Day 12

This was my last day in the mountains (I think), and it was a fitting farewell.

I started with a real breakfast at Royal Waffle King in Blue Ridge. I hadn't had a real breakfast for a while, but I knew I'd be needing the extra fuel, and that I probably wouldn't find a place to stop for lunch. While I was there, a guy offered me five dollars to drive him somewhere, because his car had broken down and there was some terrible storm coming with lots of hail. Well, I had to decline since I don't really have a passenger seat, although his fear of the coming storm got me a little worried. Still, I headed out east down US 76 towards the mountains. Just a short while later there was a ranger station, and they had a nice big topographical map on the wall so I could confirm that my planned route wasn't (totally) crazy.

That route was along the very-curvy TN 60, which would take me 35 miles southeast across the mountains to Dahlonega. The map showed elevations of up to 2400 feet, but that really wasn't too bad since I was already at 1700 feet. The guy at the ranger station told me they had just repaved the road in June, so that was really nice. What wasn't so nice was that they were still putting in the extended shoulders of red earth, so for the first ten miles I was being passed by a steady stream of big orange dump trucks on this two lane road, ferrying the stuff to its destination. The ones passing me weren't so bad, but there are few things worse than the blast of wind you get off a dump truck barrelling down a hill at you at 65 mph, while you're struggling up it at 6.5 mph.

It was all hilly, and all curvy, but the grades were pretty manageable and I never really dropped below 1800 feet. However, I either missed something on the ranger station map, or the map didn't extend all the way to where I was going. Because eventually I hit a climb that just kept going up, and up, and up. I didn't reach the summit, at Woody Gap, until the altimeter read 3000 ft (actually 3180 ft., I later found out). That was a full 1000 ft. higher than I was in the foothills of the Smokies, although the climb was a lot easier because the grade was only about 6-7%. So I had finally crossed the spine of the Appalachians, which I think was something to be proud of. The top was marked by the crossing of the Appalachian Trail, which starts just a bit to the south of where I was, and runs all the way to Maine. I took a few steps up the trail, and was grabbed for a minute by the thought of ditching the bike and just going for it and hiking to Maine. That would be a whole new level of remoteness, solitude, and hard work way beyond what I've been doing. Luckily (or maybe not?), I snapped out of it and got back on the bike.

At Woody Gap, my average speed for the first 35 miles of the day was 10.6 mph. Five miles later, it was 12.0. Apparently going 30 to 35 mph for a stretch will do that for you. Just like the ascent, the descent was also relatively gradual, so all the potential energy I'd accumulated was converted gradually at an efficient rate, instead of being immediately wasted on wind resistance and braking. So with that, it didn't take long to arrive in the touristy-but-nice town of Dahlonega, where the claim to fame is being the site of America's first gold rush in 1833. I stopped at Rick's for a large, late lunch, including Freedom Fries. Then, as I was heading over to the Visitor's Center across the street, I ran into a group of bikers also from the Chicagoland area like me. Ok, they were using the motor-driven variety of bike, but it was still cool to talk with them. They said that they'd seen a lot of bicyclists in the area, so they were wondering if some kind of event was going on. I hadn't seen any, although in the "town" of Suches, at 2500 feet just before Woody Gap, there was a road sign with a bicycle that said "Ride single-file, share the road". Very strange since that was the only bicycle-related marking I'd seen all day, and twenty miles from anywhere. I later found out at the Visitor's Center that the 15th annual "Six Gap Century" was coming up on September 28th. It's a hundred-mile bicycle ride traversing six moutain gaps in the area. It has 10,700 feet of climbing, so I bet some people were preparing for that. I guess I did the "One Gap Three-Quarter Century" today, but I did it with a bicycle 70 pounds heavier than most doing the real thing. So even though it sounds like an interesting ride, I guess I don't need to come back at the end of the month to prove myself.

From Dahlonega, I rode 18 relatively-easy miles down to Bolding Mill Campground on Lake Lanier. So it was the second night in a row of camping on a dammed river. This campground isn't as nice as last night's, but my site is right next to the lake, and the beach area is a little better. I actually took a full-on swim this time, just sitting in the water and watching the sun go down. Never did find that hailstorm the guy in Blue Ridge was talking about, or even a drop of rain for that matter. They said they're closing up the campground this weekend, so it's a good thing I got here when I did! I guess I'll have to watch out for that on the way back home.