A quest for singletrack south of the MasonDixon line reveals a cast of unlikely characters, a hearty riding culture and a hollerin’ good time. Over the course of nine days and 1,500 miles, we mercilessly flog a rental van and live off deep-fried food as we search for the South’s finest trails
by chris lesser
photograhy by morgan meredith
t ypography by hatch showprint
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M E E T T H E M U TA N T S
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Ratboy hasn’t shifted out of his big ring all day, and right now he’s barreling straight at me, his head lowered in exertion. The trail we’re on snakes around thick stands of cypress and oak in a discombobulating blur of bayou. Although it winds for miles under the canopy, the trail reveals itself just a few yards at a time, and after an hour of gasping for lungfuls of heavy swamp air, I feel a flutter of vertigo and realize I haven’t ridden in a straight line since I entered the Comite trail system on the northeast side of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Corners come up erratically, and every turn reveals a fresh battery of branches and roots to negotiate. Riding here is a fullbody exercise—balance, weave, lean, pedal, brake, lunge. There are no straight-aways, just twists and dips, so shifts are rattled off on the fly. When I look up from one of the never-ending turns, I see Ratboy screaming toward me. But then I regain my senses and realize that he’s not charging toward me–he’s actually 20 yards and a hairpin corner ahead on the same tightly wound trail. In reality, he’s pulling away. I was told this would happen. “It’s like a 5-mahl BMX track in the woods,” Eric “Ratboy” Heyl had said the night before, when we met him to talk trails at a New Orleans Hooters. The raucous restaurant, plus the sweet humidity and the crazy Cajun drawl all signal that Ratboy is of a breed of rider unlike any I’ve met before. Ratboy worked in the auto-glass industry for 16 years before he turned his weekend bike shop job into full-time employment at East Bank Cyclery, and a side gig as the president of NOMAMBO—the New Orleans Metro Area Mountain Bike Organization. “I was born here, raised here, and wish I never was here,” Ratboy deadpans, briefing us on the area. But even if he claims to have
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little love for the Big Easy, he and NOMAMBO have fought long and hard for a stretch of singletrack within city limits. When the conversation turns to trails, his salty attitude evaporates, replaced, oddly, by giddy enthusiasm. Hurricane-plagued New Orleans, with its plasticbead-festooned tourists and alligator-infested swamplands, is the last place one would expect to find mountain biking. And if the North American cyclist has an archetype—tall, lanky, lean—then Ratboy, fittingly, is its opposite. Short, squat, solid—the 35-year-old father of two is built like a cement truck. To be sure, the New Orleans-area riders have a rightful place in the taxonomy of the sport, connected by common threads like trails, bike racks, bad tan lines and goofy jerseys. Despite an utter lack of classic races, well-known fattire festivals or, well, mountains, a mutant mountain biking culture has taken root in the South—rebellious, inherently idiosyncratic, and filled with colorful characters and exotic (yes, exotic) trails. Photographer Morgan Meredith and I have come here to discover the people and the trails that constitute the South’s unique strain of riding. And if Ratboy and his swampland trails are any indication, we’re already on the right track. Clockwise from top left: New Orleans’ sweet and swampy Bonne Carre Spillway trail, home of Louisiana’s biggest “teetah-tottah”; they don’t call it the spillway for nothing—when the water lets loose this parking lot is 8 feet under; bikes compete with leaf blowers in the Big Easy; Eric “Ratboy” Heyl, champion of southern singletrack. Opposite: Mississippi’s Mount Zion trails— where Halloween kitsch lives on. OPENING SPREAD: Doug Ferguson, Oliver Springs, Tennessee.
