Local rides aren't usually worth journalling, but a while back, as I rode into North Cooper Lake Park, I noticed that the bit of land that has been for sale for ages must finally have been purchased.
The old blockhouse was gone, and the trees were cut clear back to the old antenna. Interestingly, it appeared that the trail was still intact, running through the woods just past the boundary of the cut. I meant to verify that it was still there on the way out, but I forgot and didn't have the energy to go back when I remembered.
I'll be interested to see what they do about the old antenna.
In keeping with my recent determination that I need to spend more time in the woods, on foot, I went for another hike a few weekends ago. It was kind-of in the same area as before, but really a little bit east. If you check out the Lidar data for the upper Ward Creek area makes it look like there might be an old roadbed leading down along the creek from FS42. It seemed like a good thing to investigate, so that's what I did.
I parked at the little parking area on FS42 just east of Ward Creek, dressed appropriately for the chilly weather, and headed back west along the road, passing the little falls just north of the road on Ward Creek itself.
I couldn't immediately discern any old roadbed leading down along the creek, but I was eventually able to see where it switched back away from the creek, up toward the road. It didn't properly intersect FS42, as I guess it was built well before FS42 was, or at least well before FS42 was widened into its present form. Still, I was able to scramble down to it and see where it led.
It was a steep sidehill for a few hundred yards, but as it approached the creek, it hung a sharp right and pretty well followed the grade of the valley, keeping a steady distance uphill of the creek. Knee-jerk wisdom would declare it to have once been a logging skid, as it was pretty steep, and that switchback near the road was pretty abrupt. But... I always wonder about these old roads. Sometimes they just end halfway up the mountain, and it's clear that they were just there to get the timber down. But sometimes they keep going and going, usually up to a gap or to some other road. In this case, this one may have led up to some former incarnation of FS42. The relative flats just north of the ridge were populated throughout the 1800's, much as Gaddistown and Mt. Airy still are. If you lived there, and you needed to get down the mountain... If you were pulling a wagon, you'd probably have to head west to Cooper Gap or east to Ward Gap, but on foot or riding a horse, it would have been an ok route down.
Maybe. Who knows?
A short ways down I got tangled up in an old piece of barbed wire.
Ha! Glad my tetanus booster is up to date.
Notwithstanding lockjaw, I do love exploring old roadbeds this time of year. You can see forever, and it's always rained enough recently to make every little creek tumble.
The only trouble is trying to decide if some little cascade counts as a proper falls or not.
And it's even harder in retrospect, as I didn't have any good way of capturing the scale, and everything looks smaller in a video than it does in real life.
The road may be old, but it defintiely got some traffic in the 80's.
Here and there, it crossed the creek.
And there were a few side trails leading east up Hogback. I didn't notice any to the west up high though.
One of the spurs led up to some flats...
...where it ran across, dove back down toward the creek, then curled around into a sidehill and ended abruptly. It definitely struck me as a logging spur, so whether or not the Old Ward Creek Road was originally a logging road, it certainly seemed to have been used as one at some point.
Somewhere in there I found the first balloon of the day.
One of the side-spurs had also become a "crail".
Where it crossed a little feeder creek, the creek was shallow enough to jump the bank and eventually redirect itself down the trail.
Here's a fairly representative shot of the trail. Really of all the trails I explored that day.
It wasn't hard to follow the bench-cut, but there was always deadfall to negotiate. Lots and lots of deadfall.
Balloon number 2:
Lower down, the old road crossed the creek again, and there was still an old bridge abutment on the uphill side.
Balloon number 3:
After that crossing, the road led sharply away from the creek to the west and sidehilled around the face of the mountain. It's not impossible that it kept going and I just missed the split, but the obvious route was to the west. It eventually led over and across a little feeder creek, that a much more substantial bridge must have once spanned. It actually took me a second to figure out where the road continued on the other side of the creek. Between the distance and some deadfall in the way, it wasn't immediately obvious.
I also got distracted by this little waterfall just upstream from where the road crossed.
Oh! Also, I almost stepped on this guy.
Banded Water Snake? Midland Brown?. I didn't uncover it to find out. With my luck, it would end up being an oddly colored Copperhead.
I love that snakes don't go into hibernation when it's cole. Rather, brumation.
They don't sleep.
They WAIT.
Balloon number 4:
And 5:
The road eventually ended at another road which led up and down the mountain. This one was wider and well below grade, much like the lower bit of Old Cooper Gap Road. It led up to another, larger flats, and had a good bit of rock stacked along the eastern edge. It looked like it had gotten a lot of traffic, over a long time. I wondered if it might be another Old Cooper Gap Road reroute, but after crossing the flats it just ended pretty abruptly. Maybe somebody lived up there at some point? Or, maybe the original route split off earlier and I just didn't see it.
