Berry College WMA

My Adventure backlog is still 3 Adventures deep. At this rate, it'll be that way forever. Right now I'm waiting on a long running build process though, so I have a little time. Maybe this week I can find a little more and get caught up.

The last time Billy and I were up at Berry College, we gave it a good once over, but even after 40 miles of riding, there was still plenty left. Sunday, a week ago, we figured we'd see what else we could see.

Sometimes I do a little research on the places I'm planning on riding, and sometimes I run into some really interesting stuff. One of the roads we hadn't ridden last time was CCC Road. If you google "ccc road berry college" you'll find that there are legends galore about how it's all haunted and stuff. It's also referred to as Seven Bridges Road because there are allegedly seven little bridges along it.

"There are stars in the southern sky..." That Seven Bridges Road? Maybe. The song wasn't mentioned in what I read, so maybe not.

At any rate, if you head out one way you'll count seven bridges and if you head back the other way you'll only count 6. Thus, it's haunted, or so the story goes. After stumbling across something like that, I couldn't resist making that the first stop on our journey.

My map-printing skills left a bit to be desired that morning, and it actually took us a while to find CCC Road. It's also known as Selman Road. Or, more correctly, it's Selman Road for a block or two, then becomes CCC Road at the edge of the WMA.

We parked just past the game check station, got the bikes and ourselves all put together, and proceeded west toward a gate.

The sign at the gate seemed a little threatening, so I called the number.

Berry College police answered and assured me that it was fine for me to proceed around the gate on a mountain bike or on foot, just not in a motor vehicle. Excellent!

We proceeded.

It was very hot, the sun was very bright, and the dead straight, dead flat expanse ahead of us reminded me of riding in Florida.

The only difference was that the road was gravelly rather than sandy.

We counted 1 bridge right at the gate. There was a culvert a ways down the road, and then in the middle of a clear cut that stretched across both sides of the road, there was some old-looking little rock construction on the north side of the road that might have once been a little bridge, but was totally backfilled now.

And that was it. No other bridges at all. The heck? Is there a different CCC Road near Berry College in Rome? At the time I figured there must be, but after looking into it since I got home, no, that was it. After re-reading the descriptions though, the road is alleged to lead to the Mountain Springs Cemetery. The road that we rode did not. Instead, it teed into another road and the cemetery was to the north. There is a road that connects the cemetery to CCC Road, and I suspect that in antiquity, CCC Road may may have followed that connector, but since then it's been cut through to the other road. Now I'll have to go back and see where that other road goes.

At the time we were puzzled, but we had plenty more to see and do, so we kind of forgot about it right away.

At the end of CCC, we turned right, climbed the Hurtin Gator, which seemed to put some serious hurtin on Billy.

We passed a group of women hiking it, and it seemed to be hurtin them too.

At O'Bryan Gap, there's like a 5-way intersection. One way is the way we'd come from, another leads to the House O' Dreams. The other 3 we hadn't explored as yet, but had planned to.

Turns out the old road directly across from Hurtin Gator doesn't go anywhere interesting. It bombs down off of the mountain and ends at private property about halfway down. There's a beat-up old sign indicating that the land is private, but man, if I ever own land with a road on it, I'm going to put up a "Private Road" sign. I've seen so many cases where the land to either side of a road is posted, but the road itself is open. A lone sign to one side of the road, just isn't enough to clearly delineate the property. I am not a fan of trespassing though, so we went as far as to check the lot lines on Zillow to determine whether it was ok to proceed. That's right. We stood there in the woods, with a smartphone, looking up property boundaries on the web. Yep. Because we're nerds. Indeed, the property boundary clearly crossed the road ahead of us.

Dangit.

We climbed back up.

It was definitely OK to the east though, so we went that way.

There was another gate nearby though, and some wild cotton growing near it.

Never seen that before.

While walking my bike over to check the sign at the gate (which said the same thing as that one earlier), I managed to somehow get my rear derailleur wrapped up in my spokes and either bend the hanger or the derailleur.

Man. I do that more than anyone I know. By a lot.

