Afternoon Ride

HBC delivery and Hoover

Great practice with the Jags!

Dog park with K

Delivering cookies

623 vehicles, 2.3/mi, 0.5/min, 37.9mph(avg)
1/2 mile of peanut butter mud to start the night, cold drizzle all night into nasty headwind. Then by morning it finally stopped drizzling and by mid afternoon, I was riding on dry roads for first time of entire trip. Also the wind had shifted around to be a tailwind. Several closed roads including one I simply could not make it through (no bridge at all)
Intended route - 259 miles from Dahlonega, GA to Hickory, NC
Actual route - 270 miles from Woodstock, GA to Hickory, NC

I was able to get caught up by re-routing myself directly from Woodstock, GA to Hickory, NC using Google Maps. In my original route from Dahlonega, I had routed myself up into North Carolina and missing South Carolina completely. But this was more mileage and more climbing from a starting point much closer to Hickory than basically the north side of Atlanta. Unbelievably, after a relative long hotel stay from 3pm to midnight, it was still drizzling and HEAVY fog as I left the hotel. This made for very wet roads, but the temperature was a bit warmer at midnight than when I had stopped. 

PEANUT BUTTER MUD OUTSIDE GAINESVILLE, GEORGIA

I got into a rhythm through the endless hills near Lake Lanier and had made it 60 miles up through Gainesville, Georgia long before morning rush hour traffic when I ran into my first major obstacle - a couple miles of dirt/gravel road with 1/2 mile of hike-a-bike peanut butter mud in the middle. I saw the "Road Closed, Local Traffic Only" sign and decided to go anyway thinking that worst case I would turn around. But then shortly before making it to the closed section, I went down a steep hill and was chased by some dogs. So I decided to commit to making it through and rode around the first set of "Road Closed" signs. Yes, that's right, GA DOT really tried to warn me as I would come across a second set of "Road Closed" signs about a mile farther up. Initially, the dirt was mixed with some sort of gravel so that none of the mud was sticking and was kinda smooth in places. I was still generally going downhill so I was riding pretty fast when I saw a set of signs up ahead shining in my headlights (it was still a couple hours before sunrise). I thought to myself, "oh good, that was nothing!" thinking I had made it through the closed section. 

But as I approached, I realized it was another set of "Road Closed" signs. This was at the top of where the road took a steeper turn downhill. I went around those signs and the road was immediately less gravelly and much more dirt/muddy. I thought "this is not good", but continued anyway. At first it was steep and still rideable. As I neared the bottom going slowly riding my brakes hard because I was worried about what I would find, sure enough, I could see immediately in front of me what I dreaded - nasty peanut butter mud. I slammed on the brakes coming to a complete stop with about half a wheel revolution into the mud. That was enough to completely cake 1/2 of the wheel in mud. I stepped off the bike into "suck your shoe" off mud and mucked my way over to the side to the steep embankment 50 foot climb up to some railroad tracks. There were tons of small trees I could hold onto as I decided to climb up to the tracks but I slipped and fell early and decided that I wasn't 100% sure if the tracks were at the top or if they might be down the other side. I decided to make my way sideways through the trees a few steps and then back down to get around the worst of the mud and onto some grass.

I was able to carry my bike and stomp through the grass until I reached the landslide area, which is presumably why the entire road was closed. They had already planted grass and a netting over the steep slide but apparently hadn't worked on the road yet (hence all the mud). I was able to make my way carefully across and lo and behold at 4:30 in the morning here comes somebody on an ATV as I resumed my hiking in the grass alongside the mud. The road was quite wide from how they had cleared everything out. I figured he would have said something to me but he just drove his ATV through all the mud on by me up the hill. Thankfully, on this side of the mud, the hill out of the valley was shorter and less than a quarter mile later I was able to hop back on my bike after squirting water to get the mud off my SPD cleats, ride the rest of the way up and between the road closed signs on the far side. I had made it!

crossing South Carolina

In this new route, I went right through the corner of South Carolina where I spent all my years riding while a student at Clemson, and even more recently where we would spend fall break vacation when our kids were little. Each mile I rode brought back memories from some adventure such as the three 200 mile roundtrip rides I did to the top of Brasstown Bald from Clemson, or the many times climbing Sassafras Mountain, or numerous adventures up to Highlands, NC (one time where I had to beg an apple off a farmer after getting bit by a dog while riding ahead of my exhausted friends after many miles of gravel on our road bikes to get the car to come back and rescue them) or Whitewater Falls or Ceaser's Head. Or perhaps the best memory of all was passing by the spot where I turned around to head back to Clemson on my very first bike ride in South Carolina as an 18 year old freshman in college. 

This was all on SC-11, the scenic highway which all of those adventures crossed over but rarely used because it does not forbid commercial traffic. Even back then in the 90s there were a LOT of trucks that drove very fast. There is a bike lane now, and I felt fine on it, but there were still a lot of trucks and traffic for a Monday from about 10am to 1pm crossing through Oconee, Pickens, and Greenville counties. There were tons of memories, but no views because of all the cloud cover.

As soon as I left SC-11 in Greenville county, I hit the Saluda grade, which I had only ridden a couple times during the Dividing Waters Road Race. I ended up having one of my best results as a college student in a USCF Pro/1/2 field with a strong Navigators pro team presence. I finished somewhere in the top 10 and took home a little bit of prize money which was unusual for me to finish well enough to win any money in my college racing days. The race finished at the top of a long climb to the SC/NC border known as the Saluda Grade. This area is popular with Greenville cyclists and is part of the Saluda Bakery ride, which I never did while I was a student at Clemson because it was a bit far away to even get to the start.

