Summer Camp

Between riding my bicycle, taking a roping lesson at a ranch, and kayaking on the Coosawattee River, this past weekend was like summer camp – for adults!  I learned some more history, too, a fitting way to wrap up a July full of historical bicycle rides.

State TT Championship

Our weekend of adventure started with the state time trial championship on Saturday morning.  I’ve been doing weekly interval training sessions since the beginning of May to prepare for several TTs this summer, but my biggest focus has been the state championship.  At 22 miles, it’s also the longest TT of the year.  Fortunately, I’m familiar with the rolling course because it’s the same one that’s been used for the two previous years’ state TTs.

I’m a Cat 4 and will be forever.  That’s because I gave up mass-start races after my serious crash several years ago, and only mass-start races count toward category upgrades.  However, in TTs you can race in a lower cat because it doesn’t pose any risk like mixing cats in a road race or crit would.  I’ve been racing long enough that I’d rather give newer, less experienced women a shot at the Cat 4 TT title.  Therefore, I registered for the Cat 3 TT championship race.

It was so nice to have Robert with me as soigneur.  He got my TT bike set up on the trainer while I checked in, and he pinned my number onto my back.  I warmed up and did my usual mental preparation, trying not to let myself get too worked up.  As I waited at the start line, I admonished myself in the typical fashion: “No barfy!”  I smiled as I remembered Cosmo, my beloved greyhound who passed away about a year ago.  He always had a sensitive stomach.  When he got a green look on his face, I would say, “No barfy, Cosmo!” which actually seemed to work.

Cosmo had already been on my mind that morning anyway.  As Robert drove us to the race site, I checked Facebook and saw a post from Nellie Doodles, a greyhound artist that I enjoy following.  She whimsically asked if anyone calls their dog by names other than their given names.  Well, of course!  I have multiple nicknames for all who are closest to me, husband and dogs.  Cosmo had some of the best nicknames, e.g., Cosmo Conehead, Cosmola, Cosmosis, Barfy Boy, Cosmo Klepto, and Poultry Hound.

After I started my race, I realized that my power meter wasn’t working.  D’oh!  The night before, Robert had moved it from my road bike to my TT bike.  I had tried to calibrate it in the parking lot, but there were other power meters nearby that interfered as I was trying to synch my power meter with my Garmin.  So, as at the previous weekend’s TT, I had to do the race based on speed and perceived exertion.  That’s where Cosmo helped me.

The race was near Gainesville, Georgia’s poultry capital.  A mile or so into the race, I started smelling chicken houses.  I imagined that Cosmo, a.k.a. Poultry Hound, was running beside me, pacing me.  I analyzed each road segment as I came to it.  If it was a hill, I powered up it because climbing is my strong suit.  If it was a descent or flat, I pedaled hard.  I talked to Cosmo: “Come on, Cosmo, help me go faster!  Get me to the end, Cosmo!”

One of my competitors, Christine, passed me before the turnaround.  I knew going in that she would be hard to beat, and so I focused on my other goals: breaking one hour and getting on the podium.  Thanks to Cosmo, I reached both goals!  My time was 59:20, and I placed 3^rd.  I was very satisfied with my performance.  I did the best I could, even going 9 seconds faster than last year.  Christine won, finishing two minutes ahead of me, and Loren placed 2^nd, finishing one minute ahead of me.  Although I’d rather be at the top of the podium, if I’m going to get beaten, I’m glad when it’s not close because that makes me second guess myself.

By the way, Cosmo got the nickname Poultry Hound because he went nuts over chicken and turkey.  Not surprisingly, his favorite holiday was Thanksgiving.  I always brine our turkey for a couple of days ahead of time.  One year I had placed the turkey in the brine and was carrying it out to a cooler full of ice in the garage.  I was gone from the kitchen for 30 seconds max.  When I returned, I saw a telltale trail of giblet juice leading all the way down the basement steps.  In those few brief moments, Cosmo had climbed up into the kitchen sink and absconded with the bag of giblets!  Good thing I had already planned to mop the floor.

Seventy-four Ranch

With the hardest part of the weekend over, I was looking forward to playing for the rest of it!  After a tasty lunch stop at Mellow Mushroom in Gainesville, we headed west over the increasingly mountainous roads.  I thought of the moonshine runners who used to race through these hills, giving rise to stock car racing.  Robert and I stopped at a convenience store in Dawsonville, home of legendary NASCAR driver Bill Elliott.  I rarely use the word “awesome” because it is so overused, but it is completely appropriate when referring to Awesome Bill from Dawsonville.

A short while later we arrived at our destination, a bed & breakfast near Jasper called Seventy-four Ranch.  It’s a working ranch owned by Pam and Larry Butler.  Robert and I first spent a little time relaxing in Seventy-four Ranch’s comfortable and attractive accommodations.  We stayed in the Porch Cabin, a lovely room built into an old barn and decorated with cowboy and Navajo items.  Robert read inside while I checked out the swing in the outdoor seating area:

 

I’m convinced that we get old when we quit doing stuff that was fun when we were kids, like riding bicycles and swinging on swings.  I even had a scrape on my shin like a little kid.  Earlier that morning, I had to TT before the TT but didn’t want to wait in line at the port-o-potty.  So, I went over to the trees.  Unfortunately, being the klutz that I am, I sort of fell off of a cliff in the process.

