Boundary Waters

This happened today! No more backlog.

One of my favorite things is to go check out some completely unknown trail system. Somewhere I've never been, but somewhere that doens't have such an epic number of miles that I can't hit it all in one day. It's hit or miss when I do that though. Sometimes the trail is great, sometimes the woods is great, sometimes I find ruins or other cool things. But, sometimes the trail is a poorly marked spiderweb, it takes all day to figure it out, and I end up riding around in circles trying to match reality to the map. So, hit or miss.

I felt like rolling the dice on that today though, so I grabbed some lunch and headed over to the Boundary Waters Aquatic Center.

Never heard of it, right?

It's obscure, to say the least, but the web site alleged many miles of trail open to bikes, hikers, and horses. The map looked only mildly spiderwebby. I was adequately intrigued.

Sometimes figuring out how to get out of the parking lot is the trickiest part. Once I'm on the trail, I can usually figure out where to go next, but figuring out where you are in the park is sometimes harder than it looks. To that end, I usually ride around the little park roads until I figure the park itself out.

I did that.

It was spring everywhere BTW.

Every tree was like: "Dave! It's spring!"

Spring!

So, there's the Aquatic Center proper:

And there's this new building going in next to it.

The map doesn't show the new building. In fact, it was covering up a road that is shown on the map - part of the equestrian lot.

See, good that I discovered this now, rather than trying to figure it out later when trying to follow the map out of the woods later.

After a quick loop, I felt like I had the lay of the land, so I hit the first trail, which turned out to be paved.

It's the "Douglas County segment of the Chattahoochee Hill Country Greenway". Super fancy name for like 0.85 miles of paved trail. Will it connect up to some other chunk of paved trail at some point? Is there more to this Chattahoochee Hill Country Greenway? I am now interested, but also lazy, so I haven't looked it up yet.

About halfway around, I passed Groover Lake.

Or, at least I think that's Groover Lake. Google maps puts the name in a different part of the park where there is no lake. So, I'm not really sure.

The paved trail was "The Green Loop" which I guess makes sense because it's a "Greenway".

Next, I hit "The Blue Loop", which seemed quite well signed.

At first!

The posts in the field don't quite match the map, and there are a few that are missing, and there are multiple routes, but, I was able to figure it out.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. It was also kind-of a gear test. I'd recently gotten Glen to drill all kinds of holes in my frame. That's a nervewracking experience, by the way. Drilling holes in a carbon frame. He added many carefully placed rivnuts, and I can now mount all kinds of stuff all over.

I spent all last week wringing it out, especially that cage on my top tube. I kept hitting it with my knees, and just whittled away at it until I no longer did. The idea is that I can use it for food. It's the least likely spot to get muddy and wet, except from rain. I can get to it the easiest without unpacking anything else. And, I can carry an arbitrary amount of crap there, as long as I can capture it with two straps. Eg. roll up on a Chic-fil-a, order 4 packs of grilled nuggets in a paper bag, strap that bag to the top tube and take off onto the Dalton Pinhoti.

I had a huge italian sandwich strapped to it all day today, and it worked great, but we'll see how it goes. That bag strapped to the downtube is a placeholder. It fits all of my sleeping stuff in it, but I don't love the bag itself.

I had been running two bottles side-by-side on a Wolftooth B-Rad thing, with that Blackburn rack behind them. Everything fit, and it only used 1 bottle mount, but I hit the bottles with my knees constantly, and having the weight of 2 full bottles so far ahead of the center of gravity caused all kinds of issues. The weight distribution is way better now. I can get hop, rock, and nose bump over stuff with less effort, the front doesn't dive quite so hard. It's way better. Fingers still crossed though, I've only ridden a hundred miles or so on it.

I hit The Yellow Loop after blue, and ran into various people hiking and on horseback, but everyone was friendly. The Red Loop was semi-difficult to figure out how to get started on. I kept finding signs telling you how to get over to it from the Yellow Loop, but no proper "Here's where the red trail starts!" kind of sign. All day long, I'd seen a guy walking two horses around with different riders on them every time I saw him. He, apparently, led people on horseback rides, literally all day long. I happened to run into him again, with his 4th set of clients that day, as I was looking for the red trail, and he pointed me in the right direction. Super friendly guy, and helpful.

The trail experience out there is somewhat diverse. There's no purpose-built singletrack, but it's still pretty good.

There is some decent-ish singletrack.

There's this long pipeline right-of-way that the trails tend to loop back onto at some point.

