Scare of the Wild

Today, Trek/VW teammate Jeff Shalk and I went for a bit of back country riding and, as is par-for-the-course, there were wild things out there.

The route took us up a huge, hour and twenty-minute climb up Big Hollow trail to Flagpole Knob. While entranced with the steady rhythm of the effort of climbing thousands of vertical feet, our minds were pretty blank. Out pops this large bear. Woah! It disappeared into the brush that formed a wall on the right of the trail. Now Jeff is fearsome competitor but when it comes to bears he's a bit nervous, so I rode up on his blind side as he inspected the deep thicket to which the bear submerged his heaving mass of teeth and claws and I yelled LOOK OUT! BEAR! HA ha ha .. It was sweet. We in fact saw another bear five minutes later however it was so small and scrawny I wanted to put a collar on him and make him a pet.

To top things off we got to succumb to the begging of the hallowed Shenandoah Mountain trail in a section I call the enchanted forest. This Lord-of-the-Rings-like section of single track is lined by hip-high fern meadows and gnarled grandfather trees with thick elephant trunk like branches pointing all directions I can't help but slow down for this section of rare high elevation flowers, balds and random stone henge rocks. It's awesome!

So as I was saying, we popped out onto a fire road and Jeff yelled some marble mouth curse word I have never heard of before and pointed down to where his right foot had been pedaling by a second earlier. RATTLER! Yikes. This snake was pissed! He was shaking his rattle as fast and as loud as he could. I stood there, about 8 feet away from it, and just took in the sight. Jeff meanwhile was halfway up the mountain trying to spin the burning adrenalin out of his legs. He came back to take a look.

We finished the ride in style bombing down a 2,700 ft decent and soaking our legs in a mountain stream.

All in all an awesome adventure.

Later,
JB

Labels: Epic Adventures

posted by Jeremiah Bishop  # 6:43 PM

Comments:

EPIC. I won 300 bones in a race today and I'd gladly give every penny to have attended the bear/snake extravaganza.

# posted by  Lyle : 3:10 AM

 

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