Somewhere up there I ran into this 6-trunked tree.
It only looks like 5 in the photo, but there are 6. One is just hidden behind another one. It was hard to get them all into the same frame.
There was an old rusty bucket up there too.
Another spur led back down an adjacent ridge before blending into the backslope and becoming virtually indiscernible from the surrounding woods just above another old road, which led west.
Right away I recognized this waterfall.
Ha! The road I was on was Old Lower Conner Mountain Road (or so I call it). I'd been right there on my previous hike and been discouraged to find that none of its spurs led over to Ward Creek. Well, it turns out they actually do, but not directly, and certainly not intentionally. I guess it would be more correct to say that the spurs of one road end up intersecting the spurs of another. It's possible to connect them, but it's a circuitous path.
"Trail improves somewhat..."
When the trail started improving, I started feeling pretty confident that I was where I thought I was. When I hit the 6-way intersection at Old Cooper Gap Road, I was certain. From there, I headed up toward the gap, making sure to hit a couple of spurs that I'd missed the last time I was there.
There was an old canteen up there somewhere.
Rather than cross the landslide again, I just cut up to the road before I got to it, and from there, took the road back to the car.
It was still a little early though, and I had a good opportunity to check out something else... Some time ago I'd ridden the Hogback Mountain Trail, but I'd gotten to it by following the Old Hogback Mountain Road that runs up the east side of the knob from Jones Gap. When I first rode it in like 2004 or something, the road just became the trail, and then the trail disintegrated as it headed south down the ridge. Last time I rode it though, the road was overgrown and choked with deadfall, and didn't look like it got a lot of traffic. Rather than becoming the trail, it almost disappeared, then finally teed into a very well-defined trail. At the time I didn't feel like following it back north, so I wasn't sure where it led. I hadn't seen anything on the ride in, so wherever it teed into FS42 was not super clear.
I figured, while I was in the area, I'd figure that out, so I headed east along the road towards Jones Gap, keeping an eye out for any break in the rhododendron as I went.
Lo, and behold, there was a break. It was pretty high up the backslope and didn't look super-distinct, but it kind-of made sense, so I followed it.
And, pretty quickly I decided that whatever trail I was on was definitely not the trail I was looking for. It was definitely a trail. It was easy to follow, and there was a clear tunnel through the rhododendron, but there were many seasons worth of pine needles on the ground, and a bit of old deadfall that would certainly have been crushed with any amount of non-foot-traffic. Whatever... I figure that it probably led to top of the mountain, and from there I could find the trail I was looking for.
That was kind-of true. It did lead up the mountain, but not quite to the top. I ended up wandering around for a while up there before finding the real trail. When I did find it though, I took it back down to the north.
There were a few interesting things along the way.
An army sandbag:
Another army sandbag:
Some "organized rocks":
There were also many pits and piles. Mining? Old Ranger bunkers? Something else?
Balloon number 6:
And 7:
So many balloons.
The trail eventually led down into a little draw, and eventually became so covered in leaves that it was difficult to follow. When it teed into FS42, I looked back up the draw, and the trail was almost indiscernible from the rest of the woods. Also, it kind of teed in around a hump. If you didn't know it was there, you wouldn't know it was there. I'd bet that it's a little easier to see in the summer, but I'd also bet that with everything leafed out, if you don't notice it right at the road, you wouldn't see much looking up the draw.
Ok, now it was getting late enough to head out. I'd been out a satisfying amount of time, and my right ankle was starting to give me the business.
The road was totally in shadow from the trail back to the car, and with it getting late, it was also getting a little cold. It's always the ultimate conflict at the end of a hike (or a ride too, I guess). It's getting colder and colder, but you'll be done soon. Do you stop and spend time putting on another layer, or would that time be better spent hustling back to the car?
The ultimate conflict!
Back at the car, I noticed some weird green lump in one of the dried up ruts nearby.
Ha! Frozen frog eggs.
I've never seen them frozen before. Only the very outer bit was frozen. The eggs didn't appear to be damaged.
I cranked the heater and got dressed for the drive home. I don't remember much about it except that my right ankle was unhappy, and that I got the secondary shivers as I warmed back up.
It was a great day, but man, it's been a difficult winter. Pleany of Adversity, but nowhere near enough Adventure. Sitting here now, I barely feel like a cyclist, and I only feel like a hiker or explorer because I just wrote the above and I'm still riding high on the memories. Lets hope things turn around soon.
