Oak Mountain and Tannehill

This past February, not long after my birthday, me and the boys got ourselves over to Birmingham for a weekend of some pretty good riding. Some of the details have been lost to time, but I remember a good bit of it, so here goes...

I met John at his place and he drove us over to Oak Mountain. We ended up leaving Atlanta right around the same time as the rest of the guys - Mark, Marc, and Erick, and we all arrived at the park at about the same time.

On the way over, I was trying to remember the last time I'd been to Oak Mountain, and I couldn't. I had to search this blog to figure it out. Turned out it was in 2012. Twelve years ago! In the intervening years, there had been many interesting developments.

There were tons of new trail.

There was also, now, a bathroom right next to the parking lot. Historically, you had to take a little trail around a hill to get to the bathrooms. Everyone would try to ride their bikes along the trail, in street clothes, with their riding clothes in one hand. Not a huge problem on a random day, in the summer, but if it was cold then you had lots of extra clothes to carry, and it was always possible you might drop something. If it was wet, it was awful if you dropped something. On a race day, there was bidirectional traffic, including folks on foot. It could be a mess.

But no longer.

The urinal cake holder thing was super weird...

I didn't immediately realize that the upside down triangle thing was a stylized tough guy. I though it was... something else, lets say, and the implication was that you were a tough guy if you could... enjoy what I thought that it was. Of course, that wasn't the case. At least, not explicitly...

Yeah.

Moving on.

There was also a classic bronco in the lot...

...which I expected that Mark would be a big fan of, but I got distracted and didn't end up pointing it out to him. I wonder if he noticed it.

We all got kitted up and headed out. Historically, you'd ride down the road until the trail diverged from it off to the right. Then, at some point, they built a "family trail" over behind the bathrooms. Then, a bigger loop off of that. Then, finally a trail that led from that loop around the lake, over a bridge across the spillway...

...and eventually right up to the point across the street from the main trail. It took me a second to re-figure all of that out, but we figured it out, and rode all of that before eventually getting back onto the old, familiar trail.

The trail was mostly familiar. There were a couple of reroutes here and there, and it looked like a couple of jumps had popped up over the years, but I remembered it pretty well.

I've raced at Oak Mountain a bunch of times, and every time, there was one section that I'd use to gauge what kind of day it was going to be. There's a section of trail called "Chimneys" that features a chimney from an old homestead, off to the left, and not long after passing it, there's a set of switchbacks. If I struggled on the switchbacks, then it was going to be a painful race. Otherwise, I'd be fine. That day, I had an ok time on the switchbacks. No suffering. So, when we got around to the big fire road climb, I felt like I was going to be ok.

And, so it was. I followed my brother up the climb...

...and had a pretty easy time of it. I was even comfortable climbing the really steep kick before the bridge.

At the top, we waited for the rest of the crew.

From there, we took Boulder Ridge across the top, for a while. I'd ridden that trail before, with John, way back, but I remembered it differently. I'd have sworn that earlier in the trail, you had to ride longer sections of rock, and I didn't remember the sketchier sections at the end at all. Here are some of the guys riding one such section.

...which, looks like nothing in the videos, but in real life, looks kinda sketchy.

I didn't remember the very tail end of the trail either, which was super rough.

Was it different, in the past, or did I just not remember it right?

After regrouping there, we took some "new" trails back down the mountain - Thunder and Lightning. Thunder was super rocky and chunky. Lightning was more of a flow trail, with jumps and berms. We ran into a guy and his girl on a tandem at the top of Lightning. They didn't finish too long after us, and I was somewhat impressed.

The very bottom of that trail put us back on Chimneys somewhere, and we climbed the fire road again.

This time, we took it across the top for a while, before taking the West Ridge Trail, and eventually coming down Jeckyll and Hyde. The first bit was much like Thunder - super, super rocky and chunky. Then it suddenly became perfect, swoopy, pine-needly singletrack glory for quite a while, before eventually teeing into Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. I guess the lower half is Jeckyll and the upper half is Hyde.

From there we picked up the Family Trail again, and that was it.

Done!

Right at 30 miles in total. Historically, we'd ride 3 laps, which was like 35 miles or something? I forget. The 30 miles we rode that day were tough and taxing, though, even with all of the downhill. It was just so rough, and the trails across the top were tougher than riding the fire road.

Woo! Great ride.

