Mountain Report

I am back from the Smokeys and had a great trip.  I went up there Sunday afternoon with my buddy Roger to scout out the Team YL bike ride that we are organizing for May 21.  We have 27 riders that are raising pledges for this ride up in the mountains of north Georgia.  Our job is to make sure everyone knows where they are going, make sure that they are as safe as possible, have well supported SAG stops where they need to be and provide a post ride celebration complete with lots of food for our hungry team that just had an epic ride.  Needless to say we had our work cut out for us to get this accomplished.  We had several conversations with various folks that would be helping from up in the area and Roger had made an earlier trip to re con the route somewhat but it was not finished.  As we drove up Sunday we discussed our to do list of sorts and decided the best course of action would be to ride the route the next day.  In doing this we would experience everything from the riders point of view and we could also gauge the difficulty of the route and fine tune our training for the team accordingly.

My gear loaded up for the trip

Hiker Hostel

We stayed at the Hiker Hostel in Dahlonega, home town of Zac Brown Band, and it was great.  We were centrally located for all that we had to do on our trip.  Monday morning was perfect weather and we got started on our ride at 9:00 after a great family style breakfast at the Hostel with all the AT hikers heading out to start their thru hike attempts.

Monday morning getting ready to head out.  In the background you can get a sense of the climbs.

 We covered about 7 miles to get to the camp where we may start the ride.  It is a Methodist Church Camp.  We had spoken to them about the ride and they were gracious enough offer up an area for us to stage the race from on the property.  We wanted to meet the folks there and get a lay of the land.  It is a beautiful camp with a river running right thru it.  There is a spectacular waterfall as well!!

waterfall at Camp Glisson

We started the route the riders would ride that culminates atop Woodys Gap.  Roger estimated the distance to the top of Woddys would be 30 miles from the camp.

summit of Woodys

The ride was tough.  There was really no flat places.  You are constantly climbing or descending.  When we got to the top my odometer read 30.2 miles!!  Roger has this area dialed in and knows his way around these hills.  From the top of Woodys we had to go down.  It was the same descent I had done in September and crashed on at 35 miles an hour.  Landing directly on my head and snapping my bicycle frame in two.  By God's grace I only had a small amount of road rash and a broken finger!  I was a little nervous coming down but it was great to get it behind me.  The winds were picking up by that time and that made it interesting as well.

more climbing

 We still had a good bit of riding to do and I was getting hungry!  We came across a great country store and stopped in to get some food and refill the water bottles.  We decided that this would make a great SAG stop and enjoyed some payday candy bars and pop tarts.  It was like someone turned on the lights and I felt great!

Great SAG stop

More climbing

Back at the Hostel

By the time we got back to the Hostel we had covered 75 miles and done 10010 feet of vertical!!  We were really tired and the legs were sore.  We also had the satisfaction of getting a great deal done towards getting this ride organized.  Tomorrow, I will share some shots of the mountain biking we did and some other cool pictures from the trip.