It took a little adjusting, but I got it working well enough after a minute or two. It wasn't anything terrible.

The road we were on was Lavender Mountain Road. And like the rest of the roads up there, it was closed to vehicles most of the year, and in really, really beautiful shape.

It ran along the ridge for quite a while before finally diving down off of it near the highway.

We passed a guy hiking with two kids. He was hiking with a baseball bat in his hand. We weren't too sure what to make of it. Protection? From animals? From us? We kept moving.

There was one spot with a great view of The Great Valley though.

We debated what hills those are in the distance. The view was to the southeast so they weren't the Cohuttas or Taylor's Ridge. I couldn't offhand think of what lay in that direction other than the hills around Burnt Mountain but those seemed like they'd be way further away. I could see Plant Bowen to the right (outside of the frame) and the airport down in the valley too, but they didn't really help. Turns out they're ridges I've never heard of: Ward Mountain, Armstrong Mountain, Cass Mountain behind those... Might be worth a look someday, on the road bike at very least.

We ended up on Scenic Road and then Highway 27.

It was super hot. Goodness, it was hot, and exposed on the road, we burned through the water we had quickly.

Fortunately we were on the road, and there were gas stations. Unfortunately, the one we picked was one of those bulletproof glass guard shack type gas stations with no public restroom. They did have a spigot outside though, and that was fine with us.

The loop we'd ended up doing wasn't anything like what we'd hoped to do. We were near the car, wondering what to do next, trying to avoid backtracking as much as possible, and hoping to incorporate at least some amount of shade into the ride. The plan we ended up with was heading back down CCC, riding some stuff we'd ridden last time, coming back on a road we hadn't seen yet, and calling it a day.

And we did exactly that.

As we approached the car though, we noticed that somebody had opened the gate. It was definitely closed when we parked there, I'd called that number to be sure it was cool to go through. Now it was open. Odd. Was that like a once-a-week thing? Is it always open after noon on Sunday? Or did we happen to hit the one day a year? No idea. But hey, one less obstacle to negotiate.

On the way out the first time, we'd seen what looked like an old silo off to the left.

No way I'm not checking that out. I'd seen what looked like a little road leading over to it earlier too. There were signs saying "foot traffic only" though, so we parked the bikes and walked. Turned out that it would have been faster to just walk directly to it from the main road though. It was a lot further back in the field than it looked.

Yep, definitely an old silo. Must have been a farm there at some point. I imagine the whole area may have been farms at some point.

We took a short detour to the old cemetery, thinking maybe there was a cut-through to where we wanted to go, but there were several cars there, several people milling around, up to something, and they indicated that there was no cut-through. It occurred to us that they might have been the ones that opened the gate, needing to get to the cemetery for maintenance or something.

Near Old High School Road we saw a few deer.

Decent sized buck there.

There are plenty of single and double-track trails, but Old High School Road is the only triple-track that I know of.

It was really nice and shady too, a welcome break from the ever-present burning murder ball we'd been dealing with all day.

Near the campus we hung a left, took that other unnamed road back to CCC Road. There was an electric fence running down the right for a while. Later it looked like a bridge had been demolished. The road just fords the creek now. Not that it's really much of a creek, or much of a road, for that matter. The trail fords the trickle.

And that was about it.

It was a nice ride. I'm not sure how many miles it was, but the diversity of trail experience and challenging conditions made up for any lack of mileage.

Berry College is a unique system. Lots of roads, but they're all so different from each other, they're all closed to cars most of the time, and some of them are really more like singletrack-on-an-old-roadbed than a road proper. It's a great system. The Pinhoti runs through somewhere to the north too. I bet there's an epic loop in there somewhere. I might have to put something together and give it a try, sometime in the next few months.

Upper Chattahoochee

Oh man, I've got an Adventure backlog. It's like 3 Adventures deep, even. Too much work lately.

About two weeks ago I went back up to try to actually, correctly do what I'd failed at so spectacularly the week before - follow the Chattahoochee from the upper campground to the AT. Long story short, I was successful. Long story long, here's how...