After swinging, I read for a little while in an Adirondack chair.  I started a new book appropriate to the weekend, The Southeastern Indians by Charles Hudson.  A few months ago I stopped by the visitor center at the Ocmulgee National Monument in Macon and picked up this excellent historical overview of aboriginal Southerners (what a great term the author uses!).  I have been wanting to learn more about Native Americans, particularly the Creeks who lived in my part of the state.

Next, it was time for some Western style fun.  Originally, I had hoped that Robert and I could go horseback riding that afternoon.  That didn’t work out, though, because the trail guide had been given the day off for her birthday, and they don’t want to send the horses out in the heat of a summer day anyway.  Instead, I signed us up for roping!  Larry gave us a lesson.  He had several ropes.  I picked one up and was glad to see that it already had a knot in it:

Larry said that the knot is called a honda, and the more experienced you are, the looser you like your honda.  This one looked pretty loose, and because I had never tried roping before, I selected a different rope with a tighter honda.

The first thing you have to do is make loop, which is an art in itself.  Larry made our loops for us, using two to three coils of rope.  He had us focus on the throwing: moving your arm from “ear to steer” with an overhand motion, targeting the right horn (if you’re right handed), throwing rather than placing the rope, and not pulling back with your left hand because that’s where you hold your horse’s reins.  (We simply stood in a wide stance to simulate being on horseback.)  I actually did better than I expected!  It was fun to learn about this totally unfamiliar activity and gain appreciation for the skill that roping requires.

Cowboy Robert

Robert and I discussed some of the physics of roping.  Standing on the ground, it’s not too difficult to throw the rope at about 15 mph to catch the dummy steer.  However, if you’re riding on a horse at 35 mph to catch a steer running at 30 mph, you still have to throw the rope about 15 mph faster than you are moving, i.e. about 50 mph.  At this speed, air resistance is much more of a factor, requiring significant arm strength.  For this reason, men are generally better than women at roping on horseback.

When we went back to our room, I noticed a cute cowboy figurine made out of horseshoes.  Larry would be proud of me for recognizing that the cowboy’s hand above his head is incorrect technique.

It's ear to steer, dagnabbit!

For dinner we went to 61 Main, a farm-to-table restaurant in downtown Jasper.  A waiter a few tables over described the fish special, wreckfish, which I had never heard of.  He said they got it from the coast near Charleston.  It likes to hang around shipwrecks (hence the name) and is a rather meaty fish.  I had already ordered the wreckfish, but when I had asked my waiter about it, all he could tell me is, “Uh, yeah, that’s the name.”  (By the way, it was really good.)

Robert and I got back to Seventy-four Ranch in time for a walk before sundown.

Magnolia fruit after the beautiful, fragrant blossoms a few months ago

We walked through the pasture to a low area by a gate.  Larry had told us that their property extends to a creek, but we didn’t see it.  Robert pulled up a tax map on his phone (technology is amazing, isn’t it?) and saw that the property extends a good distance farther than where we were.  I wish we had had time to walk all the way to the creek.

After a good night’s sleep, we got up early for our next adventure.  As we savored a delicious waffle breakfast cooked by Pam, Larry regaled us with fascinating stories of the West.  In addition to Seventy-four Ranch in Georgia, Pam and Larry own Willow Creek Ranch in Wyoming.  It’s in an area distinguished by a high cliff, or wall.  The only way into the valley is through the Hole-in-the-Wall, a narrow passage.  Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid used this easily defendable area as their hideout.  Larry described how the combination of geography, remoteness, climate, Mormonism, and other factors shaped a unique history here and elsewhere in the West.  Although I don’t know much about this region’s history, Larry definitely piqued my interest.

One other noteworthy topic is branding.  The Seventy-four brand is visible throughout the ranch, as on this outdoor chair:

Pam and Larry showed us their Seventy-four Ranch branding iron.  They purchased it from an elderly woman whose family had owned it since the 1800s.  Brands generally stay within families, but fewer and fewer young people are interested in continuing the ranching tradition.  Additionally, when a ranching woman marries a ranching man, her cattle are rebranded with his symbol.  Therefore, the original owner of the Seventy-four brand was willing to sell it.  Pam and Larry have to reregister it every year with a national board that keeps up with brands.  Every brand is unique.  Larry said that open letters and symbols are needed for brands.  For example, an open capital J is a good brand letter, but a closed capital B is not a good brand letter.  That’s because a closed symbol causes the animal’s skin within it to slough off.  The Seventy-four brand is marked using a single branding iron, which indicates how old it is.  As more and more unique brands had to be developed over time, ranchers started having to use two and then three different branding irons to create their unique brands.

