I bought a bike so now I need to go camping…
By Stephanie Smithwick
Last summer, I found myself swimming 6 days a week in an attempt to maintain my sanity as a stay at home mom to two spirited little girls. I thought diversifying would be good for me, so I decided that I wanted a bicycle. Never mind the fact that I hadn’t ridden one in 20 years. On the recommendation of my swim coach and future bike partner, I walked into Oak City Cycling Project and told David that I didn’t know what I was doing, but I wanted a bike to help “get the crazy out.” He asked:
“Do you want to ride on the road?” YES
“Do you want to ride off road?” YES
“Do you want to attach racks to the bike and go camping?” YES. Never mind the fact that I had never been camping before in my entire life.
After much deliberation and considerable hand-holding from David, I made my decision and settled in for an interminably long two months of waiting for my All-City Space Horse Disc to arrive.
I started working on the basic skills of forward motion, stopping and staying upright on the Neuse River Trail. It turns out that while riding on the trail is great, I had a problem staying on it. Mud puddles, dirt trails, stream crossings, gravel and pretty much any somewhat rideable path through the woods kept pulling me off the pavement. There were some learning curve challenges prompting several visits back to the ever patient and kind folks at OCCP for lessons on my clipless pedals, bending the rear derailleur hanger back into place and proper bike cleaning/maintenance/adjustments.
I also bought a tent. And a rear rack. And a set of Ortlieb panniers.
Fast forward about 9 months - after a few good (um, challenging) rides on Lake Crabtree, Beaverdam, 286, the WF reservoir, a 1 night bike camping trip on the Neusiok trail (first time for everything!) and a 6+ hour lost in the woods ride at New Light, I decided it was time for a proper adventure. So my bike partner and I picked out this route from bikepacking.com that we thought would give us a bit of a challenge without scaring me away from the woods forever.
We laid out all of our gear in my garage the night before, loaded the bikes in the car, thought really nice thoughts about the weather and took off early the next morning in the rain towards Stokesville, VA heading into the tail end of a tropical storm. It’s an adventure, right??!
After a few minor navigational delays and an unexpected stop at an Amish produce auction, we arrived at the Stokesville Campground where we had called ahead and arranged to leave the car. We started strapping water bottles to the front cages, packing water bladders into panniers already full of tent pieces, camping gear, Clif bars, dehydrated meals, rain ponchos, spare socks, bike tools, headlamps and coffee. By the time we got the panniers on and the sleeping bags strapped to the tops of the rear racks, the bikes were so heavy that I couldn’t pick the rear end up off the ground. But we were ready for adventure!
Off we went, away from the car, and into the George Washington National Forest according to the GPS route from bikepacking.com. It started as a relaxed ride that felt a lot like riding through Umstead. So I totally had a panic attack the first time we stopped to check in with each other and had to sit down and put my head between my knees. I’m pretty sure my bike partner thought we were going to have to turn around and drive the 4+ hours back to Raleigh. However, my stubbornness overrode my nerves and we kept on riding.
Gravel roads gave way to pavement and there were a few blissful, easy, flat miles of riding through the valley past cows and fields with gorgeous views of the mountains in the distance.
And then…..
Oh boy. We started climbing straight uphill over what looked like 4 million truckloads of clean, fresh, loose, large gravel. I wasn’t sure exactly what I had been expecting, but spinning my wheels out going uphill in loose gravel was definitely not it. Never mind that though, we were having an adventure!
Up and up and up we went. After several hours of slogging uphill through that much cursed loose gravel, the road turned to dirt and we found ourselves fairly deep in the forest. We rode through a decent sized stream (some of us more successfully than others) and managed to get those heavy, heavy bikes over a tree that had recently fallen across the trail.
And still we kept going up and up and up and up.
This stretch of forest trail was muggy, buggy and so much steeper than these pictures make it look! We originally planned to camp at Meadow Knob that first night. Neither one of us had cell service, but miraculously the blue dot on my cell phone map kept moving along showing our progress. We could tell that we were nowhere near Meadow Knob, nor were we going to get anywhere near it before we ran out of daylight based on the switchbacks ahead of us on the map. We kept encountering treacherous loose gravel patches and at this point the terrain was so steep that we resorted to walking/shoving the bikes up hill on foot. We thought the trees were getting shorter and the sky closer to the treeline, so we kept pushing on despite the lateness in the day. My bike partner, who possesses far better survival skills than I do, had started scouting places to set up camp while I kept swearing and declaring progressively less and less enthusiastically that we must be getting close to the top of the mountain. We finally agreed that we would go up one final hill for the day and if that didn’t magically get us to the top of the mountain, we’d head back down the hill to a turnaround that would have worked as a campsite.
At 8:30pm, we made it to the top of day one’s final hill and by some miracle were greeted by two beautiful, perfect, quiet little campsites. We strapped our headlamps on, said our thanks to the universe and got busy setting up camp, gathering firewood and cooking dinner.
By the time we got set up and settled in, scarfed down the better part of two backpackers meals, and got our gear tidied and organized, it was close to 11pm. We had a bit of spotty cell service, so we sent word home that we had survived the first day, checked the radar and saw that rain was indeed coming, reviewed on Google the high points of what to do if you’re trying to weather rain and lightning in a tent and then hunkered down for the night. The final bands of that tropical storm did indeed pass over us. It rained and the wind gusted steadily from midnight until 4am, but fortunately we stayed dry and there was no lightning. I slept like a rock from 4am until the birds started chirping at first light. I promptly cursed those birds and passed right back out.
