Headstrong Invades Issaqueena

The beautiful colors of the changing leaves always signal the end of the road racing season and the start of one of my favorite times of the year. Fall is here and there is no better way to enjoy the season than to hit the mountains.

Mountain biking is one of my all-time favorite pastimes, especially when Mother Nature kills all the bugs and poison ivy in the woods. Many Team Headstrong members enjoy a good dirt fest as well, so we all loaded up last Sunday and headed for the Issaqueena trail system in Clemson. Local resident Emily agreed to be our tour guide for the day so we wouldn’t get lost in the many miles of trails available. It was a fantastic day of riding.

Our group was about as mixed as you could get. Brandon showed us that he only needed one gear to blaze a trail on his tricked out 29er singlespeed. Ray, Brian, Randall & Nicole had new 29ers as well, while Sam, Debbie, John, Emily and I were on our trusty 26ers. It really didn’t matter what you were riding when the pedals started turning. We regrouped often and sampled an enormous selection of trails in the forest. Even after a flat tire, a few summer-salts, 1 or 2 missed turns and a botched stream crossing, we were all loving getting dirty.

I hadn’t ridden at Issaqueena in several years and I was pleasantly surprised to see that people have done some decent trail maintenance on some of the routes. While exploring the course normally used for downhill racing, we found some really cool man-made terrain park obstacles to ride…or should I say view, since some of them were a little intimidating for the average rider. My rule is that if you see man-made stuff, look first and ride second, because there can be some pretty insane stuff to ride. That didn’t stop several Team Headstrong members from showing their bravery in the saddle on some of the manufactured bits.

I wish we had more photographic evidence of our MTB adventures. It’s always a catch 22 situation. You want to ride and have fun, but you also want to document the experience by stopping to take photos. We didn’t do any stopping for photos this day. There was too much fun to be had by all. Maybe next time we’ll take a few shots for you. On second thought, just get a mountain bike and join us on our next dirt adventure.