I don't even remember what time I got up. I remember it was earlier than usual, but that's all I remember. I also remember that I was tired on the drive up, so maybe it was legitimately early, not just early for me.

Aside from being tired, the drive up was fairly standard and uneventful.

I drove up FS44, parked outside of the campground and trekked up the bits of the route I'd already covered. The one new thing that I noticed was that the trail on the west side of the river looked a lot like an old railbed too. The first time I was up there it seemed too steep. The second time I was up there I saw what appeared to be clear indications of a rail on the east side and imagined a crazy trestle climbing up over the falls. Since then I ran the numbers and the west side trail is well within range. So now I'm not sure what to make of it. Seems unlikely they'd have multiple rails and a switch right there. Who knows though, people build crazy things sometimes.

So, I proceeded uphill to the confluence that I'd gotten confused at last time. This time I searched much harder for the continuation of the old rail and I eventually found it. It seemed like I was more or less alone in that though. There were fewer signs of traffic from there on. Human traffic, at least. Plenty of pig traffic though. Plenty of that.

If a bit overgrown, the trail was easy to follow for a while, but then it seemed to end abruptly at a little feeder creek. I looked all around but I couldn't find anything resembling what I'd been following. I did find 2 bench cuts at 90 degree angles to the trail. One of them ended abruptly too though. It made no sense at the time, but looking at the GPS data on the map at home later, it became clear that I'd found a pair of switchbacks.

They'd apparently been built to get up over this massive falls.

Dangit, I wish I had a buddy to stand down at the bottom for scale!

Dang it.

Since I didn't understand what the heck was going on, I bushwhacked for a while up above the falls before eventually stumbling onto the trail again at the foot of Coon Den Ridge.

There was another massive falls just up whatever creek tees in from the west there.

And there was a skid or something heading up along the creek. Someday I'll have to get back out there and see where it goes, but I had other objectives that day.

Down where the creeks came together it looked like people used to camp there quite a bit. It was wide and flat, and there were several old fire rings, now overgrown with moss.

I followed the vague notion of a trail north. It was indistinct and braided, but whenever I'd think it had ended, I'd pick it up again. Humankind did not appear to have had much of a hand in the construction of that trail. Or, if they had originally, it had long been handed over to the pigs. There were signs of rooting on both sides, all the way up to the next confluence.

It's funny, if you look at it on a map, it seems likely that at the next confluence, the Chattahoochee proper continues due north to Red Clay Gap. But when you're there in real life, it's clear that the branch coming down from the northwest is the major contributor. Maps don't specifically say which branch is the river itself, but given that Chattahoochee Gap is uphill to the northwest, that seemed like the right way to go.

There was, at first, unfortunately, no indication of a trail, of any kind, man or pig. But it wasn't long before I picked up an increasingly distinct pig trail. It led up to yet another massive falls.

And yet again I wished I had another human there for scale.

As below, the trail was braided and indistinct, but when I'd lose it, I'd always pick it right back up again.

Presuming me unimpressed with obscure waterfalls, the woods began to court me with additional, increasingly interesting curiosities.

There were several large poplars.

And a fairly large oak.

Not terribly unusual, granted... At least for that area.

But then there was this owl.

Which I got a garbage picture of, but it's there nonetheless.

And there was a chisel.

Lying there. Randomly.

And a tarp.

At first I thought it might be a shelter, but after looking at it a bit more, it didn't seem so. I wondered if maybe it had blown off of somebody's camp site on the AT and ended up there. There was another blue tarp about 100 yards uphill, half buried in leaves, but I failed to get a photo of it.

The last push up to the gap was a little difficult, but someone or something clearly went that way, somewhat regularly. I eventually emerged on a purpose-built trail, staring at what appeared to be the source of the Chattahoochee River.

There's just a little hole in the ground there, and the river comes bubbling up out of it.

Turns out that might not be the actual source though. Just uphill there was a much larger spring.

At the time it was just damp and barely dripping, but I could imagine that after a good rain it runs out, flows downhill a bit, then into the ground, before emerging again at that hole I'd seen earlier.

Well, whichever is the source, I have now seen them both.

