch tires, 720mm bars and a dropper post. And that's just an XC bike, not to mention trail, downcountry, and enduro rigs. What's just rough and technical these days would have been unrideable on a 26 inch hardtail with 1.95 tires and an 80mm fork in the early 2000s. Improving technologoy has arguably dumbed down the bike.

Not that I care about any of that, but it all came to mind while I was riding.

In addition to the Amadahy Trail, there are a couple of unmaintained dirt roads in the area. One, it turns out, follows the ridgeline all the way down to the end of the point, where there's a campground...

...complete with multiple outhouses.

There were a few folks actually camping, but it looked like most had just anchored their boat and were hanging out for the day. Music, food, and drinks. It looked like everybody was having a really good time, and that made the murderous climb out that I knew I had ahead of me less appealing than it otherwise might have been.

The rest of the roads led to various food plots. There were some overgrown spurs that I didn't bother to explore. Maybe one day, on foot.

I still had 2 more destinations ahead of me, so I got on the road quickly after getting back to the truck.

Not far up the road, I passed the Zombie Skin Jerky Store.

Ha! Only on North Georgia.

Fightingtown is between Ellijay and Blue Ridge, and as I was driving through Ellijay, I noticed the sky to the north looked as furious as I'd ever seen in my life. I quickly checked the weather radar, and good lord, the storm that was bearing down on me looked outright dangerous to get caught in. The blobs were completely red, covered the entire state, and were heading directly south. Just my luck.

I sped south, basically trying to outrun it, and more or less did so. I got caught in some rain for a few minutes, eventually managed to escape, got home, got all of my gear inside, and then got caught in it again just as I was taking the bike off of the rack. 10 minutes later my power went out and then came the wind and hail, which, as it turned out later, knocked all of the ripe blueberries off of my bushes. It was quite a storm.

So, two days in a row, my ride got cut short because of weather. While both rides were fun, they were unsatisfyingly short. Not the best weekend.