Day 65 – Last Mountains of the Journey

By Mark Heggestad
What a day!  This evening I feel exhausted.  A good kind of exhausted.  Like can’t wait to get some rest exhausted.  Today’s bike ride was 73.2 miles, from a spot southwest of Vesuvius, VA to Charlottesville, VA.

I mentioned in yesterday’s blog that bikers coming from the east have been telling me that biking the Blue Ridge Mountains (specifically the area I biked today) would be the biggest challenge of the journey.  I didn’t necessarily believe the stories.  I just biked most of the major mountain ranges of the U.S. and the highest mountain I bike in the Blue Ridge Mountains is only 3,400 feet high.  How bad can it be?  I’m ready.  The first seven or eight miles today were relatively easy.  Then the real climbing began.  Within the next four miles I climbed over 2,000 feet.  I have climbed more than that on this journey.  Many times.  But not at such a consistently steep grade.  Throughout most of that first climb today the grade was between 9% and 13%.  I stopped a few times, and by the time I got to the top my energy was zapped.  I did not fully recover the rest of the day.

But the climb came with high reward.  I spent the next 27 miles biking the Blue Ridge Parkway – a road that is along the ridge crestline and often parallels the Appalachian Trail.  The vistas are amazing.  It took me a long time to bike those 27 miles, partly because I was exhausted and partly because I was stopping to take pictures often.   I went on to continue climbing up and down hills the rest of the day, eventually climbing a total elevation of 6,224 feet before the day was over.

Did I mention I’m exhausted?

The Blue Ridge Mountains are distinct because they really do have a blue hue to them.  And the views I was blessed with allowed me to see many layers of mountains, one behind the other.






Some of the roads biked today.




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