The little trail switched a few times and deposited me on the AT, at Chattahoochee Gap.

The Jacks Gap trail led off to the north, and there was a couple there who'd just hiked over from Brasstown and were about to head back. I talked to them for a bit. They were up from Florida, training for a rim-to-rim hike in the Grand Canyon later this year. They had to get moving though, so we didn't hang out for long.

I had a seat though, and had some lunch.

I don't remember now what time it was, but it was still relatively early. The hard part was behind me too. From there I'd planned on following the AT to Poplar Stomp Gap and then taking the old road back down to the car. It was all clean trail, old road, or gravel road.

Well... I say that...

If you look at the Lidar data for the area, there are what appear to be several bench cuts that diverge from and rejoin the AT. I was very interested in them. The last time I was up there, the AT appeared to be more old railbed, and I suspected that these bench cuts were too. One of them led directly to Chattahoochee Gap. To the south, I could see the AT heading west around the next knob, and the old railbed heading to the east.

I followed the old rail.

The first few hundred yards were clearly used as a campground. Past that it became somewhat overgrown. There was a clear trail through it, but the brush encroached annoyingly.

I found several fortified stream crossings though.

It was clearly an old railbed.

One very long section was 100% poison ivy.

100%, for a loooong time. I am fortunately not allergic, because there was literally no possibility of avoiding it without turning around or climbing up onto the ridge.

And then as if to reward my perseverance...

Two black bears appeared below me. One paused long enough for a photo.

Ok, a very blurry photo, but I swear that's a bear in the middle. That blackish spot.

And there was another large oak in one of the gaps.

I could imagine it standing there in the gap a hundred years ago, with the entire mountainside logged out around it in every direction. It would have been visible from the camp, and it might have been a decent landmark, both for locating the gap from below, and for engineers running back and forth along the ridge.

There was a black rat snake up there too.

Big surprise there, eh?

Somebody had built a wind break behind their campsite in another gap.

These purple flowers were everywhere.

This tree had a lot going on... It was fairly large, to begin with. There were also two millipedes were either fighting or getting it on. And, when I stopped to look at them, I noticed all that yellow fungus growing all over it too.

So, yes, the bench cuts apparent on the lidar data do, in fact, appear to be old railbeds. There appears to be an old rail up there, leading at least from Poplar Stump Gap to Chattahoochee Gap. One day I'll have to hike it from Hogpen to Unicoi and see if I can figure out exactly how far it goes.

When I got back on the AT, it became familiar. I passed the spot that I'd bushwhacked up to the last time. Toward Poplar Stomp, there were a series of rhododendron tunnels.

Rhodo tunnels always remind me of riding on Laurel Mountain in Pisgah. I think that's where I first saw one.

Ok, from THERE on, it was trail and road. No more bushwhacking. I started jogging and making much better time than I had been.

And then my phone rang. Ha! Cell phones in the Wilderness. Always seems strange to me that it's possible for a cell phone to ring up there. It was my mom. My brother Daniel was going to be in town, unexpectedly. If I could get back to Smyrna for 9PM, we could all eat dinner together. My rough mental math made it seem like if I kept moving, I could just about make it.

Sadly, or fortunately, depending on how you think about it, though I meant to be trucking it back home, I kept getting distracted by more weird and interesting stuff.

There were tons of big red mushrooms that looked like little gnome hats. Somebody had rigged up a rotisserie at one of the campsites.

There was another owl.

Down along Old Poplar Stomp Road, there was more too. A bear had very recently torn into one of the trees. Lower down the road, I found more stacked-stone fortifications. Just more evidence that the entire road was once a railbed. There was an old refrigerator tossed to the side too and an industrial lawn mower parked at the very bottom.

But! Wilder than any of that.

I heard all kinds of shuffling noises up ahead and downhill to the right. I knew what it must be, but I hardly believed it when I saw them.

Pigs. Feral pigs. Gigantic, enormous feral pigs. They were totally preoccupied and had no idea I was there. I kept taking better and better photos of them, and I even got some video.