Along the south edge of the property, it's kind of a swamp, and the trail gets kind of flooded.

I had many opportunities to push and carry my bike, and finagle it through tight spaces between trees, fully loaded with all my BP gear, and I had no problem with any of that.

Most of the trail is pretty flat, but man, when you get to the north end of the system, on the "Chattahoochee Crossing/Circle Loop", it's super steep. Just straight up and straight down, over and over, for a mile or so.

There is also some climbing on "The Chattahoochee Loop" but it's nowhere near as steep, and there's a long run with the river to one side that's pretty scenic.

There are some points of interest as well.

Eg, there's this cute little bathroom kind-of out in the middle of the system.

An unexpected ammenity. I ended up using it twice.

There are good views of the Chattahoochee.

A cute little covered bridge.

The Detail 6 Memorial Bridge.

I'll have to look that up. What is Detail 6?

There was this weird stone structure too.

It struck me as being the size of a grave, but it was in an odd spot for that, and I didn't see anything else gravelike around. It was also kind of the right size to be part of a grill/smoker, but it was missing the chimney, and the chimney usually persists. It wasn't obviously a kiln, or an oven, or a furnace, or anything else that I've seen before. Not sure. Maybe the internet knows.

When I finally got done riding everything out there, I ended up kind-of near my truck, just as a matter of course. I also just happened to notice another pond.

It's not on the map, and it's kind of hidden behind a stand of trees. You'd really only get a good look at it from one of the disc golf greens on the other side, unless you happened to notice it like I did.

Speaking of disc golf, man that park is shot through with it. Closer in to the park, I had a hard time figuring out what was intended to be a trail and what was just a fairway. In one case, a marked trail was actually being used as a series of fairways. There were a million people out playing, but there was only 1 time that I had to stop to wait for a guy to take a shot.

On the way back home, I was like "Mmmm, I'm in Douglasville, there's an Outback here. I feel like some grilled chicken." But, the parking lot was packed and there were a dozen people waiting outside. Garbage! This scene repeated at every restaurant along Douglas Road, except for one. Hooters! I remembered that in college, my brother and I would often catch a band playing at the House of Blues in New Orleans after work, but we'd be rushing to the show, with no time to sit down to eat. There was a Hooters between the parking lot and the venue, and they're semi-quick, so we'd run in, order a hamburger to go, wrap it in a napkin, and eat it on the way to the show. We'd totally sidestep the entire objective. They'd be like: "You want it to go??!" "Yep. To go." We joked that we may have been the only customers to ever order something to-go. We did it consistently too, just about every time we caught a show. So it was again, today. Hooters to go. I ordered from the parking lot and went inside 20 minutes later to grab my food. These days, they're handling to-go orders all day long, and they've got their game a little too down, if you ask me. Their go-bags have adhesive on the inside. They peel of wax strips and hermetically seal the top of the bag. Great if you want your food to stay hot. Terrible if you want to check to make sure that burger is plain. Good luck getting it open, and then good luck not getting everything you're trying to pull out of the bag stuck to it. Every, single, thing. My God. It was like it was specifically designed to yank everything out of your hands. If you tried to design a system to punish someone for trying to check their order, you couldn't do a better job than they accidentally did.

That said. Really good burger.

So salty.

Same for the fries.

Hooters to-go. Give it a try.

Cochran Mill

This actually happened just this past week.

I haven't ridden with John since we were both in Texas, I think for Thanksgiving. Our schedules just didn't line up. We'd try even, and they still didn't line up. Like last weekend we were going to ride, but a guy from work called at 12:30AM the night before, and I ended up on call the whole next day, and that turned into a 10+ hour network troubleshooting marathon. The stars aligned last Wednesday though, I think, and we met up at Cochran Mill after work.

It is worth mentioning that, despite being eager to ride with him, I was reticent to ride with him at Cochran Mill, as the last two times we'd ridden there together, I crashed horribly. The first time I broke a rib, and the second shredded my right arm.

Flukes!

That's what I kept telling myself, but it was still hard to shake the aprehension. In fact, I hadn't been back to Cochran Mill since that arm shredding incident, and that was pre-TNGA 2019. I was still on the Lightspeed. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing it got. I was on a totally different bike that I'm finally really accustomed to, and it had been so long since I'd been there, that it wouldn't be super familiar to me.

Awesome!

John had actually gotten there before me and spun some partial lap while I was driving over, but we met at the lot just as I was getting dressed, and got to it pretty quickly.

