I just got back from a 40-mile mountain biking trip on the Virginia Creeper Trail in western Virginia. A detailed map is available on this site.
Above: one of my friends riding on the trail last year
We left Durham around 6 or 6:30 Friday evening, and arrived around midnight. We camped on top of White Top mountain, which at an elevation of 5520 feet is one of the tallest mountains in Virginia, second only to Mount Rogers. When we got there, the weather was terrible. We camped on the very top of the mountain. Just to give you a picture of how bad the weather was, three people told me that this was the worst weather they have ever encountered while camping.
When we got there, we set up our tents and went to sleep. We woke up at 6:30 in the morning, and the weather had gotten worse. It was maybe 35 degrees, with 30 mile per hour winds and torrential rain. It was still dark, and it was so foggy that I couldn’t see 5 feet in front of me. We cooked oatmeal and bagels for breakfast, and then went back to our tents to wait until there was more light outside. Once the sun had come out, around 7:30, we took down our tents and put all our stuff away and got ready to ride.
It was cold and the weather was miserable, but I can’t say I didn’t expect this and I can’t say I wasn’t ready. This was the third time I had ridden the trail, and it was rainy last year as well. Dustin pretty much just took a duffel bag and brought his whole closet with him. I brought plenty of clothes, and I dressed in layers.
Above: photo taken last year of a small stream off the side of the trail
We rode from the top of White Top mountain to the start of the trail, which was about 7 miles. This was a steep downhill ride on the road that wound around the mountain all the way to the bottom. I started out, but found out that my brakes didn’t work because they were really wet. I tried alternating between my right brake and my left brake, and I found out that this allowed me to control my speed, but not stop.
Then, I saw that we were approaching the bottom of the mountain where the road came to a T and we were going to turn right. There was a stop sign and I knew that in order to make the sharp turn I would probably have to stop. I applied both brakes, but my brakes did not work at all. We were riding single-file on the right-hand side of the road, so I had to pull out of the line to prevent myself from crashing into the person in front of me. I couldn’t stop, and I passed the person riding in the front of the line. There was no curb, and the side of the road was a little rough and grassy, so I thought that if I pulled to the side, I might be able to slow myself down.
Unfortunately, this didn’t work. I caused myself to wipe out. My bike flew to the right, and I flew to the left and landed on my head and my left elbow on the grass. I was fine, and I got a little scraped up, but after a few minutes I decided to keep on riding.
I think I led for 2/3 of the trip. We rode the downhill section of the trail from White Top to Damascus, about 18 miles, and then stopped to eat lunch. By the afternoon, the weather had greatly improved, and it was no longer so miserable. We rode the remaining 15 miles from Damascus to Abingdon, where we ended.
I think everyone wiped out at least once on this trip. When we stopped for lunch, Dustin found that one of the bolts had come off his rear tire, so he had to sit out the rest of the ride (we had a car paralleling our route). Then, with 2 miles left to go, one person got a flat rear tire, and another person hit their rear derailer on a rock and it rotated 90 degrees into the spokes of the tire. We didn’t want to fix their bikes with only 2 miles to go, so they walked the rest of the way.
This trip was an adventure. The important thing is that we finished; one person told me that he didn’t know how many other people would have kept going in that crazy weather. I’m also now thinking about disc brakes, which would have worked fine in the rain. Anyway, the Virginia Creeper Trail is a great place to ride, but I think next year we’ll try to go when the weather is better.