They only saw me when I leapt down off of the little mound at the edge of the road, and they all took off downhill when they did. Good thing too, because I've seen that movie Snatch and I'm not a big fan of gigantic pigs.

After that, it was an uneventful push back to the car. I did manage to make it back to town in time to have dinner with my brother, and even though I was a bit dirty from the day's Adventure, and perhaps a little under-dressed, we ate outside and nobody seemed to care.

Yeah! Railbeds, waterfalls, owls, giant trees, posion ivy, bear and pigs! That's what it's about. That right there. Definitely one of the best days I've had, running around in the woods, to date.

Helton Creek Falls

This past Sunday the girls and I drove all over North Georgia. Iz has been wearing herself out learning new skills at gym and Sophie's been wearing herself out getting ready for a production of The Jungle Book. It seemed like wearing them out even more wasn't a great idea, so we just drove around. It's been forever since I did that. For the past few months, I've always had a destination in mind. It was nice to see how things have changed, and how they haven't.

We did stop here and there. One of our stops was Helton Creek Falls.

On the way down to the falls, a guy told us there was a large Water Moccasin hanging out on a chunk of a tree that had been cut out. I asked him if he was sure it wasn't a Midland Brown Water Snake, as we're a bit far north for Water Moccasins. He wasn't sure, but either way, he wasn't going to bother it! Seemed like a good idea.

We were all looking for it on the way down. I almost walked right by, but Iz spotted it, right where the guy described.

Yep, Midland Brown. Iz took some pictures. She also named it Steve. It was still there when we left, 20 minutes later, just lying there in the sun.

Thanks for hanging out Steve. Good to see you.

Cohutta WMA

My brother had a birthday recently. In mountain biking circles, one is generally treated to a celebratory birthday ride, but between rain and travel and other real-life-related activities, it wasn't until the day before yesterday that the opportunity actually came up for such a ride.

It did though, finally, come up, and it was quite a ride.

John picked me up near my house at 6:45 in the morning. We were supposed to meet Marc and Mark at Bear Creek, and we had to be riding by 8:45. It was possible that "a few people might be joining us" too. The early start was, again, due to life-related activities. John had to be back in Douglasville no later than 4:30 PM.

No later.

It was John's lucky day though. Milling around behind his truck, he just glanced down at a 4-leafed clover.

Wasn't even looking for it, just happened to see it there.

The day was starting off right. Perhaps his luck would hold.

John Vandal had arrived a minute or so before us. He was apparently one of the people who might be joining us. There were two unrelated crews of Floridians parked ahead of us too. They were not joining us, but I did speak to them for a while. I've done my share of riding in Florida. They'd been coming up here for 10 years or more. We had plenty to talk about.

Mark and Marc showed up on time.

Everybody geared up, and fueled up, and we proceeded north.

It felt cool and early. It was a little humid and a little foggy, but that just added to the charm.

It'd been like 2 years since I'd been to Bear Creek, but the woods felt familiar, and the company felt familiar. "Yeah, this is how it ought to be" came to mind.

We climbed the road and started up the trail.

It started getting warm on Pinhoti 1. We ran into one group of Floridians. One of their guys was lagging back though, so they couldn't ride with us for long.

Josh was asking about bears. He's apparently never seen one. He's been riding up there for 15 years and never seen one. I've probably seen 50 or more. I might need to take him on some of my little adventures. They tend to include bears.

I dropped a water bottle on P1. I have one metal holder and one plastic holder. The plastic holder is garbage off road. Garbage! I've dropped bottles out of it 4 or 5 times now, but I keep forgetting to replace it.

Aside from delays related to dropping bottles though, I didn't have trouble keeping up with the frere, which is definitely an improvement. Last time we rode together, he'd just roll away from me on the downhills, every time.

Pinhoti 1 was fun but Pinhoti 2 was the real deal.

Marc and Josh were chatting away on the climb, which was a little frustrating. My heart rate was such that I could not have been so chatty. No amount of not-climbing in the mountains can prepare you for climbing in the mountains, it seems. I need to get in some more climbing-in-the-mountains.

