Smith Mountain

By Sunday, July 23 I had gained just over half of the elevation required to unlock Le Col’s 8848 challenge jersey. I took the week off from work for a family vacation at Smith Mountain Lake in Virginia and I needed to haul myself up 15,000 more feet. My dad, always up for a cycling related challenge, helped plan this route Sunday night to ride on Monday morning to kick off a week of elevation catch-up.

The Planning

The main goal of planning this route was to acquire as much elevation as possible around our rental home at Smith Mountain Lake. Ideally, with a lot of gravel. Unfortunately, the area surrounding the southernmost part of Smith Mountain Lake does not contain a lot of gravel roads, nor does it contain many large hills or mountains. The lake’s namesake, Smith Mountain is an exception to that, but the only way to add the mountain to a route is to make it an out-and-back because there is no path to descend on the far-side of the mountain. An out-and-back route takes away some of the adventure to a route as you are wasting limited time and energy treading over terrain and scenery you’ve already experienced. However, the primary goal of this ride was acquiring elevation, so we opted to keep the out-and-back in our ride, with a glimmer of hope of descending down an unnamed road that neither gravelmap.com nor ridewithgps.com considered an option. From there, we’d continue towards the dam of the Roanoke River and gain some more elevation up another gnarly mountain onto a gravel loop then back down toward home.

The Ride

Smith Mountain Lake seems to be a very popular vacation spot for Virginians, as such, you would think Smith Mountain would be a popular and scenic hike overlooking the lake. You would be wrong. The road up the mountain is primarily an access road to two fenced off radio or cell phone tower stations. The tree cover is dense on either side of the road, depriving you of any notable view of the lake. If you are looking for a challenge in climbing, rather than a view, Smith Mountain can offer you that.

Upon passing the gate to Smith Mountain, we noticed an abundance of crushed stone, which we quickly found was kryptonite to our ill-equipped gravel bikes with 35mm and 38mm Panasonic Gravelking tires. To make it worse, the crushed stone was only poured on the steepest sections of the road. More often than not, we found ourselves walking up these sections as they veered around sharp turns, back into shallower grades which were composed of the original rocks and dirt of the mountain; smaller rocks with the occasional loose baseball to softball sized stone lying around. These grades were still steep, sometimes creeping over 10%, but because our tires weren’t constantly slipping out on crushed stone, we were able to climb these sections with relative ease. With each passing crushed stone section, we began dreading the descent. Burning forearms clutching our mechanical brake levers to avoid careening into a tree or down the side of the mountain. We were confident the only rescue vehicle that could come for us would be an ATV and it would not be a luxurious ride for a maimed cyclist back to the bottom of the mountain.

After the final push through crushed stone, we crested the main climb and found ourselves on the ridge of the mountain. With the lack of overlooks, we continued on climbing and descending the saw teeth of the ridge until we arrived at the radio station on the eastern most part of the ridge. I found this part to be most enjoyable, the crushed stone was behind us and the terrain on the descents was very manageable with the exception of the ravines that were carved out of the road by rain. On a few occasions I had to do a small bunny hop over a ravine or at least brace myself for the jolt. The descents were straight and quickly followed by a climb so there was little worry about gaining too much speed and having to make a tight turn.

After turning around at the top, we decided to investigate what looked to be an alternate route down the mountain that we noticed when planning the route. It didn’t connect directly to the ridge line, but it appeared to be only a few hundred feet away. I pulled out my phone and loaded up the map and saw we were close and we started bushwhacking toward this “road”.

What we found was a path that was definitely cleared at one point, but it had long since been maintained by anyone. Pine saplings filled the trail, leaves had built up where the rain had washed out the dirt underneath, and loose rocks the size of your fist littered the ground. We made an honest attempt to ride down with one foot out of the clips and our hands hugging the brakes, but we’d have to hop off for a downed tree, or too many upright trees in our way.

It was just under two miles down the hill, but it took us close to 40 minutes to walk, slide, and ride our way down (despite what the Ride With GPS says in the screenshot below, Strava has that section of the ride coming in at 35-40 minutes). Even though this part of the route was entirely walking and scraping my jersey against trees and catching cobwebs to the face, I preferred this to backtracking down the eight mile stretch of crushed stone and sharp turns which almost certainly would have required dismounting. Eventually, the conditions of the road improved to the point that we were able to ride back to the main road and we continued on our planned route.

The farm roads around Pittsylvania County, VA make for great riding, even if they aren’t gravel. We had sliced some mileage and elevation off our route by coming down the side of the mountain and now we were heading toward the Smith Mountain Lake Dam to hit another monstrous climb with grades well over 10%. At this point, we have had a forty minute break from actual riding, so a climb didn’t seem so bad. In order to get to the climb, we had to enter the road to the Smith Mountain Lake Dam. That road was preceded by a small park with a pond and picnic tables. Unlike the radio station at the top of mountain, this place looked pleasant to stop and hangout. If we weren’t already so behind on our route, we might’ve used this spot as a snack break. But we had to keep going, so we crossed the bridge heading toward the dam visitors center and our Garmins switched to their climbing screen. We were looking at an average gradient of over 10% and that wasn’t even the hard part of the climb. There was an even steeper upcoming gravel section. That section turned out to be the knockout blow to the completion of the route. Not only did the climb look devastating, but in front of the gravel was a “No Trespassing Sign”. We may not be above a little trespassing to get a good ride in, we had no idea how long we would be on roads we weren’t supposed to be on since that section is a loop back down through the dam road.

Defeated by a sign and perhaps the threat of a large climb, we turned around started heading back to home base. There were still a few decent gravel sections on the way back through rural homes with some loose dogs, but the ride ended on a bit of whimper with the failed completion of the route.

Dog Encounters

One encounter with three dogs, all very aggressive, but fortunately they were all dachshund sized and they only went after my dad and not me. The rocketed after my dad at top speed as we were coming off a descent past their house, but lost steam by the time I caught up to them and passed.

Ride Information

Ride Distance: 25.72 Miles
Ride Time: 3:12:46
Tire Size: 38mm (me) and 35mm (my dad) Gravelkings

The Verdict

I would not choose to do this ride again. The terrain of the climb up Smith Mountain put it beyond our abilities on the bikes and tires we brought. Maybe if I had 2″+ tires I would do try that part of the ride again. The gravel roads and ridge line of the mountain were the highlights of the ride for me, and even then they are unremarkable compared to other similar rides I have done. I don’t know if the gate past the dam bridge is ever open for riding, but I would also need to route that elsewhere. I also got a couple ticks on me from walking down the side of the mountain.