We hit the Green Trail first. He actually let me lead, maybe because I'd crashed following him, or maybe because he figured I'd be slower and he'd already been riding for a while, or maybe it was arbitrary. At any rate, I felt pretty good. I forgot that the wheelie-bump at the bottom of the Green Trail is actually two wheelie-bumps until I was mid-manual through the first one, and came out of it really awkwardly. But after that, I rode pretty smoothly.

We hit Red next, and went counter-clockwise on 5-turn hill.

We stopped at the falls for a second so John could mess with something.

I forget what now.

The creek was really high.

You can usually ride across it.

We took the gravel road back to the lot, to check out Cochran Mill Falls proper. You can cross the bridge now, so I got a photo of it with a bridge rail in the foreground.

Ha! Bridge rail.

We hit Yellow next, and had a good time of it. No trouble. No crashing.

This bike is apparently, effortlessly fast. I didn't feel like I was crushing it, but I ended up setting 6 PRs, and we were just riding like normal, even talking most of the time.

Awesome.

We talked about grabbing some dinner, but John said that right as we turned onto the last bit of singletrack, his stomach started hurting. By the time we were ready to leave it was a lot worse, so he figured he'd let it chill for a bit rather than eat anything. This turned out to be the right move. He'd apparently gotten food poisoning at lunch, and it was no good for the rest of that day and the next.

Eyahh!

Feel better bro.

Coldwater Mountain

Ahh, Coldwater.

There are trail systems where you enjoy the woods, and there are trail systems where you enjoy the trail. Coldwater is decidedly the latter. I almost want to call it a bike park, but having never been to a proper bike park, and only seen them on YouTube, I'm not sure if that's quite appropriate.

I've been there a bunch, recently even, but haven't ridden everything out there. We usually end up starting at Monsanto, riding up, riding along the spine, hitting Goldilocks, hitting Bomb Dog, riding back, and dropping back down. Oval Office in there somewhere. It's a lot of fun. Those are probably the most fun trails up there, but there are like 10 miles of trail in addition to those, that I've never ridden, and I a few weeks back I felt compelled to ride them.

I tried to get Billy to come, but he wasn't up for it, for some reason that I forget now.

His loss.

I parked at the Coldwater Mountain trailhead rather than Monsanto, and immediately hit the Green and Blue Gravity trails leading out of the parking lot there. The Green line is allegedly "flow" and the Blue line is allegedly "jump". It didn't look like either were very popular though, as they were rough, rocky, and above all else, very very leafy. I'm guessing that the lack of popularity has something to do with this absolutely horrible road climb back up to the lot.

Goodness, it's steep, and you have to do it after each run. No huge problem for an XC rig, except that it's the wrong tool for the entire rest of the job.

Oddly, the jumps on the flow line were more lippy and intact than the jumps on the jump line. I could see where they were meant to be, but they'd gotten rounded off, and it looked like it had been a long time since they could really launch you.

I hit those two lines, climbed that horrible climb twice, and headed off to the various "Bear" trails. Right about then, Billy texted me, and I was like "This is what you're missing:"

And he was like: "oh, man, I should have come with you" and I was like "yeah, you could have climbed that horrible climb with me twice already". Heh heh.

It was then that I noticed that I'd forgotten to start Strava. Crap. I wanted the GPS data for those gravity trails. I'd have to ride them again, which meant climbing that road two more times.

Heh.

I hit Momma Bear and Papa Bear next, both of which were pretty fun actually, but not super amazing. I can see why you might bypass them if you've only got a certain number of miles in your legs.

My seat got loose somewhere on one of those trails, and I had to stop to tighten it up. I hate my seatpost with the kind of hate that Kahn has for Kirk. The way it grabs the seat rails is quirky and one piece can get cocked sideways as you tighten it, then snap loose later, leaving the whole seat loose. A trailside fix just leaves that piece cocked sideways again. Without a pair of channel locks to hold it in place, that always happens, and channel locks don't fit on it easily... It's a mess. And, it also likes to grab my shorts and rip holes in them. I'm looking for something new, but I'm not sure what I want yet.

Check out this shaggy boi.

Longleaf Pine!

I think I saw some last time I was here too, because I remember pointing it out to Hirsh. Unless that was at Raccoon Mountain...

Up on the ridge, I took Bullfrog over instead of Rock Slot. There's this pretty big, proabably ephemeral pond up there near the intersection, which I guess is why the trail is named Bullfrog. I'm sure I passed it before, but never noticed it.