I followed John on the downhill, and it more than made up for the slight climbing struggle. Following a fast rider down a twisty downhill always reminds me of watching footage of an aerial dogfight. It's like two fighter jets, one running, one trying to stay lined up for a shot, minus the strategic significance of the conflict, and fear of death, of course.

Mark flatted towards the end of P2 and we could hear the air leaking out of his tire as he pulled into the road. Oddly, he hadn't noticed it until someone pointed it out. I guess it had started leaking slowly, and just become part of the background noise.

Anyway, he had to fix it, so we stopped for a few minutes.

There was a big crew of people I didn't know gathered at the bottom of P2, about to head over toward Mulberry Gap. We talked to them for a minute, but they got going pretty quickly. They had places to go and adventure ahead.

We did too, actually. We picked up Bromley, Mike and Chris at Mulberry Gap.

John ran up, refilled a bunch of our bottles and came back looking crazy with ten pounds of water stuffed down his jersey.

The plan for the rest of the day was FS18 -> Windy Gap -> Milma -> Tibbs -> FS28 -> Bear Creek.

Apparently, Mark had described the route on the internet, but the new members of our group misunderstand the direction. I didn't read his description. It might have been confusing, or it might just have been assumed that no reasonable person would climb Windy Gap and Tibbs. Whatever the cause, the result was something like "oh man, we're CLIMBING Tibbs?" All around.

But, it wouldn't be tough for a while. The first 5 or 6 miles to the bottom of Windy Gap was mostly downhill, and we had a good time of it.

We passed the old firetruck and the Little Chapel in the Woods, and ran along Holly Creek for a long time.

Tons of cars were parked at Emery Creek. People were playing in the water. A guy was fly fishing from the bridge.

Yeah! Outdoors!

Fort Mountain loomed off to the left as we approached the climb.

The forest road leading up to the Windy Gap lot was mellow and fun. Something large had died up there in one of the curves, but other than that, the climb was pretty nice. I'd been keeping on top of fuel and water so far. I wasn't hungry, or tired, or weak, or thinking strange thoughts, or suffering non-existent pain, or anything else. I felt good. It seemed like everybody did.

Climbing the Windy Gap trail was really tough though.

Fortunately, it was smooth and tacky. It's so often dusty and rocky and loose. I was pleasantly surprised. It is long though, and the pitch is relentless. There are 3 kicks right before Milma, and John was all: "When I see those 3 kicks, we're almost done."

One, two, three.

Everybody was sitting down waiting for us at the turn.

I checked my bike. I'd noticed a bent link in my chain right before we started. It had been giving me a little trouble all day, and was the apparent culprit in some issues I'd had during the past few rides, but it was manageable. I'd wondered if it would give way during the horrific climbing, but no, it still looked the same. No need to address it just yet, at least.

When Bromley arrived she wasn't sure how she felt about climbing two more miles of rougher trail than that, especially with the temperature climbing as well. Josh had initially planned on turning around at that point too. He was feeling good though. Brom was too, but she wasn't sure how well she'd feel later. John kept looking at the time. He had a deadline and eventually just had to get moving.

Everybody pushed on.

Milma is actually fairly gentle and fun. It's only steep in a few spots, and they're short. It is unfortunately, only accessible via one of two murderous climbs, or one of two incredibly technical downhills, but Milma itself, is great.

John and I both tanked up at Milma Creek. I'd consumed one bottle since Mulberry Gap and it's easy go to through another one on Tibbs. Better safe than sorry.

Though gentle, Milma was also short lived. The great hell lay directly ahead of us.

Josh was all: "I've always heard how hard this is. I guess I've got to find out someday." Or something like that. He seemed to have decided to keep going rather than turn back.

John and Chris took the lead.

I followed, but Mark and Marc passed me almost immediately.

I think Josh walked most of it, but I'm not sure I rode materially faster than he was walking. He was never more than about 50 yards back.

The bottom 1/3rd was actually in reasonably good shape. I've had a harder time with it in the past than I had that day. But, after the bottom third, it was as tough as it's ever been.

