If the map says “hiking only,” don’t take that trail with a bike. Even if the other trails marked the same were wide, abandoned roads and even if the first part of the same trail was an easy old road, don’t take that trail.
We thought it was peculiar that after the road we were riding narrowed into a single track there was evidence of someone having cleared the overgrowth about two years prior. We were riding on stubbly shoots of rhododendron, oak, and undergrowth. It was clear no one had walked this 1/10th mile of cleared path. Then the work stopped and the path disappeared under the branches merging together to reclaim the forest. We should have turned around right then and there. Yet if we looked hard enough, the path was still discernible and, after all, we didn’t want to go back over the last mile of pushing and dragging our bikes across the trail that connected us to this deceivingly fateful one.
And as you can see from the video, this new somewhat jungly trail was rideable – as long as you went slow and didn’t mind very sudden stops for logs and rocks. This new brush-riding experience lasted until we got to the first of many swamps where even the heartiest of mountain bikers would have succumbed to the silver green water and stinky black mud. As we emerged from the muck with blackened soaked shoes, the real fun began. The trail crossed over long sections of rocks and boulders that would have been a challenge for the average hiker. But we were crossing with 50 lb bikes, lifting, checking footing, pushing, jerking and groaning as we pushed on. Surely, we thought, this would be short and it couldn’t get any worse. Wrong.
It got worse. The swamps were wider, the bike-bouldering was harder, and the growth between the boulder patches became thicker. Our pace slowed into the early evening as the trail became harder and harder to find and we just had to push through snagging thick growth that we hoped was trail until we could spot the very faded blue trail-marker paint on a tree. No one had hiked this trail for years, as evidenced by the downed trees and pesky overgrowth.
Going this slow meant that we had depleted our supply of fruit leather, nuts, and water. Sweaty and exhausted through our last few sections of bike-bouldering, we cursed anyone who had left this trail on the map. And then the mosquitoes arrived. In numbers. We must have smelled better to them than the swamps, so they decided not just to hang around, but to send word to their thousands of cousins that there was fresh meat in the forest.
The fun had left long ago, and as exhaustion was setting in, we just had to push on. At about 6:30, Milissa asked if we should rethink our plan, maybe just abandon the bikes and find our way home. The end of this hell couldn’t be too far off, I thought, and even though we were tired to our bones, it still seemed that our place on the map wasn’t far from the civilization of our campground. We finally emerged to something rideable about an hour later, dirty, sweaty, exhausted like we hadn’t remembered being. Setting our bike batteries to full assist, we rode like eighty-year-olds back to the trailer.
With the high volume downing of water and fruit, then standing in the hot water of the shower, our senses outpaced our dull exhaustion as we slowly came back to near-human condition. Chowing down reheated leftovers required less energy than cooking dinner, so we ate as we stared vacantly into each other and realized the day’s lesson.
There were many times I asked Fred to wait up, because I could not see him just 30′ in front of me. This picture and video are still before we got to the gnarly part of the trail
https://funitude.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/img_9532.mov