I've been having nothing but trouble this winter. Between a broken wheel, COVID, rain, and endless trouble with my back brake, I've been off the bike way too much. Mid last-month, me and Billy made it over to Allatoona to try to shake out the cobwebs. For the first hour or so my bike felt super awkward, but finally started feeling ok toward the end of the ride.
I guess it was a good thing too, because right about that time we hit Voodoo, which is super technical.
I guess I've always kept my eye on the trail out that way, because I never noticed these old moonshine barrels.
It sucks to have a broken bike when it's your primary means of exercise and Adventure, but hey, that's how life is sometimes, right?
Whenever something breaks, I buy two replacements. I'm steadily amassing a pile of spare parts, but if it's something that hasn't broken before then it takes time for the part to come in, and even more time to get it working.
Shimano XT brakes are about the most bulletproof brakes out there, and yet the last two sets of them that I've owned have been nothing but trouble. Come to think of it, I've ALWAYS had a bad time with brakes. Back in the v-brake days, I had to fiddle with them non-stop. They would never return properly. One side always wanted to drag the rim. Even if I cleaned the hell out of them, lubed them, and adjusted them perfectly at home, after an hour on the trail, they'd suck again. If someone else adjusted them, it would be the same situation, despite theirs always working. I got a pair of Magura Martas way back, figuring they'd be better since Eddie had ridden them with no problem for years. Nope. Terrible. They constantly had to be bled, and if you'd bump a tree with the lever, it would blow out the piston in the lever and it would perpetually leak thereafter. Every pair of XT brakes I've owned has constantly needed to be bled, from day one. Glen, John, and I have all worked on them, and nobody could ever get them to work. Hell, John gave me a set of formerly-working XTRs from a bike that he's been cannibalizing for the past few years, and it turns out the pistons (in the calipers) are somehow super leaky. The bike has just been sitting in storage for a few years. How do ceramic pistons sealed against aluminum calipers go bad just sitting there in climate-controlled storage? The anwser is that since he gave them to me, they automatically went bad, as that is, apparently, a fundamental law of physics.
Enough ranting about brakes though. I say that my bike is my "primary means of exercise and Adventure" but it isn't my only means. I have two feet, and there's a whole world out there. So this past Sunday I went running around in the woods for a while.
I've been meaning to "finish" exploring lower Conner Mountain (below Cooper Gap Road) for a while now, so that's what I did. I parked about halfway up FS80, right by the old road, got my gear together, and got to it.
I haven't used my old GPS for quite a while. I've got an eTrex mounted on my stem, and that's what I use when I'm on the bike. I'm not sure if it's just getting old and busted, or if reception was just bad yesterday, but it just would not acquire satellites.
I eventually just stuck it in a pocket of my pack and hoped it would eventually acquire. My phone worked, and Strava can record, so I was covered on track data, I just couldn't mark any waypoints. Hopefully I wouldn't need to...
The first few spots that I wanted to check out turned out to be little logging networks. Interestingly, each of the little side trails started a ways up the backslope from the main road, but didn't continue below the road. I interpreted this as meaning that the road was cut, then the logging spurs were cut, and then the road was widened and improved later. I wonder if, at some point, it was officially FS80A.
There were a couple of interesting things out there.
It had rained a lot recently, and all over the place you could see the main path of a stream, and also new rivulets forming that just ran across open ground because some pool upstream was spilling over.
Streams wander and cut wide draws, or so you learn in Middle School Earth Science. It's neat to actually see it in action.
Of course... balloon.
There was an actual cut for the road to pass through at one point.
These are fairly unusual. I only know of two other cuts like this - one on the connector between the Puncheon Express and Hightower Express, and one near No-Tell. Well, arguably the road leading into the Cooper Creek WMA from the Cooper Creek store has a huge one, but it's modern. Usually, for a road, they just go up over the hill. Why bother cutting through? Sometimes it happens naturally as it just gets worn down over time, but all the ones I've mentioned look deliberate. It is common on old railbeds. The other two above are definitely not old railbeds. This one has a chance of being, as its grade is super flat and consistent, but if it was, then it was very temporary and wouldn't have done anything but haul timber back to FS80. Unless lower FS80 was also a railbed... That seems unlikely though.
Who knows?
I'd spotted this trail once before some previous time I was out here, but wasn't sure it was actually a trail. You can kind-of make out a bench-cut on the right hand side of the creek.
Turns out, yes, it is an old road, and it goes for quite a while before petering out up a draw.
There are lots of boulder formations uphill of the old road, most of which are almost completely obscured in the summer.
The last few years' storms have rerouted a stream and cut a new channel completely across the road.
