Snowy Side of the Mountain - A Mixed Surface Metric
By Andy
It all started when Great Eskape teammate Jeremy suggested we ride to Brunswick and back on the C&O canal in preparation for the Croatan Buck Fifty. I love the canal tow path for bike camping, coffee outings, and general chill riding, but I hate the mind sapping slog of hammering out big miles on it. It’s basically the indoor trainer equivalent for dirtbags like us. Sure, we will do it to help make us faster, but there is no joy in it. A group of us went hunting for gravel roads last week, and this week four of us went back to close the loop.
So my challenge was to find a good gravel cycling route that started on the Maryland side of the Potomac and didn’t involve an endless slog down the C&O canal. After a second (somewhat snowy!) weekend of scouting gravel roads in Montgomery, Frederick, and Loudoun Counties we’re pleased to say we have a metric century route that incorporates a good amount of great gravel roads, beautiful country lanes, some epic views, challenging climbs, and some awesome historic towns and structures. We’re mostly just excited to have a route we can use to scratch that gravel itch that is closer to home than the routes all the way out in Leesburg, as well as something just a little bit different.
While we are satisfied with this route, satisfaction is the death of desire and we are also working on a century and double metric route starting even closer to DC. Hope you enjoy. Full route collection coming soon.
