I’m not saying that any cliches about the South are true. But I’m in the woods with hundreds of people, we’re all holding beers in foam koozies, and we’re screaming at people putting themselves in mortal danger.
Welcome to MTB life, Knoxville-style.
It’s day two of FallFest, the annual mountain bike jamboree that celebrates and helps fund the huge, mostly volunteer-run Appalachian Mountain Bike Club, and I’m at the WhipOff competition.
Remember when you were a kid, and you and your pals used to ride jumps in the woods, and yell, and it was all a bit sketchy? This is basically that, except the jump’s 20ft high, there are about 500 people here, and the skills on display are a few pay grades above your average 10-year-old on a cheap BMX. It’s carnage, in the best possible way.
The event begins – begins – with the under 14s, several of whom are under 14-years-old by quite a lot. Tiny children fly off this thing like jets off an aircraft carrier, and pull some serious steeze while they do it. And it keeps coming. Amazing female riders, dirt jump groms, full-suss riders in maximum protection. And one lunatic in just his dungarees and no shoes. It finishes with local legend Shaggy, holding a cowbell on a stick, so that riders can try and hit it with their back wheels. It’s awesome.
Start Your Week at Baker Creek
I had a lot of options for this U.S. riding trip. If I’m being honest, Knoxville wasn’t on my radar at first. But a trusted U.S. friend, who’s a lifelong rider, trail builder and photographer, insisted I come here. Great trails, great scene, great people. He’s right.
Knoxville might not be up with Moab or Sedona in terms of international mountain bike fame, but if anywhere in the UK had three separate pump tracks, multiple MTB skills lines, two world-class downhill trails a 5-minute climb from the car park, a brewery, a bike shop and great burger joint, all less than 20 minutes from town, we’d be swarming the place like a Viking horde.
This is Baker Creek, the jewel in the crown of the Appalachian Mountain Bike Club, and at 11.00 am on a Wednesday, it’s jumping. Literally.
A variety of children, from toddlers on balance bikes to groms in full-face, are hitting the jump parks with glee. The parking lot is packed, and Ethan from Rocky Mountain is waiting for me with a smile and a bike. I’m being loaned an Instinct C70 from their demo fleet for the week, and it’s a lovely thing – 29er, large, with a Fox 36 150mm upfront, Float X Performance 140mm in the middle, Maxxis Minion boots and a RaceFace dropper. Plus it means I don’t have to take my own bike apart, haul it through Heathrow like a man on holiday with a piano, then pray it isn’t hurled down the stairs by baggage handlers.
Flight School
On our first descent of the excellent Barn Burner trail, we bump into locals Caroline and Chrisonthy, who insist we join them sessioning the jumps. Despite the fact that Caroline is wearing a knee brace after two years out due to injury, and Chrisonthy is about 5-foot-nothing, they both proceed to hand me my ass – soaring over big tables, flying off steep lips, roosting out of corners and forcing me to up my game, lest word gets out that the stupid Limey can’t even, you know, jump. I follow Caroline’s lead as closely as I can over multiple hits of the lower section, and get about 50% better at jumping in five minutes flat. It’s always inspiring to ride with people who are better than you, even more so when they welcome you like family. Thanks folks – I always need the help.
Rock Roulette
Full disclosure — we’re not at the uplift bike park of Windrock, which, as just a few seconds of YouTube searching will confirm, consists of steep, fast, enormous jumps that this self-employed 48-year-old man is never going to attempt. We opt for the ‘XC’ trails, which turn out to only have that name because you have to pedal up. The cross-country suitability ends right there — by all means try these in full lycra with no travel and your saddle up, but I’m not coming with you.
After a short, embarrassingly wheezy climb up from the trailhead, it’s hidden rock roulette time! This game involves ploughing down steep, rutted trails with narrow chutes that are filled with big rocks, roots and loose dirt, and covered in a deep layer of crisp autumn leaves that hides all of the above. Will your front wheel stop dead and throw you 100 ft down the gorge? Will all traction disappear like a magician’s ace just as you put all your weight into the turn? Will you jump a couple of feet, only to discover the ground’s a full foot further down than you thought? Step right up.
