Alexander Park is just outside Asheville, NC

February 26, 2008 on 4:03 am | In Mountain |

I know blogs are more interesting with photos. I know this, MAAANNNN. But I’ve never been good with taking them. The best period for me with taking photographs of the outdoors was when I was a backcountry hike fan and took pictures with a Canon 35-105 camera with a broken viewing lens. The best photographs I ever took were with this camera, mostly due to the fact that I was forced to only look at color and space (remember, slightly left of center! Thanks to my 11th grade art teacher for that one) and couldn’t think too far beyond that. Sure, a few items were out of focus, but if I look at the pictures I have framed around the house, they are mostly thanks to that camera.

So I have no pictures of the riding today at Alexander Park, located conveniently off of River Road (State Highway 251) just north of Alexander bridge (1/2 mile, maybe?) 15 minutes outside of Asheville. Todd Branham (Todd if you see this I’d love a website to link) and Long Cane Trail Building Group Incorporated (a guess at the name - I know the first two words are correct…), WNC bike dealers association, and SORBA spent the last year or so refurbishing and rerouting the existing trails and some singletrack Woody Keen and Trail Dynamics helped build in the area prior to that. I don’t want to point fingers, but much of the Trail Dynamics area (which I helped build) was followed by Buncombe County Waste Management to get to a clay deposit for the city landfill, which put a huge delay on these trails being finished for the general public. But that is past, and I say let bygones be bygones in order to move forward and help create some solid access for the North Asheville crowd.

So enter myself and Zissou, the Australian Cattle Dog-mutt I picked up from the pound in December. The plan was to go to the Fish Hatchery area of South Ranger District in Pisgah, but I had some mulch and compost to spread, so a 20 minutes drive seemed a lot more reasonable than the 55 minutes trip and pavement/ forest road combo my original ride entailed. And really, the dog isn’t that well behaved, so cars passing as I climb up 475 and beyond didn’t sound too enticing. So we roll in to alexander park around 10:30 after dropping Kristi off in West Asheville so she can roll for 6 hours in the forest with Kassi, Megan, and Laurie. Lucky.

I pull in to the parking area on the right side of the road, and immediately get to roll into single track with a narrow opening (no vehicles there, folks!). There are two loops, the red and yellow, with a nice sign to suggest a counterclockwise direction. I decide to start with yellow, which takes me along some tight singetrack up away from the river and parking area. Zissou hangs three feet behind my wheel as I hammer up the nice grade, around some nice rock features, and off into the old landfill area that has had a few decades to grow over into a light pine forest.

Being February, that poison ivy is yet to proliferate, so I am safe as my legs start to burn as I follow the tight track toward the north end of the park, with whoop-de-doos, roots and rocks making this section of trail very different than anything else you will find in Bent Creek or the rest of Pisgah. I feel my cross country muscles working very hard, a serious change for someone who tends to ride for 4+ hours or nothing at all. It makes me a little wary for the Knobscorcher Race at Tsali - a few more hours out here could do me some good.

As I was saying, I roll north on yellow trail, with nice rock features, a bridge, and a lot of short out of the saddle bursts of speed required to keep my bike going forward. I head up a right-hand switchback and stare off into the distance, the French Broad River framed by a line of trees on the left and railroad berm on the right. I stop for a second to drink in the view, at which time Zissou decides it is her turn to lead me on the trails, and she rockets off, glancing back intermittently to assure her place as Alpha until I can get a quick downhill and yell at her to get the hell out of my way. Which doesn’t really happen, because on the yellow loop the downs are quick and swoopy, but never enough to completely lay off the brakes and live through the turns. And trust me, in piles of vegetation between the trails lies a magic combination of pointy plants and poison ivy.

So I coax Zissou back in line behind me and get back to the shared section and pedal back to the red loop split. The return on the two-way section is great, quick singletrack with a left turn around a rock cropping that makes you want to balk. But I don’t. And I pedal on. A little creek crossing gets me to a split in the red loop. I opt to jump across said creek crossing, as I do realize this used to be the city landfill and I don’t want my Sidis impregnated with god-knows-what they used to toss out here. I opt for the left turn (The right, I understand, just loops back onto the left) and head out for a few more miles of trail with some steep sandy climbs, a big grassy field eerily littered with pieces of plastic sheets, a left turn at the actual border of the landfill itself (smells like urinal cake!) and to top it off, an old home and barn site with three standing structures in the middle of the loop. And some more of the grunt-laden climbing I previously described. A few little pieces were washing out, especially in the grassy field of plastic-decorated trees, but the overall experience as I dropped the last downhill, a little steeper on this side, back to the shared use section was very positive.

I’m not sure if there will be racing there as there was in the past - some of the tight tech moves and lack of anything wider than single-track might make a few of those titanium bolt cut you bars narrow 140# race geeks less than pleased. But I really think if you don’t mind a few points at which the crowd could back up a little it has the potential to be awfully fun. We’ll see what the powers that be have in mind. Not to mention to $1000 IMBA grant that I think SORBA still has to help put in some freeride features (I’ll defer to Mike Brown and Pisgah Area SORBA on this point) so I can not be such a wuss on the rock drops. Alexander Park does suffer from a significant lack of log rides and see-saws at this point, but that could change in the future.

So Ashevillians, and those from beyond our little neck of the woods, check out Alexander Park. Its short-than-Pisgah loops, climbs, and total elevation, as well as challenging-at-high-speed / do-able-at-low-speed technical features speak to strong work by local organizations and some thought for was WNC riders might want. Check it out. Burn your legs up. Tire out your dogs. Revel in the two wheeled ecstasy.

Wes