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EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED We first heard of the fledgling freeride trails in Mississippi by way of ominous rumors of creek gaps and ladder bridges. Several sources had mentioned the trails with awe, but no one had actually ridden them, and while Ratboy readily agreed to explore them with us, I sensed a twinge of nerves behind his blustery bravado. After experiencing previous let-downs on much-hyped Skid Mark (a routine roll-down in Baton Rouge) and Quadzilla (a smooth middle-ring climb in the Clear Springs trail network outside Bude, Mississippi), I was taking local lore with a big grain of salt. But nothing had prepared us for what we would find in Brookhaven, Mississippi. We roll into the Mount Zion trailhead’s grass parking lot just as dusk settles in. More than a dozen riders are already gathered, ranging from one with a full-face helmet and goggles to Lycra-clad hardtail riders and even a few kids in warm-up pants and no helmets. My own helmet is cold and clammy from the morning ride in Clear Springs, but soon it is steaming with sweat as we race around sharp, flat corners and across repeated wooden bridges. Each little structure is laboriously anchored in cement, and there are so many of them that their rolling humps and banks gives riding here the feel of a pump track—creating flow from otherwise flat, swampy terrain. Our conga line spreads along the area’s 5-plus miles of meticulously well-marked trails, and darkness has descended by the time I return to the trailhead. Johnny Smith, the man responsible
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for these trails, greets one and all with a crackling fire and a grill full of hamburgers. With the fire staving off the cold night air, Smith delivers a quick history of the trails’ creation. They take their name from the Mount Zion Baptist Church down the road, and the property owes its existence to Mississippi’s Section Sixteen Law, which designates every sixteenth parcel of land in a township for the benefit of public schools. Smith leases the land from the town, and in the last five years he and a small band of riders have scratched some quality singletrack into the rattlesnakeinfested swamp. “I did three rides at Clear Springs and I was hooked,” Smith says. “But then Katrina hit, and when we finally got tired of waiting for the forest service to clear the trails we just built our own.” Just as New Orleans riders have found a way to build trails in their sub-sea-level urban environment, the Mount Zion riders have made their own, too. Sure, the creek gap had a flat landing and most of the ladder bridges are less than a foot off the ground, but the trails have an unexpected flow, and in a state that leads the nation with a staggering obesity rate of 33 percent, these guys have built a public trail network with their own money and sweat equity—they even keep two singlespeeds parked at the trailhead for anyone to use. I thought we’d discovered a far-out breed of riders
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From top left: A recent 24-hour race blew the trail clear at Clear Springs in Mississippi; Tracy Case boosting his pride-and-joy ladder drop; Mississippi child-labor laws don’t apply to bike shops based out of box trucks. Right: Eric Porter picks up the pace at Blankets Creek; an old-school Atlanta diner serves up a breakfast of biscuits and grits that’ll stick to your ribs.
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with the Louisianans, who live and breathe the sport of mountain biking despite a lack of mountains. But these nice-as-shucks Mississippians take it two steps further: First, they’ve created a fledgling freeride trail in a bona fide swamp, but what’s more shocking is that Brookhaven sits in a dry county—and these riders don’t drink beer. The next morning, Tracy Case gives us a sneak peek of a “black diamond” trail that’s not yet open. Tracy, 32, works at Brookhaven Cycle and Sport, and rides a Trek Session 7 with a full-face helmet and mirror-blue goggles. He probably has the biggest bike in the whole state. Tracy leads the way over a 60-foot-long ladder bridge spanning a ravine, and points out the flow lines he’s putting in underneath it. When we stop, he admits he’s watched The Collective more than a hundred times, slowing the tape to study the trails, frame by frame. Though he’s never even left the state, Tracy is as dedicated to riding as anyone I know. He spends his days building trail, working in a shop and riding—living and breathing mountain bikes— despite, not because of, where he lives.
