Tim and I decided to spend the first half of our Memorial Day ridin in Roanoke at Carvins Cove. We hadn’t been to the cove in almost two years and it felt great to get back down there. We stocked up on water and protein gel and bars and hit the road.

Just the Right Gear wasn’t open so we weren’t able to get a parking pass. Tim wrote a letter and stuck it behind his windshield wiper letting the park rangers know that we weren’t able to get a pass but we did have the money. Roanoke really needs to rethink their park pass system at the cove. I take my 4 wheeler up to a trail on the Blue Ridge Parkway and they charge $5 to park and ride. But they have a drop box with envelopes and a tear away pass that you write your license plate number on and drop the $5 in and you are on your way. I don’t really think that people are going to shaft the park out of $2.

Tim brought his new 29er Monocog and I rode the Gary Fisher X-Calibur which is fitted with the SRAM X.O components that we got last year. After checking our tire pressure and lubing chains we hit the trails, without a trail map, oops.

There is a short road section before you actually hit the trails, after that you have quite a few choices of where to enter the single track, without a trial map we weren’t too aware of those choices. So we just road until we saw some single track from the firer road and entered there.

Tim decided to tackle this hill along the way.

The first section of single track that we hit had some good climbs right off the bat. We remembered this from the last time we road there, at first there is a lot of climbing after that it tames down quite a bit. The first section we road turned out to be one big loop. So we hit the fire road again looking for some more trails.

My favorite part about riding Carvins Cove is the scenery. You go from your typical woods to riding next to a lake to riding through a forest of evergreen trees. The terrain keeps things exciting also. There are quite a few log crossing and creek crossings that definitely make the ride more enjoyable and break things up a bit.

After riding the single track for a while we came out at the fire road and made a couple wrong left turns, this is where the trail map would have been very handy. We road the fire road for quite a while looking for single track to no avail. We finally came up on a guy fishing down by the lake and asked him where we were. Well, we were very close the boat landing, which is on the opposite side of the lake from where we should have been. So we asked how far back to the other parking lot and he said, “A good ride” with a chuckle. Tim and I both looked at each other with a that sucks look on our face and headed back toward the parking lot.

After riding for a few miles we came up on a fellow biker named Jose, we stopped and talked to him for a while. He told us about some other trails that would be good to ride the next time we made it down there, he also affirmed that we were heading the right way toward the parking lot.

The last few miles were pretty rough. It was pretty hot that day; we saw a bank sign that said 98 degrees. And we had been riding for much longer than we had planned on. Tim ran out of water quite a way from the end of the ride and got overheated. We did finally make it back to the car about an hour and a half later than scheduled. What did we learn? Umm… take a trail map.