It's not as rocky as Rock Slot, but it's still kind of rocky.

Instead of bombing down Bomb Dog, I rode a chunk of Cassidy that I'd never ridden before, around the outside. It's pretty fast and fun, but instead of jumps and drops, there are lots of chunky rock gardens. So, it's a lot of work. I was rewarded for my efforts with a lovely view of this industrial quarry though.

Ahh, industrial quarry.

Cassidy joins lower Bomb Dog, and then you climb out on Bomb Dog as well. This mylar balloon was somewhere in there.

One per square mile of forest. I'm telling you.

When I got back to the lot, I hit those gravity trails again, and my legs were pissed at me when I got back to the lot.

They were especially pissed, because I wasn't done yet. I'd planned on packing up, driving to the Monsanto lot, and hitting the obscure trails over there as well. It was kind of hard to motivate myself to do it, but I did.

While I was getting packed up though, I saw this family drive up in a van with 4 bikes on the back, and 4 kids (like young teenagers) jumped out and grabbed their bikes off the back real quick. They were very excited. Their mom had driven them over to the trail to ride. And it didn't seem like a 1-time thing, they were talking about the trails they were going to ride and she was arguing with the youngest about not going too far... Like a soccer mom, or a dance mom, she was a mountain bike mom. She did not appear to ride. There was nothing in it for her, per se, just being a good mom. High-5s to you mom. You deserve many high fives.

At the Monsanto lot, my spirit was waning a bit, so I kind-of hurried up and got to it before I talked myself out of it. About halfway up Tortise is Bunny, or something like that, which just lets you loop back to the lot on Hare, hitting the jumps at the bottom. It's pretty fun. Up near the top, you can take some trail that kind-of parallels part of Oval Office over to another set of trails. It's a bunch of little segments, each with it's own name, but it basically makes a lollipop with a shortcut across it. Fun trails, actually, it's kind of unfortunate that they don't get more traffic.

Somebody rides them though. Maybe it's just us that don't.

The whole area is a bit different than the rest of Coldwater. Less rocky, and a lot more pine. Also, the climb out is pretty steep, but nothing compared to that road, so I was fine with it.

Done!

I've no officially ridden everything at Coldwater except for Gazza. When I got home I looked it up on YouTube, expecting senders and mandatory gap jumps, but it looks like it's just a bunch of sketchy rock gardens. I'm generally decent at those. The guy in the video rode it with a rigid fork. So, maybe I'll hit that next time.

Man, if you want to see the true economic effect of the pandemic, drive through the Oxford/Anniston area. It's an absolute ghost town. Nobody is open. I tried the Peerless Grill. Closed. I tried like 3 other restaurants. Closed. It was fast food, gas stations, and a few local spots that are one block off of the interstate. If you go two blocks off though... Closed. It was like that in Chattanooga when I was up there last time too. Dahlonega is only doing like 1 step better. You don't really see it so much in Atlanta or Dallas, but you see it in smaller towns.

I'm not sure how I feel about the Alabama, Georgia, and LSU flags flying next to each other, but I was happy to find a local place open at all, so I'll take it!

I ordered a burger. It was ok. I'll eat there again. Maybe soon.

Brown's Mill Battlefield

Brown's Mill!

I noticed Brett Davidson riding some trail that I didn't recognize on Strava a while back. Turns out it was Brown's Mill Battlefield.

Intresting!

I was unfamiliar with the trail. It was in Newnan, and I hadn't ridden anything in Newnan since that guy's farm way back where you signed in on the porch. Back when Blankets Creek and Yellow River were the only trails in the Atlanta Metro Area. I couldn't remember the name of the farm, or how to get to it, or anything. It couldn't be the same trail... Whether it was or not, I was gripped by nostalgia and had to go check it out.

Brown's Mill Battlefield

Definitely not the same place.

Studying the map, it looked like there were 3 trails - an outer loop, an inner loop, and a beginner loop. The inner loops were kind of one-off-of-the-other, and there were a couple of connectors... Whatever, I'd figure it out.

Almost immediately I ran into riders coming from the other direction. Oh no. Was it directional? Turns out no, the first guy likes to ride it one way then ride it the other way. The second guy had just randomly picked a direction.

Allegedly, no one direction is better than the other, but after a while, it seemed like clockwise was the way most people rode.

I hit the outer loop, then the inner loop, then the beginner loop, then some maze through the system to hit the connector trails.

It's all this kind of outsloped, half backslope, bench cut, with rolling dips, and grade reversals:

And it's super fast, though I remember feeling like I was low on energy that day. I don't remember why now though.