g ett i n g d i a l ed Exiting I-575 on the northern outskirts of Atlanta, a series of large municipal signs direct us to the trailhead at Blankets Creek: Mountain Bike Trails, This Way. The large parking area is one of the most institutionalized I’ve ever seen—a kiosk displays trail information, lists corporate sponsors, has a donation box for contributions and informs riders of a third, $75,000 loop that was recently added to the two already established here. This display of civic responsibility smacks of Berkeley or Boulder, or even Portland, Oregon. But Georgia? Skills-building planks and skinnies greet riders, and we climb the newest loop, which clings to a hillside high above Allatoona
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Lake. The switchback ascent is well buttressed and wraps up one of the steepest pitches we’ve seen so far. Haro-sponsored rider Eric Porter, who joined us in Atlanta, leads the charge, and we plunge down leafy descents after each short, punchy climb. Wooden signs with carved alien heads offering maxims like “SKID = SQUID” and “Gravity Cavity” line the trail. It is fast and swoopy and littered with more rocks than we saw in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama combined. Judging by the traffic on the trail, the signs off the exit ramp seem to be working, and we see more than one rider sporting the brand-new-department-store-bikeand-sweatpants look. But newbies didn’t build these trails. SORBA, the southern-fried branch of IMBA and the organizational muscle behind all this civic integration, built them. “A lot of people in the South own bass boats. I don’t— I’ve got bicycles,” says Jay Franklin, who began volunteering with SORBA shortly after its inception in 1988, and served as club president during the lead-up to the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. “Helps now we have trails in the metro area. Used to be we were just in the national forests, but now we’re building on Corps of Engineers land, and city land and parks have opened up, too.” Just before the Olympics, membership hovered around the 400-mark, but today SORBA’s roster tops 3,800 paid members, and Jay says that’s not counting volunteers who come from outside the organization. Luckily for riders here, the notion of southern hospitality extends to trail building, and SORBA tallies a considerable number of volunteer hours every year. How? Easy: organize militantly, rally around year-round riding, and tap corporations and churches to help with volunteer days. “One of the local church groups may bring 300 people,” says Jay. “You get a lot of trail work done with 300 people.”
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THE REBEL DREAMER Bill Victor had six tickets to Grateful Dead shows in California, and after that he was planning to become a ski bum in Breckenridge. But then he got a job offer to use his accounting degree from the University of Kentucky at a thoroughbred racehorse operation out of Aiken, South Carolina. That was 1991—Bill sold the tickets and took the job, and it’s a good thing he did, because otherwise the Forks Area Trail System, a 35-mile network of purpose-built singletrack in Sumter National Forest, simply wouldn’t be here. After driving through the early morning, Morgan, Porter and I step out of the cold morning air and into the warm home of Liz and Bill Victor, which is buzzing with the energy of three young Victor children and at least as many dogs. There’s a palpable hum to the home that even the entrance of strangers doesn’t interrupt, and Liz welcomes us with a smorgasbord of shrimp n’ grits, eggs, bacon, sausage and orange juice. Bill, a fast-talking 38-year-old, tells us how he got the state of South Car-
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olina to pay his trail-building company nearly $300,000 to build an IMBA Epic right out his back door. “It’s wild man,” he says. “South Carolina is so pro-business they opened up their state trail-grant program to for-profit businesses.” Being a Deadhead from the South, Bill was accustomed to bucking convention well before he started a trail-building company. He also set up his own chapter of SORBA, which has grown from 30 members to 300 in the last 10 years. “Bill is like a Jack Russell terrier, and when he grabs onto something he ain’t gonna let it go,” Liz says. The comparison is fitting—it’s plain to see that Bill is smart and tenacious, and, I realize as we start riding, he’s fast, too. “Hoot-he-hoo! Hoot-he-hoo!” Bill yelps in his twangy Kentucky timbre. He’s leading us around a blind corner, the four of us riding the FATS like a line of roller-coaster cars on a series of endless banked rollers. The trails are like one of those Pixar cartoons—easy enough for a toddler to giggle through, but entertaining enough for anyone to enjoy. And the best part is that these trails are a public resource, paid for by a state that historically has used its land to grow tobacco. The new Tower and Big Rock loops hug the contours of the land and are riddled with grade reversals—built for mountain bikers, by mountain bikers. It’s the kind of place you can ride all day and not even realize it—the miles just disappear underneath our wheels as we chase Bill through his masterpiece. “If you ride everything in here you’ll end up with 40 miles with 2,700 feet of climbing, and none of it’s hard,” says Bill, with an intensity that tells you that 1) he means it, and 2) he wants to ride it all—right now. BELOW: FATS with a PH: Riding Bill Victor’s never-ending pump track.
