Pisgah, I love you!

My brother, Brad, called me before I headed to Florida a couple weeks ago with an amazing idea. He was on a business trip to Atlanta and knew he could probably take a couple of days off of work. Brevard is about equidistant from me and from Atlanta...what better place to meet, eh?

Day One

We met at Sycamore Cycles on Wednesday morning and headed into the forest to get a site to camp. We headed to one of my favorite spots in the forest, a spot at the end of a little trail called Daniel Ridge. We set up camp in quick fashion, ran back into town to get some groceries and pre-ride refreshments and made haste back to the forest. On the way back in I decided on the route for the day. Up Clawhammer to the top of Black Mountain and down with some possible extensions of Sycamore Cove, Grassy Gap and Thrift Cove. I had never been to the very top of black mountain, and had never descended the entirety of the trail....needless to say, I was excited to hit this trail. The "top" of the Black Mountain trail isn't really the top, there are some super steep sections to hike your bike to get up and over clawhammer mountain and to the top of black mountain before you start descending. We stopped at the overlook for some photo ops, a yeti call, and we rolled out. We quickly decided that the hike a bike was worth the downhill!Those of you (both of you) that actually read this blog may remember from Steve's post that I hurt my knee at the cowbell. By the point of the intersection with thrift cove my knee was about spent so i headed back to camp, Brad continued on for thrift/sycamore coves and had a blast! We then did some fly fishing (with no success) near our campsite.

Day Two

After a hefty meal of panini's cooked over the fire and much brotherly idiocy we ended up waking up later than we expected, kept asleep by the spell of the rushing water next to our campsite. My knee was sore, but I decided that I wanted to at least do Long Branch/ Butter Gap to the hatchery and back to the campsite. My plans though changed because once I got riding my knee felt pretty decent. We headed up some gravel to get to Long Branch...what a fast downhill this is! We ran into some campers about half way down, gave our greeting and headed down to Butter Gap. Rocked it on Butter Gap and got the the intersection of Butter Gap and Cat Gap. Cat Gap is shown on the map as being open from this intersection to the fish hatchery year round, but claimed it wasn't open to bikes. Rather than backtrack for six or so miles, we made an executive decision and headed over to the hatchery. We refilled our camelbaks, ate some food and started to head up 475B to the top of Cove Creek. Just as we pulled out of the hatchery, though, we ran into a van with a trailer full of bikes. We stopped to chat for a second to see what the deal was and they offered to take us to the top, we obliged (neither of us had ever shuttled a trail before, kind of cool, but I actually like climbing). We did Cove Creek twice and decided to head over the reroute to daneil ridge and descend right back to our campsite. The climb up to the top of Daniel Ridge is pretty rough/overgrown/technical. It was a blast. The ride down Daniel Ridge is unreal. It transitions from quick stuttery rocks to some nice big techy moves on some big rocks/roots, back to super fast. The best part is that it runs along the river for most of its length...life, with a soundtrack. This is, by far, my favorite trail in Pisgah.We got back to camp, and cleaned up in the river a bit. I noticed that, though I hadn't hit my knee during the ride, it was bruised and extremely stiff. I may be off the bike for a bit now, but the trails were worth it. After some deliberation we decided that the day needed to be topped off with some Mexican food; wise decision. The next morning we packed up and went our own ways; Brad back to Indiana, and me back down the mountain.

Coming home after spending just a few days in the woods is always weird for me because I grow accustomed to being away from all the "ills" of society. It's refreshing to have a simple life. wake up, eat, ride my bike to exhaustion, eat, ride some more, eat some more, hang out by a fire, make some noise, sleep. I have those, "fight club" moments when I think; I'm not my job, I'm not my home, I'm not my khakis. Then I come home to my house in suburbia, and write about my near wilderness experience on my nice desktop computer in my air conditioned spare bedroom. Sometimes I feel like a sellout. I like to ride bikes.