We packed up our stuff and headed over to the Hampton Inn, where our room had no hot water, and no working phone with which we could notify them of the situation. John ended up going down to the front desk to talk to them about it. Turned out the hot water in some entire section of the hotel didn't work. It would be fixed in a few hours. They could move us to another room, but they only had rooms available in that same section. Whatever. We didn't really care. The water wasn't "cold" per se, just not hot, and it felt great to be clean, either way.

I'd grabbed some Zapps at the gas station on the way over...

...and I kicked back and enjoyed them while John showered.

An hour or two later we all met back up and rolled over to Charm Thai for some pretty satisfying dinner.

The menu cracked us up a bit.

Anyone for some Soft Shell Grab?

I like my vegetables tossedaround.

There was also a guy at another table wearing a shirt that said "Woke up gay again".

Ha! I wanted to take a photo of that.

And the humor didn't stop there. On the way out, I noticed an ice cream shop, so we stopped by on the way back.

The innuendos...

I'm sure they know. I'm just sure they know! And, just check out the casting couches inside of Cream and Cones. That's all there is to sit on in there.

So many jokes.

We all got good sleep that night, and the next day we checked out and headed over to Tannehill Ironworks State Park. The rest of the guys had ridden a 24 hour race there the previous year, and alleged that it was a great place to ride. Little did I know that I'd be doing that same race this year, but that is a story for another day.

I'd gotten some GPS data of the park from Tim Winters, in like 2010, and always meant to get over there, but just never got around to it. Apparently, like Oak Mountain, in the intervening years, lots more trail had been built, and it was apparently some really great trail.

The park itself is fairly elaborate. There's a store, and an ice cream shop, and a bunch of camping, and an old iron bridge, and a light guage rail train that you can ride, and they have an open air flea market there sometimes. And, of course, trails. Lots, and lots of trails.

We arrived, figured out where to park, got dressed appropriately, milled around a bit...

...and then began to shred.

Not that there wasn't any climbing...

But it was mostly shred.

I remember the trail really well now, having ridden a 24 there since, but at the time, I really couldn't tell where we were or what was coming up. It was just tempo climbing and flowy downhill, all day.

At some point, we rode along a creek for a while...

...and that trail was kind-of rough, but the rest was just perfect no-brakes singletrack and old roadbeds.

Eventually, we ended up over by the old ironworks itself, and man was I excited to see it. There are a bunch of old furnaces and kilns in Bartow County, but most of them are relatively small, and the wood has long rotted away from all of them. Not so, at Tannehill. Well, I mean... I'm sure that's not the original wood, but the furnaces have been restored to look the way they would have looked when they were in operation.

And, the furnaces themselves are just so impressive.

The Cooper Furnace at the Allatoona Dam is similar, but it only has one arch. There's a Cooper-sized furnace at Tannehill, with an entire double-arched furnace next door.

The old mill house and wheel have been restored too.

Sadly, there aren't any mock-up bellows, but hey, you can't have everything, right?

Apparently, there was a much older and smaller furnace at the site, originally...

...which was eventually supplanted by the larger ones. I didn't take a photo of the plaque on the old furnace, so I'm not sure if it was just a bloomery or what. I'm sure the internet knows, but I'm too lazy to look it up.

The trail even led under the ore bridge.

That's where ore would be wheeled out and dropped into the top of the furnace.

From there, the trail wound around to the top, and you could look down the bridge itself. I thought I took a photo of that too, but apparently not.

We thought we rode everything, but we ended up missing some little part of the trail over near the furnace. I only noticed when I got home and uploaded the data to strava. I guess I'll have to go back someday and pick up that last little bit.

We only rode about 15 miles that day, but everybody seemed satisfied with what we'd done, so we packed up and hit the road.

I want to say we stopped at like Jason's Deli or something like that near the interstate, but I don't 100% remember. I don't remember the drive back either, but apparently we made it home safely because here I am today!

All in all, it was a really good trip. Great trails, and I always love riding with those guys, and just hanging out with them, in general. We definitely need to get out together more often.

East Texas

I meant to visit my folks around Christmas, but random circumstance just kept throwing up delay after delay. I finally pulled myself together, though, in mid February, and got myself over there.

The weather was lovely all the way.

I stopped at Buc-ee's in Alabama.

I've now been to Buc-ee's in 3 different states. Not sure if that's a flex or not...

The day after I arrived, my Dad and I went for a spin around Forney, hitting all the local spots.