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Headed South? Don’t miss these fine new trails SORBA is threatening to call the IMBA World Mountain Bike Summit next spring “GRITS”—for Great Riding in the South. From May 5-7, 2010, the Forks Area Trail System in South Carolina will be clogged with trail advocates, but any other day should offer smooth sailing on the network’s 35 miles of super-buff singletrack. Six different loops are all accessible from a central trailhead with plenty of parking just 2.5 hours from Atlanta, Georgia, or 40 minutes from Augusta. More information at sorbacsra.org. Riders who find themselves in Tennessee with a big ol’ suspension bike can do themselves a favor by checking out Windrock, in the Coal Creek OHV Area of Oliver Springs. Passes cost $17/day, and riders must arrange their own shuttles while dodging ATVs on the main roads, but the mountain bike trails are worth the trip, and have enough rock gardens and wooden features to keep the most seasoned big-bike riders on their toes. More at coalcreekcompany.com. For the most unlikely little patch of singletrack in the South, visit the Bonnet Carre Spillway trail in New Orleans. The 5.5-mile loop might be the only trail system in the country that uses a levy as a roll-in for its dirt jumps. It also includes a series of ladders and a teeter-totter, but this twisty trail is meant for ripping, and only improves with speed. More at nomambo.net
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The cannon shot gives us our first indication of the surrounding area. Although it’s dark as tar on the eastern fringe of Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau tonight, the blast echoes across the valley and rings off the rocky landscape, revealing a sort of sonic snapshot. The topography here is bunched up like wrinkles in a bedsheet, and it’s no wonder the U.S. government chose nearby Oak Ridge as one of the primary sites for the top-secret Manhattan Project—if anything went wrong as scientists were learning how to engineer the first atomic bomb, the rocky ridges might help contain the disaster. The Haw Ridge Fall Festival is the work of a loose-knit group of local riders, and entry requirements include a riding partner, a light and a six-pack apiece. We arrive at the trailhead too late for the night-ride relay race, but just in time for the bonfire and bike jumps over it. We don’t quite know what to expect pulling up to a party where we know no one, but the fact that we ride bikes and bring a case of beer and a bag of fireworks buys us a warm welcome. Before the night is out, someone jumps the fire on a Marin DH bike, we assault every car that leaves the party with Roman candles, and somewhere in between, the cannon—a miniature stainless-steel replica made by a local rider’s grandfather—is pulled out of the back of a pickup. It puts our out-of-state fireworks to shame. After just a few hours of sleep at a questionable Oak Ridge motel, we meet local rider Doug Ferguson at Windrock, in the Coal Creek OHV Area of nearby Oliver Springs. The 72,000 acres here are mostly used by ATVs, but Doug and a core group of riders have permission to cut downhill trails to their hearts’ content—and they have. The steep and riotously rocky terrain demands respect, and is as challenging as any lift-fed bike park on the continent. The trails range from fast rocky singletrack to full-on DH sections that could stand some race ribbon and tree pads. Porter keeps pace with Doug through most of the ride, and even sessions a road gap with his Haro Xeon and an XC lid. It takes
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more than an hour to finish the first shuttle, and this, Doug tells us, was the easy way down. “You’ll see chicks tear up this road on ATVs in goggles, moto’ boots, a bikini and no helmet,” Jay Smelser tells us as we load the truck for another shuttle. Though he is relatively new to the local mountain biking scene, Jay has already logged his fair share of hours building trail alongside Ferguson—much of which they did by hand, using come-alongs and prybars to move the massive rocks that litter the 2,000 vertical feet of trails. The next morning, we drive two hours to Raccoon Mountain, where riders are already waiting, fogging up truck windows to stay out of a steady rain. Jamie Pillsbury, who works at locally based Lynskey Bicycles, has agreed to show us around. Also joining us are Jon Magnusun from the bonfire party and Chris Ivory from Murfreesboro, a small college town in central Tennessee. All three are riding rigid singlespeed 29ers. After a week of pristinely clear days, the wet weather isn’t altogether unwelcome. The singlespeeders impressively blaze over wet, slippery rocks and tear down high-speed singletrack chutes. Raccoon Mountain holds some 16 miles of singletrack woven around a 500-acre reservoir. The SORBA-built trails reveal a familiar, well-built cadence, albeit with more rocky, technical sections than at FATS or Blankets Creek. The riders we’re with are part of a cadre of hardscrabble mountain bikers who don’t often show up in magazines or movies. Riders like Ivory, who rides the brutal Pisgah Productions events—the Most Horrible Thing Ever, PEMBRA, Double Dare—without any real aspirations of ever winning. He’s the kind of crusty SOB who does them just to suffer through them. He lives and breathes bikes, wrenching as head mechanic at a Murfreesboro shop, but he doesn’t get all philosophical about it. “Good clean fun,” he calls it. Plain and simple.