These trails are rough, rowdy and really, really good fun. There’s rock jumps, step-ups, slabs, tight switchbacks and drifty dirt all over the place, and it’s just a short lung-buster of a climb back up to hit them again, or take another option down. And even though we’re deep into the woods, with rolling hills and forests as far as the eye can see, this place is just 40 minutes from downtown Knoxville, so after riding all morning, we can still get back to town, eat some lunch and head off somewhere else.
Sharp’s Ridge, Knight Fall trail
We’re just a few miles north of the city, in a quiet rural backstreet — trucks and kids toys in the yards, basketball hoops above the garages, a high school — but I’m assured by Leslie that Sharp’s Ridge is one of the hidden gems of Knoxville riding — the place the locals come when the justifiably popular Baker Creek trails get a bit too busy.
You’ve got to hand it to the local trailbuilders — they really know what they’re doing. Each of these steep, rockslab berms on Knight Fall is a thing of joy to ride. The grip is incredible, so you can hit them at trail speed and feel totally secure, at angles that don’t feel real, and there’s no braking bumps or loose dirt to slip about on. They’ve taken every chance they can to get your wheel off the ground too — little rock kickers, tabletops and doubles are crammed in everywhere. My favorite thing is that it doesn’t feel too groomed — all that work, all that calculation, and you still feel like you’re on the ground, not a strip of asphalt or an overly tidied trail. We don’t get too long to hang out at Sharp’s Ridge as we’ve places to go, but if this was the only rideable trail in my own backyard, I could hit it every day and be happy. Or even happier, if I could clear some of those bigger jumps at the bottom.
Paint Mountain trail
A man dressed in a Dr. Seuss hat, stripy clown shorts and a string vest has just walked past with five puppies, tripping out of his mind.
I guess the beauty and isolation of the Cherokee National Forest just brings out the spirit of freedom. Works on me, anyway. It is absolutely, stunningly, breath-takingly beautiful out here. We’re just inside the Tennessee state line, looking out over the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, with layer upon layer of forested ridges painted over the horizon. This is what the locals call the Paint Forest trail, and it’s a proper big MTB day out. Thousands of feet of climbing, all-natural trails that zigzag their way down the gullies and valleys, and very little sign of shovel or digger on any of it.
The climb is brutal, right from the get-go. It doesn’t help that my nutrition plan for today is one coffee, half a sausage biscuit from local fast food chain Bojangles, and a handful of cold tater tots, which sits in my stomach like a fallen tree. Leslie’s gone ahead to capture some shots of me climbing, and if any of them feature in this article, we’re not going to be friends anymore.
But it’s so very worth it. The Cherokee National Forest looks like something from a fairytale — hills carpeted with dense autumnal trees, the trail deep in crisp fallen leaves, and rays of golden sunshine dancing among the branches. And it’s not just a scenic ride — as soon as the elevation starts to drop, we’re into fast, loose singletrack that weaves tightly between the tree trunks, out onto the exposed hillside and back. This is the kind of riding I love. The trail’s hard to see, there’s not a manufactured feature anywhere, and no telling whether the next 50 feet will be up, down, left, right or sideways. The leaves fly in all directions, I have more than one moment of teetering right on the edge, hundreds of feet above a steep plunge into the river, and if we didn’t have to stop every now and then to get photographs, it feels like we could just keep riding all day long.
Not long enough
What a warm welcome. On the basis of nothing more than a recommendation from a mutual friend and a rushed video call, I’ve been personally shown around the very best of Knoxville’s riding spots, introduced to as many locals as possible, ridden six days in a row on an amazing variety of terrain, and end my week throwing down delicious local IPAs and scarfing my bodyweight in Sweet Pete’s excellent BBQ, while hearing tales of the trails from some of the people responsible for making this place a truly great place to ride your bike.
Thanks Knoxville. I enjoyed every single second.
Author’s note: Thanks to Rocky Mountain Bikes, the AMBC crew and Visit Knoxville for their help with this trip.
