Pisgah Ouch

For the first time in awhile, I had one of those weekends. After staying at work until 1:00am Saturday morning and then working again all day on Saturday, I was looking for stress relief on Sunday.

We made our way through a hard driving rain all the way to the fish hatchery and then the weather was beautiful. Broussard and I were the only ones riding and our significant others were going hiking.

I didn’t really care about anything besides riding my bike versus riding my office chair so we made haste to Gloucester Gap. Our ultimate goal being to ride Sumney Cove and see Courthouse falls since neither of us had actually seen the falls even though we both had been literally a couple hundred yards from the falls before.

After quick work of Davidson River and 475, we stopped and decided that if we were going to make it back in time we would have to skip the climb to Farlow, oh darn. So we made a right turn onto FS ????, I don’t have the map in front of me. It was the turn we made for the SWANK last fall.

I was in pain climbing this road, as I had hastily gotten my bike ready and didn’t feel the need to change gears, therefore I was running 32X19 which is now officially deemed “Don’t piss off your girlfriend gear as long as you can turn it over.”

After some fun climbing and great descending we were at our first turn, or so we thought. We made a left and I was having waaaaaaay too much fun going down the steepest trail I have ever been on in Pisgah. It was Wilson’s Creek steep.

We got to the bottom and found this little campground and could hear a dog barking, uh oh. At first we though we had just gotten off the road bed but then we realized that we were on private property and we would have to hike back up the steeps.

After a calf destroying hike back up we were back at our mistake. This area of the forest is kind of tough to navigate but we didn’t get lost again and found our way to the falls.

After a quick swim, we hiked/rode Sumney which was quite fun and super steep. The first section of single track has the potential for a really bad mistake if you don’t stay on your toes.

We were spit out onto 215 and we took that to Indian Creek and eventually 475 back up to Gloucester Gap. I hadn’t ridden to the gap from this direction and I had no idea how long it would take. I was in pain bad from pushing the gear and I thought I was seeing a mirage when the gap appeared. We flew back down the gravel and Davidson River trail to the Hatchery. We thought for sure we had blown the four hour time frame we had given the girls as we had no time keeping devices. To our surprise we were four minutes early.