Clockwise from top: Chattanooga choo-choo— Raccoon Mountain offers miles of grade-A singletrack; Jamie Pillsbury shows how it’s done; just another day in the holler for Chris Ivory; and another out-ofstate salute to the South’s liberal fireworks legislation. Opposite: Bruce Montana, one hip cat; Fort Duffield fortifications; Eric Porter reunites with one of his hometown trails.
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h o me bre w ed The Fort Duffield trail network in West Point, Kentucky, gets its name from the Civil War-era encampment that sits atop a hill draped with singletrack. The fort once served as a supply depot for the Union Army, and some remnants are still visible at a small visitors’ center. But we’ve come here to see a different sort of relic. Bruce Montana, 61, is waiting for us in the parking lot wearing a windbreaker and kneepads, his breath clouding in the cold air. Semiretired from his job selling high-pressure valves and fittings, the man is known for his homebrewed beer and an unwavering dedication to trail building. Eric first started riding mountain bikes here, as a skinny XC racer who once marveled at how Bruce negotiated log-overs. He might never have made it big if it weren’t for this man’s decades of trail-building work. We follow the godfather of Kentucky mountain biking along ridges and over stream crossings. It is our eleventh trail in nine days, and we’re all looking for a gentle swan song. But even though the trails are mellow, the old man puts it to us, his windbreaker fluttering behind him as he slices through the trees. The handlebars on Bruce’s Intense Spider are cut so narrow that it looks like he’s riding a fixie, but he’s no hipster. He still uses friction shifters and 8-speed cassettes—not because they’re retro, but because he has a stash of them, and they work. At one point he veers off the trail and leads
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us to a teepee he built. He has slept out here a few times, but mostly it’s just a place for him to hang his hat during long days of trail work. And suddenly Bruce doesn’t seem like such a relic; he appears much younger, grinning proudly in front of his fort, showing us his trails, riding bikes with us. And the mischievous spark in his eye shows traces of the same passion for riding that helped build singletrack in New Orleans and a 60foot ladder bridge in the middle of Mississippi. For a region of the country that is often reduced to clichés, painted solid red on electoral maps and generally misunderstood or overlooked by those who live outside it, the South has a healthy, hearty riding culture all its own. It’s part of the larger tribe, but also inherently distinct. And thanks to hard-working trail groups and the unrelenting efforts of guys like Bill Victor, the trails aren’t going unnoticed. Next spring, IMBA will host its bi-annual Mountain Bike World Summit—previously held in such locales as Whistler, B.C. and Park City, Utah—in Augusta, Georgia. The town sits at the heart of SORBA country, and it’s just across the Savannah River from Bill’s roller-coaster trails in South Carolina. Hidden in plain sight, the great riding here can’t stay off the map for long—not with local riders so openly inviting strangers to explore their trails, and not with a 365-day-a-year riding season. Trails in the South are spreading like the rogue kudzu vine, with no signs of letting up.
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