The morning was exquisite and we started the day with 3 rounds of wickedly strong coffee and choked down some Clif bars for breakfast. My nerves were starting to kick in again but we reviewed the map and discussed our plan for the day. Surely the hardest part was behind us. We had originally planned to make the trip in 3 days, but thought that after riding 20 of the roughly 50 miles the previous day, we’d be able to make it back to the car by the end of the day if we were worn out and didn’t want to spend another night in the mountains.
One foot in front of another. Uphill. Through the rock and the gravel. Straight into by far the most challenging part of the trip. We rode a what felt like a microscopically tiny distance before the trail became impossible for even our stubborn selves to ride. We were soon pushing the slightly less heavy (thanks to all that coffee) bikes up what turned out to be serious Jeep 4x4 trails.
Even worse, we must have made it to the top of the ridge because we were soon attempting to navigate our way down this extremely rocky trail. I neither felt safe riding my bike nor walking it because even with the brakes locked, gravity was still pulling its weight uncontrollably down the hill. I quit swearing altogether - never a good sign. I was frustrated nearly to my breaking point when my bike partner sagely declared that “memories were forged through hardship and failure.”
So I started laughing and swearing about all the memories we must be making and off we went again, slow and steady. We were met head on by multiple convoys of 4x4 vehicles with modified suspensions who greeted us with warm smiles and wide eyeballs. The trail morphed from giant rocks to sizeable mudpuddles. I didn’t have it in me to ride through as many of them as I would have were I closer to home. My nerves were still rattled from the morning’s “ride.”
We were traveling at a snail’s pace through difficult terrain. It was mid-afternoon before we caught a glimpse of a view through a gap in the trees and started to get a sense that we were accomplishing something. I started talking more happily about the memories that assuredly we were making!
Later that afternoon we finally made it to Meadow Knob, which had a view but turned out to be a place for Jeeps to do burnouts and was otherwise not terribly exciting.
There was no way we were making it back to the car that day. Even though we had carried a large amount of water with us, we decided that based on our substantial coffee requirements it would be best to push on to the piped spring indicated on our map. By our estimation, it had taken us 5-6 hours to cover 3 miles, and we had 3 more between us and the spring. We had no way of knowing what the terrain would look like.
To our good fortune, the trail once again became rideable by our standards. Having had quite enough hike-a-bike, a.k.a. drag/shove-a-bike, a.k.a hang-on-for-dear-life-a-bike, it felt amazing to clip in and tear up the trail, mud puddles, rocks and hills be damned. I rode right past Flagpole Knob because it felt SO GOOD to be moving at relative speed! In retrospect, we should have stopped to take in the view - it was a gorgeous spot with what looked like a dozen beautiful campsites.
We rode right past the piped spring, but fortunately it was marked precisely on the map and we were able to track it down and fill our bottles/bags back up, albeit quite slowly. We found a quiet, grassy spot that turned out to be a rather overgrown campsite and commenced to some hefty gardening and wood gathering. We then pitched the tent and built a roaring fire with wet wood and the very last of our napalm fire paste scraped from the inside of the slit open tube. We fell on our freeze dried food, passing the pouch back and forth between us because anything else required an unfathomable amount of energy. Once we’d filled our bellies and burnt the evidence, we laid back into the grass, exactly where we were sitting, to marvel at the stars.
It had been a challenging, but truly amazing day. There was a spectacular release in being able to put down all of my usual worries and focus on quite literally nothing but the trail in front of me. We laughed our way through nearly all of it. I was filled to the brim with a complete and utterly soul filling nothing else in the world matters but this moment happiness.
Again, we awoke to a spectacular morning. We had no idea what to expect from our third day of riding, but figured that if we could laugh our way through the previous day’s memory making moments, we would be OK with whatever the trail threw at us. We ate, packed up our gear, made some major adjustments to our brakes, reattached my right hood which had nearly fallen off, refilled our water bottles and hit the trail.
Visions of the previous day’s rocky, rocky path were looming in the back of my brain, but much to our delight, the route ahead was quite rideable. Eventually we hit pavement and it was gloriously smooth! Even better, after 2.5 days of riding up the mountains, the treeline opened up and we got to see some breathtaking views of our current location.
We came to a literal fork in the road. Two roads went downhill, and of course the road on our map was the one third of the fork that went up. So up we went in the direction of Reddish Knob. The bikepacking.com route actually goes past Reddish Knob without taking the spur to the top, but since we’d already come all that way we decided to ride to the top to check out the views. Tacking and lots of rest breaks were our collective strategies for the climb. I am going to need to work on my mountain climbing skills - because the 360 degree view from the top was like a shot of adrenaline and now I want more. Better yet was the realization of quite literally how far we had come since Friday.
We spent a good 30 minutes at the top taking it all in, refueling and talking to a pair of mountain bikers that passed me on the final climb. And then we started flying back down the mountains. Pavement quickly turned back to dirt and rocks. We found a good resting spot with views and wild columbine flowers for yet another snack. We refilled our bottles in a cool, beautiful mountain stream. Eventually the road turned back to that devilish loose gravel. The unmistakeable silhouette of a black bear crossed the road ahead of us. A Jeep stopped and told us they’d seen us on the ridge the day before - to keep going the road was all downhill. We missed one of the final turns, because what kind of adventure would it be if there wasn’t a little getting lost? Mercifully the roads were more downhill than up, and we made it back to the Stokesville Lodge late that afternoon with our friendship and body parts intact - my two goals for the trip.
The weekend was a great reminder that in order to accomplish something special, all you truly need is determination, a sense of humor and a really good friend. Being able to unplug from the world, lay down my worries and genuinely feel and enjoy each moment was incredibly restorative. I came home with an exceedingly muddy bike - happy, fulfilled, and overflowing with memories.
It was an epic adventure.