There's a lake too. Kiwanis Lake.

The only kind-of frustrating thing is that it's called "Brown's Mill Battlefield" but no trail leads to or even to the vicinity of a mill or any mill-like anything. There's a creek at the back of the property, and if there was a mill, then this creek must have driven it, but even the hiking trails don't go down to the creek, or really get near it. Nor is there any dot on the map with a "Historic Brown's Mill Ruins" next to it. It's kind of a minor gripe, but it seems like it happens quite a bit. Such-and-such Mill Road or Park, or something, but no old mill to be seen. I mean, I understand, there may be nothing left but a barely noticeable notch in some rock somewhere. But if there are actual old mill ruins back there somewhere, it's such a tease to name the park after it, but then not even show it on the park map.

Pinelog

Chipping away at the backlog... Pinelog appears to be next.

Yes, me and Billy rode Pinelog some weeks ago. His idea, actually, and a great one at that. I hadn't ridden there in quite some time. I'd basically explored it to such an extent that I'd grown tired of riding/hiking there, and moved on. These days, there are new trails that I haven't ridden, but they are a) not on the Pinelog property, and b) built by riders who are braver and more skilled than I. Maybe someday. But, back to the ride at hand. Billy was like "Pinelog" and I was like "sounds good" so we drove up to Pinelog and got to it.

If you don't know there are great trails at Pinelog, you might get bored long before you find them. It's a long gravel grinder to Hogsback, and there are many distractions along the way, none of which involve shredding sick singletrack.

For example, the Lewis Furnace.

I mean, it's right there, why not sidetrack and check it out?

And there's Stamp Creek Falls. Why not sidetrack and check it out? Though put rhetorically, there is an actual answer to that question. The trail is hard to follow, and you have to cross the creek, and it's not obvious where any more, and you end up eating up all kinds of time before you get to the aforementioned shred.

And if your shoe is suspect, as apparently mine was, then the hike-a-bike involved will tear the sole off of the bottom.

When I was last in Texas, the sole of my right shoe had come unglued and we shoe-gooed it back together. The previous week, I'd noticed that the sole was starting to detach, ever so slightly on the left shoe, but it seemed stable. It hadn't changed in several rides. Well, apparently that's because I hadn't walked on it enough. It ripped off in glourious form as we approached the falls, and I had to tie it back on with an ace bandage. Fortunately, I know from experience that the ace bandage is the way to go in such situations, and carry one to deal with that, and other, eventualities.

We bailed on the falls and proceeded directly to the shred.

Or, the climbing, as it actually was. So much climbing. On gravel...

On old roadbeds.

On singletrack.

On rockier singletrack.

"Where's the downhill?"

Billy had never ridden Pinelog, and had heard that there were awesome downhills. Well... I guess it depends on how you define "awesome". I don't know of any long lines of sight, no brakes, top speed for 10 minutes kind of downhills like you find in the NF. The downhills that I'm aware of at Pinelog are fairly short and pretty damn steep. I don't know what his concept of awesome was, or what he was hoping to ride, but I've seen him get knocked into a coma before, so we were going to ease into this. The plan was to climb Hogsback, follow the ridge down off of Hanging Mountain, take Wet and Wild back to the Road, and go home. If he handled that descent off of Hanging Mountain, then we'd hit Gutter next time. Maybe Laundry Chute after that. Or maybe not. Maybe just not tempt fate.

I forget why, but we stopped at the top of Hanging Mountain for a bit...

...then headed down.

Billy negotiated the descent quite responsibly. I'm not sure what I was worried about.

Actually, scratch that, I know exactly what I was worried about - that he'd be out of his element, make some mistake, and eat it hard - it was just that none of that happened, and it was a load off of my mind.

Check out the skills.

Man, those rocks look like nothing from the bottom.

I always have trouble finding Wet and Wild from the ridge. I want it to be at the gap, but it's actually a little up from the gap. We found that, but then it was unexpectedly tricky from there. I remembemred that we ought to sidehill for a while, then hang a right, bump through some sketchy rocks, end up on an old roadbed, drop down to the left to go around a downed tree, then back up to the old roadbed again, climb a super steep kick, then roll downhill all the way out of the woods, crossing a creek many, many times.

That got derailed when we didn't encounter any sketchy rocks. Where were the rocks? Then we just ran into a big tangle of downed trees and there was a wornish trail leading off to the left.

????