My memories were vague, but I thought I remembered someone saying during the race that the Bakery Ride split off from where we would be finishing. And sure enough, I reached the spot where there was indeed a split, which confirmed my memory. The road was closed at the split presumably with the top of the mountain impassable. 

This makes sense because all along the climb there were spots where the road was down to one lane with washouts on either side of the roads. Usually the lane on the downhill side was the part closed as you could see the potential for heavy vehicles to cause the road to give way. Prior to this spot down in the valley I had noticed an increase in the number of trees down with many of them piled alongside the road. It must have been a nightmare in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene. I noticed on the wikipedia page that the NC DOT made an announcement that "ALL ROADS" in western North Carolina should be considered closed until further notice. 

But back to the climb up to Saluda, NC, I was happy to be on a new road I had never ridden before and on my way up to a town I had never been to before. The sun finally was peaking out ... for the first time since I started riding 36 hours earlier. I also had a bit of a tailwind as I made my way across the top of the ridge and descended down into the town of Saluda. I was pressed for time hoping to make it all the way to Hickory still 100+ miles farther away so I had no plans of stopping at the famous Wildflour Bakery (the turnaround spot for the Saluda Bakery ride). 

After-school traffic started to pick up as I made my way out of town and through the next set of several towns. Steeps climbs and descents gave way to shorter hills to longer flatter sections of riding including one five-mile stretch of rails-to-trail between Forest City and Rutherfordton. After the rails-to-trail there was heavy rush hour traffic 

A BRIDGE OUT IN THE DARK AND CRUEL, SURPRISING CLIMBS

These more gently rolling and even flat sections of riding made the next section seem even crueler. So, basically, I turned left and instead of heading East on the busy road I had been on, my route took me back north again. And within a few miles I had noticed it had gotten much hillier ... but it was long 1-2% climbs for several miles followed by a sharper (and shorter) descent. So you felt like you were crawling and finally got a break before beginning to crawl again almost immediately. This wouldn't be too bad except a dense foggy drizzle had settled in with relatively mild temps. So at this point I was overdressed for the agonizingly slow 200-300 foot endless and a bit underdressed for the descents - all the while on busy roads with fast approaching cars in dense fog. Fun times.

Also, I was well over 225 miles into my ride when I came down one of those sharp descents to a "Road Closed" sign and a bridge completely gone. I first made my way around the construction equipment thinking I could probably get across whatever was happening, but then I noticed that where there should have been a bridge was a whole lot of nothing. In the dark, I didn't want to risk climbing down a steep muddy embankment and wading across the creek, which I couldn't even see. So I turned around, climbed back up the steep hill and proceeded to watch my "distance to go" climb up by several miles each time Google Maps auto-rerouted me while I was following the Detour signs. 

Also, I ran out of water through here. But thankfully I could tell from my maps that there was a town not too far ahead where the detour was taking me. In the town, I stopped at a gas station where a man who had recently moved from Nepal was very chatty and told me that he was a certified Wilderness First Aid guide and used to help with base camp treks to Everest! He came outside since I was the only person there after I had bought my supplies and chatted while I refilled my bottles and stuffed my backpack full of food. He was looking at my filthy bike and said something along the lines of, wow, that has seen some adventure. As much as I would have liked to continue chatting and hearing his stories from Everest, I was also sleepy, tired, wet, hot and cold at the same time, I just had to get to Hickory so I could get at least a little bit of sleep before leaving early enough to get to Roanoke the next day to then get a little bit of sleep to make it to Staunton on time the day after that.

It's a balance, you've got no real schedule, but a rough timeline. You've got unknown obstacles ahead of you. Do you turn around to take a picture of a cool sign or scenery? Do you stop and chat with a former Nepalese guide? The answer to the second question is an obvious "yes" ... but for how long?? I think our 10 minutes of chatting was plenty long enough to realize that the man I just met in a tiny "no stop light" town in rural North Carolina somewhere between Saluda and Hickory was a very cool person with so many stories to tell and also enough to realize that there is no way I could stay to hear all those stories as amazing as they might be ... because I have my own stories to live and create and experience and a somewhat time-limited number of untold adventures awaiting ahead. You just got to make sure you don't miss the current adventure trying to get to the next one ... as a tiny example of that, I did not turn around to take a picture of the "NO TRESPASSING, EXCEPT FOR TROUT FISHING" sign on the final day because it looked like it was about to rain and I was trying to make it to good cellphone reception area to make sure Analise check-in in NYC went smoothly.

Back to Hickory, after many more climbs through the fog, I finally made it into the outskirts of Hickory with traffic picking up quite a bit around 9pm. It was mostly a descent into town followed by steep hills with I-40 off to my left. Next to my hotel was a Zaxby's that had apparently closed at 9pm (it was 9:30 by this point). But there was also a Waffle House where I got a to-go order of my favorite -- sausage hashbrown bowl with a reece piece waffle (pb and choc chips) -- to take back to my hotel. Check-in went very smoothly except I dripped all over everything from how wet I was from the heavy fog. She said not to worry that she would bring out the mop and gave me a voucher for free breakfast, which meant I for sure was going to stay for it and alter my route again to chop off as many miles to make up for the late start in the morning.

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Brian Toone

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Afternoon Ride

HBC delivery and Hoover

Great practice with the Jags!

Dog park with K

Delivering cookies

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