Somewhere in there we ran across a rattlesnake. It was all stretched out across the trail when I rode up, and even though I was probably 20 yards away, that was apparently too close, and it started rattling at me furiously. I've never actually heard one rattle before. I've seen plenty stretched out across the road. I nearly stepped on a timber rattler at Bull Mountain, and a pygmy rattler on Conner Mountain. I walked within a few feet of a pink rattler in the canyon. They were all dead quiet. This one was pissed though. It rattled all crazy and coiled up into a big snake pile.

The photo is unfortunately garbage. I had to use maximum zoom to take it and the lens was all sweaty and disgusting.

When Josh walked up behind me, he could neither hear nor see the snake. It had been rattling since it was out of earshot, and to him just sounded like running water off in the distance. It was so well camouflaged that he couldn't even see it without looking for a few seconds, after I pointed out where it was.

Fortunately the trail is really an old road, and really wide right there, and we were able to walk waaaay around it.

Then, not 100 yards later I passed within inches of another snake.

"Black rat snake." [points to it] "Not poisonous. Try not to run it over though."

I swear I've seen more black rat snakes than any other snake. Like 4 to 1 at least.

We climbed and climbed. Eventually the trail degraded into shelves of exposed granite and shale.

The photo does no justice to its ridiculousness. There's just no riding that.

We walked, and walked, and walked. Josh passed me in some short, rideable section. My legs started cramping. Not that full on, locked-up, going-to-hurt-all-week cramping, but cramping nonetheless. Again. No amount of not-climbing in the mountains can prepare you for climbing in the mountains. I need to do a lot more climbing in the mountains.

As all things do, Tibbs came to an end. As I approached the trail head I could imagine John sitting there, ready to go, counting the minutes until I arrived, but he was actually fairly casual about it. "Hey D, take a few minutes, but I need to get going pretty soon."

No problem. It's not good to sit around for too long after a tough climb anyway.

Mark: "How are you feeling?"

Me: "Heh. I feel like I just climbed Tibbs."

John switched gloves. He'd carried a second set in a ziplock bag all day. Yeah! Nothing like a fresh set of gloves. Apparently Mark had come up with that trick a long time ago. I guess it's starting to catch on.

Chris had already left. Bromley and Mike were still climbing and might still be for a while. The clock was ticking. Me, Mark, Marc, John and Josh headed toward Bear Creek. Josh was out of water though, so he, Marc and Mark took a detour to the Lake Conasauga campground. John kept moving.

"That's my ride guys, I've got to keep moving too."

There are two pretty long, pretty steady climbs on the way back to Bear Creek. They're not bad at all if you're fresh. I could not be described as fresh but they weren't as tough as I'd expected them to be.

The original plan was to take the Bear Creek back, but being pressed for time, we took the road instead. It was just as well though. There are dozens of sweeping turns on the road, and it gave me a chance to evaluate/work-on my tear-ass-around-sweeping-gravel-road-turns skills. I felt a lot more comfortable than I had on Winding Stair when John and I'd ridden there a month or two ago. I was even able to ride comfortably at terminal velocity down the ridge just above the upper Bear Creek lot.

Woohoo!

I'd hoped to get a good view of the whole world from the overlook, but the sumac is really taking over up there these days. I had to reach way up above my head just to get a photo.

It's funny... In years past I could have named each of those ridges offhand. Today I don't recognize any of them.

Terrible.

One step at a time.

We got back to the car with about 10 minutes to spare, so it looked like forest road detour had probably been a good idea. I was sleepy on the way back, but some Zaxby's and a coke solved that. Seems like I always eat Zaxby's when I've been riding with my brother. It's becoming a tradition.

I took a nap when I got home, but I wasn't super tired yesterday. A ride like that usually wipes me out the next day, but not this time. I'd made an effort to stay on top of food and water, and I'm sure that helped. Also, I suspect that my legs were kind of a limiting factor, keeping the rest of me from getting too worn out. Whatever it was, it made for a good time that I didn't suffer from later, and that's always good.

Thanks for the ride guys! Great hanging out with everyone. Let's do it again.