Whose trees have apparently been down for some time, and maybe people generally go left now? I have no memory of there ever even being a trail that way, but it looked like an old bench cut. No idea. On the other side of the deadfall, things started looking correct, just not very well worn. But then the trail started getting more and more well worn and eventually ended up being correct.

Weird.

There's a bit of deadfall on Wet and Wild, but it's kind of fun.

Billy tried super hard to keep his feet dry for the first few creek crossings, but when I told him there were like 4 more he just gave up and walked right through the water.

When we got back to the gravel road, we just rode back out to the truck. I saw some guy on the way out that I thought I recognized, but it turned out to be somebody that I didn't know.

I had fun, but I don't think it was what Billy was hoping for. I'm pretty sure he was expecting something like Bear Hare or upper Mountaintown. Instead, he got like 1 minute of downhill on Gallows, some confusion, and then several miles of what amounted to lower Mountaintown. Not to mention the long ride in and out on gravel, and the distractions.

Sorry bro, maybe next time.

Cane Creek/Two Run

Oh, the backlog...

Where to begin. Looks like Two Run. Yes, some weeks ago, I rode all over the Cane Creek/Two Run area. This was kind of a reprise to the previous week's Blue Ridge WMA ride, in that it was a bunch of trails that I ride like once per year, at most, and like the previous week's trails, it had been way more than a year since I'd ridden them.

I parked at the church again, and recognized a truck parked down the road a bit. I'd seen the same truck the previous weekend. It's quite recognizeable because it has some kind of rear bike rack that you can hang 4 bikes off of, vertically. I have no idea what that rack is. I've never seen it except on that particular truck. Pretty cool.

Instead of climbing FS80 like I usually do, I actually headed downhill to old FS879, crossed the creek and headed up that trail. In antiquity, it went maybe a quarter mile back before becoming a good bushwhack, but some time ago it became much more well defined. I hiked it once, while checking out Old Cooper Gap Road, but hadn't yet ridden it. I think most people ride it as a downhill, but I needed to climb, and it was a good opportunity, so, there you go.

Part way up I found this metal band.

Trash or artifact?

There was also this falls up there that I'd seen before, but it was really raging that day.

Trilliums were starting to pop up all over the place, too.

At the very top, a huge tree has fallen across the old roadbed, and across the spur that the trail becomes, so the current line is straight up the fall line, bypassing the trees. As I was climbing, there was no freaking way, so I ended up finagling my way through the trees. It looked like I wasn't the first person to try that, but it also looked like I might have been the first on a bike.

I popped out on FS80 about half way up an climbed it the rest of the way. At Sky "Orchad" I noticed a trail leading back downhill that I hadn't seen before. It appeared to be skirting the private property signs, in a specific attempt to stay outside of them. While interesting, it was definitely going the wrong direction, so I left it alone. For now.

Ahh, FS42. In recent years, I've rarely headed east on FS42 from Cooper Gap, but it was high time, and so I did.

There's some neat stuff over that way. Ward Creek Falls, for example.

To the south, it's the face of the Blue Ridge, and it drops precipitously to the Piedmont. To the north though, there's a bit of a Highlands kind of area. It's hilly, but the hills rise above a large area that sits at about the elevation of Cooper's Gap. Or, at least that's how it seems. I've hiked all through it. There used to be farms and homes back in there. It's still dotted with old fences and crumbling chimneys, not to mention a maze of old farm roads and more recently, logging roads. The AT runs through all of it, but I've only hiked that once. One interesting thing... There's a good bit of American Chestnut back there. It's all stunted, like you might expect, but there's a lot of it. Or at least there was 10 years ago.

I wasn't heading that way though. I planned on diving down off of Hogback Mountain. Like Old 879, I'd last been up there 10+ years ago. At the time, the Ranger map alleged a trail running down the ridge, and I had been able to follow it for a while, but eventually lost it when the backslope got really steep. In fact, to get out of the woods, I'd had to do that "go downhill until you find water, then follow it downhill until you find civilization" thing to get off of the mountain.

It is alleged that the trail is more discernible these days, and in fact, it was.

But, I did have some trouble with it. I took the old road up to the top, like I had before, only to find trees down every few hundred yards. It looked like blowdown though. The Forest Service hadn't dropped them across the trail on purpose or anything. I could see where people went around them, but it looked like foot traffic. Rangers maybe. I walked most of that. When the road ended, I followed a thin ribbon of worn in footpath up over the top. "More discernible" is not how I'd describe it. But, then, from behind me to the right, a very well-worn trail joined right in. It must lead up from FS42, but I can't explain how I missed it. I guess I just wasn't looking for it.

