TUESDAY - DAY 3 – Brevard to Swannanoa (55.1 Miles)
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(Computer Was Not Working From The Day Before!)
An absolutely beautiful day.
We climed over 3,000 feet to the
Cradle of Forestry Overlook
near Mt Pisga on the Blue Ridge Parkway. This location is
just down the road from Mt Pisga which represents the hightest
point on the bicycle tour. That elevation is 4,954 feet. You
can see this reflected in this elevation profile of the ride.
The highest point on the Blue Ridge Parkway is actually 6,047 feet and occurs at Richland Balsam about 20 miles
south of Mt Pisga (Thanks to Dave Casey of Las Vegas NV for sending along this fact. In a previous version of this web page, I had mistakenly identified the Cradle of
Foresty Overlook as the hightest point on the parkway rather than the highest point on the ri).
On this day of the ride I was wearing my arm-skins and
my leg-skins all day. It was cold! The total climbs for the
first three days have exceeded 16,000 feet! Here are the daily
totals for the first few days of the ride. You can see that we
climbed over 20,000 feet in the course of the first five days.
Day ..... Climb .. Total I got a
picture of myself at looking glass falls.
The decent down the Blue Ridge
Parkway to Ashville was great. It was really cold near the top
but warmed up as the afternoon wore on. We went through lots of
tunnels. Two of them were so long you could not see the end once
you entered it. The last tunnel was like this and the biker in
front of me got disoriented, hit the gravel on the side of the
tunnel and went down. Neither she nor her bike were damaged and I
stopped and we walked together the rest of the way out of the
tunnel. I hit my al time top speed on a down hill (55mph - estimated). When
we go to the campground I had my back deralieur replaced by a new
one (very $$$). Aparently the rain of the previous day had washed all the lubricant out of the inside of the deralieur and a small bent place started sticking.
Day 1 ... 4804 ... 4,804
Day 2 ... 5250 .. 10,054
Day 3 ... 5170 .. 15,224
Day 4 ... 3440 .. 18,664
Day 5 ... 2360 .. 21,024
QUEUE SHEET for this ride.
MAP that goes with queue sheet.
MAP that goes with queue sheet.
TOPO MAP of the route.