That channel wasn't there at all the last time I was out there. This is the original channel.
The power of water!
Speaking of water, we've gotten a lot of rain lately, and all of the little streams and creeks were really tumbling.
Far enough up the Conner Mountain fork of Ward Creek there was a bit of a falls. It doesn't look like too much in the photo.
So, here it is in action.
I guess it still doesn't look like more than just a raging stream in the video. Trust me, there are several cascades. I wish there was something there for scale. It's actually one of those falls that you can see less of the closer you are to it, but from far away, there are too many trees in the way to get a good view. Ehh, it was still a nice find.
I also found this old PBR can and immediately thought of Glen.
Somebody graffitied a beech tree, but didn't put a year.
Come on, put a year!
Way out past where Old Cooper Gap Road crosses, there are a bunch of parallel trails that I always wanted to explore, but never did. They all come together at one point. You can go off in 7 different directions at that point, which I think is unique in the forest.
They were mostly just logging spurs. One of them seemed to get more Ranger Traffic than the rest.
But most were choked with deadfall or just generally overgrown.
One was a bit cleaner than the rest and may have been maintained as the continuation of the road I came in on for some time. It led out to the Cooper Gap Fork of Ward Creek, crossed it, and ended at what appeared to be a large circular area like you often see at the end of a proper forest road. A bit of a waterfall lay just upstream and downstream of the road.
Above...
Below...
An old road led up along the fork almost all the way to Cooper Gap. I mean, it blended into the draw within a few hundred feet of it.
Some garbage had even made it down from the road.
The trail was mostly clear...
...except for occasional, terrible deadfall...
...but at higher elevations there were thorns and other brush. It wouldn't be any fun in the summer.
The creek itself was picturesque.
The power of water was again on display though. Some very recent, very heavy erosion had made some interesting features. This one is deeper than it looks.
Back at the 7-point intersection, I ended up on an old road that paralleled Old Cooper Gap Road, and appeared to have been a reroute of it. Or maybe vice-versa. Rather than leading up the ridge, it sidehilled it. It was less worn-in, but steeper. At a point, the other Old Cooper Gap Road came in from the left and joined it.
Up there I found an old tire.
And a ton of big chunky rock, that I guess was blasted out to make the modern road, then just chucked downhill.
There was also a very recent landslide up there that obliterated a section of the old road.
Woo! Looked like it just happened. When I got home I sent the USFS a note about it, just in case they didn't know. It was below the new road, but I've seen them close roads to mitigate slides below them from time to time.
Again, the power of water!
Further up there were additional tires. Goodness, all the tires.
At a point, the old road just blended into the modern road, though it was a bit of work to actually scramble up to it.
I took Cooper Gap Road proper back to my truck. I'd been out for about 5 hours, it was getting to be late enough that the sun was well behind the mountain, and it was quite chilly up there.
Here's a shot of the landslide from the road itself.
And there was more of that "power of water" on the way down.
Yikes!
Two different folks offered me a ride, and one lady commented: "Aren't you freezing?!" It was a bit chilly, but I had plenty of warm clothes in my pack. I was actually enjoying the cold though, as weird as that seems. How often do you find yourself walking a down a mountain road at dusk, in shadow, cold breeze in your face, with the west faces of the adjacent ridges blazing at you through the woods? I was enjoying the whole experience, I guess, cold included.
I eventually made it back to my car, headed home, and ended up stopping a little north of Cumming at Palapas for dinner.
They have good Chili Colorado, which has been my go-to meal at unfamiliar Mexican restaurants of late. There was a huge family at one of the larger tables. Like 20 people or more. This one lady was so loud. I mean I could clearly hear everything she was saying from like 30 feet away. She wasn't yelling. She wasn't exceptionally garrulous. She wasn't talking to people at the other end of the table. Her natural speaking voice was just super loud. There was dynamic range in it. It wasn't just a constant steady loud volume that she couldn't control. I wondered if maybe it was just because she was facing me, but I watched the other people next to her, who were also facing me, and I could hear that they were talking, but I couldn't make out what they were saying. It must have been earsplitting to sit at the table with her, but nobody else at the table seemed to mind. It didn't ruin my evening or anything, but it was notable!
My knees and ankles were tired all evening and sore for most of the day today, which was a little surprising. Looking back though, the last time I did any significant hiking might have been in July of 2019 at Sloppy Floyd Park, and I remember back then thinking that it had been a while. Goodness. That's just too long. I like what hiking does for my joints. The bike is way better for cardio, but the moderate impact seems to keep my joints strong and healthy. When I was at my absolute fittest, I rode and hiked in nearly equal amounts, in hours at least. I also fished a lot.