At any rate, after dropping over the edge, the trail actually carved back and forth across the ridge quite a bit. This was largely due to the need to dodge an abundance of downed trees, but the fortunate side effect is that it made long stretches of the trail into a sidehill, and introduced (however accidentally) many grade reversals. While no paragon of sustainability, it was decidedly finer than EPCR. I also wasn't just full-on deathgripping the brakes the whole time, which was also a bit of a relief. Or, at least, that's how I remember it.

There was an enormous amount of hog rooting up there too.

Appropriate, given that it was Hogback Mountain, but I mean, it was A LOT. More than I'd seen in a long time.

Further down, there were fewer downed trees, and I remember a couple of extremely (to me) steep sections, some of which looked like they'd been climbed on motorcycles. Sigh. Maybe some trees will fall in just the right places.

Do, you kind of ease down for a while, then drop hard, then it eases back up, and you have to jog west a bit. If you lose the trail, it's very easy to end up on some little spur of the ridge, thinking that you're heading down the main ridge. This happened to me however many years back. I figured, with the super obvious trail, it ought to be no problem.

Ha!

Hog rooting.

Where it flattened out a bit, the trail just disappeared completely into the rooting. I could see where people had gone different ways, hoping to find the trail, but all those attempts disappeared into the rooting as well. I ended up swinging increasingly wide arcs back and forth as I descended until I picked up the trail again below the rooting. For a minute, I was worried I'd have to pull that survival maneuver again.

The trail put me out on FS878. A trail led east, but I didn't want to take it at the time, so I headed south on 878.

The trees to either side were marked for logging.

No idea how long ago they were marked. The paint looked super, super old. It's funny. The Forest Service will have a timber sale, some company will come in and mark the trees, then wait like 10 years to actually cut them. In the intervening time, the company might go out of business, or change owners, or the land might get swapped, or some other eventuality. There are trees by Black Branch that have been marked for 20+ years, and every time the company gets ready to cut them, something happens, and they end up not.

This also caught my eye.

"Wrapped around a tree" for sure. Maybe running from the revenuers.

Near where 787 joins with Hidden Lake Road, there was once a trail leading back north, directly over the top of the little ridge there. I intended to take it back north to the top of 787, then hang a right over to the Ward Gap Trail. I found what I thought was the trail and followed it for a few hundred yards, but it dead-ended at a campsite. I couldn't discern a trace of it beyond. It seemed impossible that it could disappear so completely, considering that most of the old roadbeds I follow are like 100+ years old. But, it's not a sidehill, and maybe some specific effort was made to decomission it...

Looking at the GPS data later, it appeared that I just missed the turn. The campsite trail was some new trail that wasn't there way back, and I just didn't start looking for the ridge trail early enough.

I could either backtrack or follow the old route up through the Hidden Lake camp. Or, Life Teen Hidden Lake as it's now called. I've detailed the controversy surrounding Hidden Lake, and that girl that I'm pretty sure I saw escape before, so I won't go into it again here, but it was a weird place, and I wonder how much less weird it is now.

Judging by the debris scattered everywhere, it looked like it might still be pretty weird.

At the back of that field, I found the old trail, and the old sign for the cemetery.

...and the old bridge.

But for a while, it looked like nobody had gone that way in a really long time. The trail was super rocky. Was I still going the right way?

Turned out yes. Much like Hogback, the modern route joined in from the side. I was following the old route.

Healen Cemetery.

With it's weird, low fence.

I'd seen it a dozen times, but never gotten a photo. Always meant to though. Finally!

The Ward Gap trail is pretty steep. Like Hightower Express and the Puncheon Gap Trail though, it's at least possible to climb, and I managed to climb most of it, except where I had to get around downed trees. And, there was an abundance of those. The old roadbed is a bit below grade, so getting around a downed tree means first climbing a few super steep feet up to the grade of the backslope, then getting around the tree. Those first few feet... Terrible.

Near the top, there's such a tangle, that like an eighth of a mile of trail is just bypassed entirely, right up the side of the mountain. Definitely more fun in the other direction.

Oh yeah. Mylar balloon. Somewhere on that trail.

Ok. Back on FS42.

Still headed east. This time to Long Mountain.