As we pulled up to a line of traffic at FM548, I noticed a guy lying in the street, just down the road to our right. We hustled over to help him out if we could, just as another guy and his girlfriend did the same. It turned out that he'd crossed through a little hedge between the gas station and he road, tripped on a rock, and ate it. He was a bit too heavy to get back up on his own though, so my dad and the other guy helped him up. He was a little skinned, but otherwise uninjured. The whole process really wore him out, though. He looked older than me, but younger than my Dad. He couldn't have even been 60. Every now and then, I see something like that, and I remember that I need to stay fit.

May I please be able to.

It had rained a lot the previous week, and I want to say it rained that night as well. When it rains in the Dallas area, your trail options become pretty limited. Goat Island is one of the few reliable ones though, so we went for a ride there.

Just look how high the Trinity was!

The trinity is trying to straighten itself out and create an oxbow. The "island" is the piece of land that's currently getting cut off. The new channel that's forming collects all knds of trash when the water is high.

So much trash.

I guess I caught a thorn somewhere?

No memory of doing that.

I do remember riding through endless puddles. Fortunately, none of them were exceptionally muddy, just wet, but it really slowed us down, which was quite a drag, as we usually just rip at Goat Island.

A couple of days later, I spun around town again.

And the day after, we drove out to Tyler to hit Lindsey park. Lindsey was actually great - probably my favorite Tyler-area trail. There had been a cross country race or something there, and the main trail had confusing ribbons cross-cutting it everywhere. Fortunately they were confined to the A trail. The rest of the system was as-is. I was excited to finally get GPS data of the system. We'd ridden it once before, but a weird strava glitch kept it from recording. This time, though, I double-checked. No glitches.

The next day, I headed home in the wee hours of the morning.

I'd noticed the Hospitality Station in Vicksburg on the way out, and got a photo of it on the way back.

Yeah, Hall of Dicks is a good way to describe a lot of rest areas. Nice to see one formally named "Dick Hall".

Ahh, Georgia.

I love to travel, but travel makes me love being home.

Noontootla

Back in February, the boys and I got in some pretty good miles in the general Noontootla area. We hit a bunch of obscure trails, and got in some good, solid Adventure.

Unforutnately, it was a long time ago, I didn't take any notes, and I don't remember the details that usually make it a good story. I did take some pics though, and I remember the gist of it all...

We parked at the Fellowship Primitive Church, as one generally does when riding Noontootla, but instead of climbing FS58 as one generally does when riding Noontootla, we headed west on the pavement.

I'm sure some folks have come up with a clever name for the trail we climbed, but I just call it Old FS180. That led to actual FS180, and we continued climbing it too.

From there, we climbed even more, up FS42, to FS58A, where we finally started descending. 58A became Lovinggood, which was satisfyingly primitive, but in much better shape, in various ways, than it had been on many previous rides.

There was some amount of deadfall...

...some of which I was able to just heave downhill and clear entirely. At some point, John fumbled and crashed, but didn't get hurt, which was nice.

If you ride Lovinggood, you gotta cross Noontootla Creek...

...and though there have been various downed trees across it in decades past, there were none that we could cross that day. I took off my shoes and socks, but still managed to get an inch or two of my shorts wet.

From there, we climbed FS58, which was fast and fun.

It's always a great climb. Instead of continuing on up to Winding Stair Gap, we hung a left on FS253 and made our way over to the Hickory Flats Cemetery.

I was feeling good, I arrived before everyone else, and had time to take a pic of the old school marker. Some day, I really need to find a way to look through the Fannin County Heritage Foundation's old photos and maps.

Marc and Erick pulled up eventually...

...and we made our way over to the pavilion.

There's kind-of an actual bathroom there, so everybody took the opportunity to use it before we pressed on. From there, we headed north on the Frick Creek Trail. In years past, it was clean, clear, and well worn-in. This time, it was leafy and rooty, and slippery, and it required a lot of attention to ride.

The creek itself required skill to keep ones feet dry, and not all of us succeeded.

From there, we climbed up to FS42 and pondered our future. I remember that I had some different idea of how to get back to the cars, but I don't remember what that was now. Whatever it was, we bailed on that plan and just took Noontootla Creek Road back down. I want to say that it was only the second time I'd ever descended that road. Me and John and Mark sparred most of the way down, and Mark crushed me on the one kick at the bottom.

Done!

I remember having a great time, and feeling good all day, but I really wish I could remember the details. I gotta get through this backlog, and get back to writing while the memories are still fresh.

One day at a time, I guess.