A couple weekends back was the Annual Athens All The Way mountain
bike ride. It has taken a few years off but AATW is back and will
hopefully be truly annual again.
If you Ask Jeeves about local mountain
bike trails he does not have a very good answer. There are a few trails
that pop up, one is right here in town but pretty short and caters towards
beginners, the others are all a good bit out of town requiring a car or a
pretty grueling fat tire road ride just to get your tires muddy.
Soooooo... Athens does not stand out as mountain biking town to the
general PUBLIC.
The truth is that there is a core group of
dudes that have some pretty decent trails that you will not find any info about
unless you ask one of the said core dudes. These trails are all in town
and if you live in town there is no reason why you could not ride every day and
never get in your car. Now, we are not talking about beautifully groomed
single track.... more like in town rugged wilderness.... but the trails are
beautiful in my eyes.
Athens All The Way is a group ride that
sets out on a pre planned day with the end goal of riding every known trail in
town one after the other after the other....
This is no easy task. I think the
guys and gals who completed the ride this year logged somewhere between 40 and
50 miles.... most of which is single track with small amounts of pavement to
connect sections of trail.
I was unable to ride in the morning due to
some other obligations so I met the ride at the halfway point... I will call
the ride Athens All Half
the Way. The halfway point greeted the group of beat morning riders with
a SAG car complete with a change of cloths, food, water, pizza and a
resupply of other necessary beverages. After ridding the last half of the
ride I was kind of happy I did not start with the early crew....Everyone was
DESTROYED near the end of the 40+ mile ride.
All said and done 29 riders participated
in this gruel fest and 17 completed the ride in it's entirety (major props).
We all decided that this will again become an annual event but maybe it
should not take place during the dead heat of summer..... To be continued in
Fall or Spring 2015.... Not summer!
Necessary Beverages!
"Ballers Hill"
