Woods Mountain

I was only a few miles into my ride on Saturday when everything started to seem wrong. I had ridden the loop twice before and had a good idea what to expect and what I was seeing was not it. The entire loop has been blazed and I had just been following the blazes but suddenly found myself pushing my bike for long stretches and nothing around me seemed familiar. I started to think that perhaps the trail had been re-routed but that still did not make sense as I was still seeing dots for the mountains to sea trail which was wrong. I could also see Lake Tahoma down in the distance and that seemed wrong as well. Everything just seemed wrong. Wrong wrong. Then, suddenly it dawned on me that I was going up Betsy Ridge and was doing the loop in the wrong direction! It all suddenly made sense. - I had gone left when I should have gone right and was two-thirds of the way up what was supposed to be the big downhill at the end of the ride!

 I took a few minutes to consider my options. I could either turn around and fix my mistake and do the loop in my intended direction or continue pushing up and see what it was like going the other way. I decided to just keep going up. There was still plenty more pushing but it wasn't too bad and then I got to descend the very steep stretch from the top down to Bad Fork. From there it was just putzing around on the gravel before taking the Harris Creek Horse Trail back to the start. Somewhere after Harris Creek, things didn't seem quite right again and I somehow missed the turn back onto the MST but quickly corrected my error and made it back to the trailhead where my truck was still the only vehicle. 

27 miles of Pisgah without seeing anyone else on the trail. Perfect!

Sunday found me running one of my favorite routes. The Little Nasty - Pressley Cove > Black Mtn. > Buckwheat Knob > Bennett Gap. The weather was perfect and it was a day of bumping into friends. Kellie on Black and then David and David on Bennett.