Asheville: Where Trails are Named and Maps are Numbered

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With the Tour De France occasionally locking up on the internet TV in the workshop, I handed the mechanic at Backcountry Outdoors $11.95 for my DuPont State Forest Map.  Guess the price has gone up since it was declared an official IMBA Epic mountain bike ride.  It’s been a long time, maybe 3 years, since I’ve been to Asheville and Brevard, long enough for Backcountry Outdoors to change their sign and beautifully organize their sales floor, but I don’t recall ever paying for a map of North Carolina’s DuPont State Forest.  I almost thought they were free, grabbed one and walked out.  Wait.  Is that a price tag?  It is.  Seriously, I probably have three sweat soaked blurred DuPont Maps in a folder at home marked “Asheville-DON’T FORGET TO TAKE THESE MAPS STUPID,” which of course I forgot.  It was a last minute decision.  It sort of went like this.  My wife asked, “Wanna go to Asheville over the 4^th sweetie pie?”  In my deep sexy Barry White voice I replied, “Fo shizzle my Nizzle!” 

Immediately I started planning.  Yeah right.  This is my wife and I we’re talking about.  Most of our ride times end in “ish.”  Like 8 in the morning-ish, or more likely 10:30-ish.  We like to wing it.  Still, knowing we’d get in Saturday Afternoon and leave Monday afternoon, we did make some loose plans to make the most of Asheville, the unicycle and dirty bearded guy capitol of the world.  We’d ride near the hotel somewhere on Saturday and go out for dinner somewhere afterward.  With fireworks somewhere in Asheville sometime Sunday night, we planned to ride mountain bikes at DuPont sometime during the day.  On Monday morning we’d do whatever ride we didn’t do on Saturday, either mountain bike at Bent Creek or do a road ride somewhere on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

At the hotel computer, I printed off a black and white copy of the color map of Bent Creek.  Whoever wrote the Bent Creek Map must have been the same survey engineer that created the DuPont State Forest Map.  While accurate and up to date with closed areas (the trail passing under Bridal Veil at DuPont is now closed to bikes), they are not very user friendly on the bike.  The trails on the map are marked with numbers.  The trails on the dirt are marked with names on wooden signposts, no numbers.  So, if you’re not a rocket scientist, and say a dufus with a Bachelors degree in Broadcasting, you’ll find yourself looking like a cave man in the space shuttle at every trail intersection if you don’t pre-plan your route and or ride with someone who works at the aerospace division at GE. 

I thought I was being a genius with the Bent Creek map.  I wrote out a crib sheet of trail numbers, put it in a sandwich baggie and stuffed it under my shorts leg.  It read: Hardtimes Trailhead, Lt 664, cross road, 666, Rt 660, Lt Road, Rt 150…etc.  Brilliant!  I could read the sheet through the white leg panels of my new shorts.  It didn’t help.  In real life, there are no numbers on the signposts at either Bent Creek or DuPont.  So, rather than having a flowing steady ride, I found myself getting the map out of my Hydrapak Morro at every other intersection or face the certain doom of taking my wife down something gnarly.  Eventually, I just stuck the map in my shorts leg.  That way I could read it, check the number/name key and look a few turns ahead while riding easy sections.  We ended up riding Deer Lake, Wolf Branch, Ledford, Ingles Field Gap, Little Hickory, Sidehill and Explorer in 2-ish hours.  Regardless of the map hiccups, it was as beautiful as I remembered.  We snapped a photo of my wife’s Litespeed Pisgah in Pisgah and headed out for big noodles at Doc Chey’s.

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Sunday Mornings

The sun is doing it’s best to burn the frost off my windshield and the fog from the Ohio River Valley. Like a human coco bean radiator, I take another sip off coffee and unzip my jacket. There’s always an interesting story Sunday morning’s on NPR. Today, I think it’s an interview with a producer from a TV cop drama, but I missed the beginning where they mentioned the show. He’s actually been to real murder scenes and I laugh when he reiterates the fact that saying “c’mon, shoot me” is about the dumbest thing you can say if someone in real life points a gun at you. I’m halfway through an Odwalla Bar and about a half hour from today’s cyclocross race venue.

Just this past Saturday, my wife and I were spinning and watching the “Pure Sweet Hell” video. Some CX nut from Portland was saying how cross is sort of masochistic. My wife quipped with a smart-assed raised eyebrow, “is that why you like it?!” Caught off guard by her subtle humor, I spurted out something like, “no, I like it because it’s short and really hard.” I chucked inside and we kept spinning. As the yuk wore off, I started to think of why I like cyclocross.

I do like it because it’s short and hard. While I do like racing bikes in general, I’ve never been completely fond of the all-day long endurance mountain bike races. I don’t get excited for the Mohican 100 and Pisgah Death March like I do for cyclocross. Every form of racing is hard in its own right, but for some reason I prefer the red-line racing over the “oh god I hope I can endure this beating for another 4 hours” variety.

But, cyclocross is more than that. It’s the little intricacies, most of the time nothing to do with the actual bike riding, all rolled up into one package that keeps me coming back every weekend. It’s trying to quietly stuff a cowbell in the pocket of my backpack without waking up my wife. It’s loading up the bikes on a chilly November morning and seeing my neighbor tip-toe out to grab his newspaper in his underwear and suddenly realize that someone spotted him in his boxers. It’s feeling compelled to make a sign of the cross midway through evening hill repeats in Mount Adams as I rest and take in the vista overlooking the Ohio River Valley from the gate of the Holy Cross-Immaculata Church.