Same story - ranger map shows a trail, long ago it was broken and barely discernible, now allegedly more discernible. I picked it up where Long Mountain joins the ridge, and it was a lot easier to follow than it had been, though it wasn't super well worn, and quite pine-needly. At some point, it seemed more like it went left than right, so I went left, but apparently in the past (according to my GPS data), I'd gone right. To the left, it followed an old bench-cut for quite a while before rejoining the ridge. More of that "old FS42" kind of thing. One day I'm going to go up there and explore those old 42's. It seems like there really are a whole network of old benches following FS42 from about Mauldin Gap east to who-knows-where. Horseshoe maybe.

But I digress. I picked up the main trail somewhere that I didn't recognize. I only know of 3 landmarks on Long Mountain - this one outrcopping with blue grafitti on it, "the coffin rocks", and a side trail leading down toward Lumpkin Ridge. I eventually found the side trail, but I must have rejoined after the other two. That, or the trail dodges them, which would be a shame.

Long Mountain ridge is not exceptionally steep at any point, and there are some climbs here and there. I don't remember the trail being chewed up by bikes or motorcycles at any point. But, honestly, I don't remember a lot of detail about the trail, except that I got wicked arm pump from descending for so long, and that it was a lot of fun - less demanding than the other descents in the area, and I didn't feel like I was in over my head on my XC rig.

I took the forest road out to pavement and headed further east.

My plan was to climb FS55 up to Horseshoe Gap, hang a left, take FS42 back to Cooper Gap, and drop down back to the car.

It was getting late in the day though...

...and I was on the exact same road that my car was parked on, so it took a bit of will to actually press east, and even more when Black Mountain Road was further down than I remembered. And it took even more when I realized how far up it FS55 was.

It wasn't "dark" but it was definitely "dusk" when I started climbing, and I was a bit more tired than I thought I was.

I may or may not have walked a few hundred yards, a few different times.

Ooooh, getting dark.

Yeah, really getting dark.

God, look at that though. How often do you get to see a dusky blue sky like that through the trees halfway up the face of the Blue Ridge. It was starting to cool off too, and there was a good little breeze.

Up near the top, it looked like some rocks had fallen "recently".

Yeah, just leave em there, they're not hurting anybody.

It was officially dark when I hit FS42, and the only lights I had were my little Spok commuter lights, which are much better for being seen than to see by. I'd planned for this though. I've ridden FS42 in the dark so many times, and that particular stretch has always been a piece of cake. It's a gentle downhill until about Ward Gap, then there's a kick up to Cooper Gap. The gentleness of the downhill makes for good road conditions too, so low visibility isn't that big of a problem. Plus you're on a road, and in the dark it shines white compared to the woods, so it's not too hard to stay on it. You just have to watch your speed in case there are holes or rocks or whatever.

I made it to Ward Gap in good time. There were a surprising number of people on the road at that hour though - a dozen or more motorcycles, and at least 3 cars. The climb up to Cooper Gap was rough. I may or may not have walked a few hundred yards of it, but only once.

The descent from Cooper Gap back to the car in the dark is a lot more dicey than rolling along FS42. I know the road pretty well though, and managed it without incident.

Oh yeah! Another good long one. More fun than the previous weekend, but ultimately longer and tougher, despite involving less overall climbing.

The bright lights from Camp Merrill cast long shadows across the church lot at night - one more thing that's different than I remember.

I tried so hard to find something to eat on the way out. There was no where to park at whatever that Mexican restaurant is on the square. I kept trying, only to find that the spot was the handicapped spot, in 3 different lots, and then there'd be someone walking behind me when I'd try to pull out. It took me like 5 minutes to not park. I couldn't find that other Mexican place that me and Eddie ate at that one time where they gave him that huge Dos Equis. Yahoola Grill was closed. My blood sugar was probably 60 at that point.

I ended up at Roosters, which is usually good. I usually get the Little Hen Strips or something with a goofy name like that, but I wanted a chicken sandwich that night, for some reason, so I ordered that. Aaaah, it came with american cheese on it instead of swiss. Did I read the menu wrong? Did I forget to "sub swiss"? IDK My brain wasn't functioning and I was starving, so it could have been either or both ...and I forgot that they give you pickles even though their menu doesn't mention pickles anywhere, and somehow the pickle makes the fries taste like pickles, even if the fries aren't touching the pickle.

I felt a lot better AFTER dinner, and it was satisfying in retrospect, but on the front end, it was just a comedy of errors, each more painful than the last, but only because I was so hungry.

The drive back was smooth, and I slept so well that night - nothing better than a long, fun, exhausting Adventure, followed by good food, followed by good sleep.