Larry also showed us a running iron, a particularly interesting artifact.  A running iron has a single bar, which cattle rustlers would use to alter a brand, say, turning a V into an N.  In the Old West, anyone caught with a running iron was hanged on the spot because no one but a cattle rustler would have need for one.  The judge was usually hundreds of miles away in the sparsely populated area.  The judge was going to sentence the rustler to hanging anyway based on the irrefutable evidence.  Since no one wanted to feed and house the rustler for several weeks until they could get to the judge, it was simpler to hang the rustler then and there.

We bid a fond farewell to Seventy-four Ranch and headed west.

Paddle to Farm

For several months I had been looking forward to Paddle to Farm, 10 miles of paddling with a farm-to-table lunch along the way.  Additionally, it was on the Coosawattee River, which I had never heard of!  I enjoyed looking at maps and discovering that it joins the Conasauga River to form the Oostanaula River.  I did already know that the Oostanaula and Etowah flow together in Rome to form the Coosa River.  Such interesting geography and Native American names!

Side note: Although people associate Deliverance with the Chattooga River in Rabun County because the movie was filmed there, author James Dickey first got the idea for the book from a canoe trip that he and some friends from Atlanta took on the Coosawattee River just before Carters Lake was built on it.  Dickey and his buddies came upon some moonshiners who were less than welcoming.  Dickey embellished the incident to turn it into one of the most famous love scenes in movie history.  (Thank you, Frank Crane, for this bit of history!)

About 100 people gathered for Paddle to Farm at the dam at Reregulation Reservoir, which is just downstream of Carters Lake.

The starting point of our paddling trip lay at the junction of two of Georgia’s physiographic regions, the Blue Ridge and the Ridge and Valley regions.  The Blue Ridge region consists primarily of metamorphic and igneous rock while the Ridge and Valley region contains mostly sedimentary rock.  Their nexus in the area around the Coosawattee formed a fertile agricultural area for Native Americans.  In fact, the capital of the province of Coosa, a very large and powerful chiefdom, was located here.  Hernando DeSoto and other European explorers spent significant time with the Coosa.  Interestingly, these natives were not Cherokees, who are typically associated with North Georgia, but descendants of the Creeks.  When diseases brought by the Europeans decimated the original Coosa inhabitants, the Cherokees moved into the land.  The Cherokees named it “Coosawattee,” which means “old place of the Coosa.”

After taking care of the preliminary logistics, at last we were able to get out on the water.  The Coosawattee River is noticeably smaller than the Ocmulgee, the river close to my home that I’m quite familiar with.  It was also a new experience to paddle in a group; it was like a boat peloton.  In fact, many times we had to paddle single file due to obstacles.  That just made it interesting, though:

As always, being in my kayak on the water was completely relaxing.  The summer sun felt so good, and if I got a little too warm, all I had to do was splash some water on my arms and legs.  I had envisioned our paddling excursion to be a somewhat athletic event, but Robert and I found that mostly we just had to steer ourselves as the current carried us downstream.  We weren’t supposed to get ahead of the group leader, so we simply lay back and enjoyed the ride.

We were approaching our lunch stop.  We heard music – not banjo music (whew!) but Eye of the Tiger by Survivor.  It was coming from some guy’s small fishing boat.  As surprised as we were to hear music in this semi-wilderness area, he was probably just as surprised to look up and see 50+ kayaks and canoes headed toward him!

Our group pulled our boats out of the water at Riverview Farm, the largest certified organic farm in Georgia.  Owners Wes and Charlotte Swancy grow vegetables, pork, and beef on over 200 acres and sell directly to the public through farmer’s markets and restaurants, primarily in the Atlanta area.  Rango the Vizsla dog greeted us and led us around a large soybean field to our lunch spot.

Bumblebee on soybean flower

We enjoyed a delicious lunch that included pulled pork and potatoes from Riverview Farm and several salads made from locally sourced vegetables.  We also heard brief presentations from Gwyneth Moody of the Georgia River Network (the only statewide organization for Georgia’s rivers), Joe Cook of the Coosa River Basin Initiative, Michael Wall of Georgia Organics, and author Suzanne Welander, who wrote Canoeing and Kayaking in Georgia.  (More on that below!)

We got back on the river for the second half of our jaunt.  At this point we were definitely in the ridge and valley area, as indicated by these interesting, folded sedimentary rocks, typical of the region:

As we approached our takeout spot, I savored the remaining moments on the river.  These tree roots reminded me of Cthulhu:

We got goodie bags at the end.   The best item in it was a copy of Canoeing and Kayaking in Georgia!  Suzanne was even kind enough to autograph it for us back on shore.  As Robert drove us home, I had a good time familiarizing myself with the book.  Suzanne and her collaborators have mapped nearly every body of water in Georgia that can be paddled, from the whitewater rivers of northeast Georgia to the quiet, black waters in and around the Okefenokee.  The book categorizes paddle segments by physiographic region and level of difficulty, even giving distances between successive access points – what a great resource!  Robert and I particularly enjoyed getting more information about some of the creeks and rivers we like to paddle near our home.  It shows the navigable section of Murder Creek in Putnam County between Glenwood Springs Road and Georgia Highway 44, which we kayaked several years ago.  Also, we were glad to learn additional access points on the Ocmulgee River as well as some other creeks that we need to try.  Looks like some more kayak outings are in our future!