Today I awoke and made breakfast, eager to get the day of riding started. Greg and I had a plan to ride the Coleman Boundary trails. It's situated in Barnardsville, N.C. before you get into Asheville from Johnson City. A couple\three guys from our club (NTMBA) have ridden over there in the past few weeks and have given it some good reviews. Greg and I thought we would try it ourselves. Right out of the gate your climbing on a forest service road, it's actually nice and smooth as far as those kind of roads go. We didn't want to ride 10+ miles on a FS road, we came there to ride trails. We found the kiosk with the trail map and wrote down what we needed to know and we were off. It was pretty chilly as we started but the climbing elevated our core temps pretty quickly. We took a couple of pieces off and continued on. We missed our first turn onto Upper Corner Trail due to it not being marked so we passed up the actual trail and when we arrived at the Little Andy Trail we decided to hit it instead, since it would take us close to where we were wanting to go anyway. This trail was not maintained at all, lots of debris down and really rocky. One section was more than a 20% hike-a-bike in rocks. We made it to the top and found the Laurel Gap Trail. Mostly a grassy FS road, not bad, less climbing but it still proceeded to go up. We ran into a hiker and Greg chatted a minute then we were on our way. We were pedaling along and then we started seeing places on the ground where something with very large claws had been scraping away the grass to get at what was underneath (bugs, nuts, who knows). We went back and forth on what it could be. We kept seeing more and more spots on the ground like this everywhere, every 20-30 feet. It was very fresh also, looked as if within the last 30 minutes or so. We stopped several times to look at the claw marks in the ground. Had to be a BEAR we said, too big of tracks and claw marks, bigger than a human hand! We were on edge for several miles until we finally found the trail we were looking for, Perkins Trail. It was not maintained either and also extremely rocky. We bounced and shook until we found the bottom back onto FS74, turned left then pedaled over to the "DH" trail Staire Creek. If this had been a little drier this would have been a blast to shoot down. The slick dirt and the rutted out erosion in the middle of the trail made it difficult to say the least. This was very very steep in places and brakes did you no good, you just slid thanks to gravity, it was that steep in spots. We were running the GoPros also down these bumpy, rocky, treacherous trails. We should have some video soon after editing. We put in about 4 hours of riding and I totally enjoyed exploring and discovering a new place. The pictures we took of the falls and creeks were awesome, the water crystal clear. At the end of the trail we encountered a small sanctuary. Greg took some pics but there was Chinese\Japanese writings on the door. I didn't want to investigate so I stayed on my bike while Greg looked around. It was a little spooky to be honest, the place was well kept but no one around........................WE LEFT! That's about it for today, Thanks to Greg for driving too. Here's some pics, cell phone quality so I apologize in advance. Video soon I promise.
Later G................................................
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