The best adventures come from the ridiculous ideas of friends. The next time a friend says ‘hey, you want to go do something’ that sounds crazy, say yes.
Four years ago, that happened to me, and I did Singletrack Samurai’s Tally Tango route with my friend Jenn. Three weeks before Thanksgiving this year I got that call again, and immediately said yes. I had no idea what I was in for the first time, and I was looking forward to having that same experience again. I did.
We started Friday morning at first light, 6:30am and needed lights to navigate the 10 miles of single track that starts at Tom Brown Park. The sun was up by the time we crossed the first levee at the end of the single track. The changes in scenery and surface type is my favorite part of this route.
Somehow, I totally forgot about the swampy crossing of Saint Marks River at mile 12. The double track starts to sink into it and reappears about 40 yards later and is 4-5’ deep in spots. There is tree growth on the left and right, and we both went right last time, taking off shoes and socks and navigating stumps wading 3-4’ deep.
This time I saw a wide tree laying in the water with it’s surface exposed on the left side of the double track. It was about 3’ into the water and went about 20’ to a large standing tree, and it looked like there might be some small stumps sticking out of the water on the other side of that. I rolled the dice and tried to shoulder my 50-pound loaded bike and walk the downed tree. When I got to the upright tree, I did plan a path on the other side, but I had to move my bike 180 around the tree before I could go around it myself. I’m not sure how I did it, but I grabbed my bike behind my back and with my belly to the tree and rolled around to the other side of it. I did get wet ankle deep while crossing but wasted a lot of energy maneuvering the bike around trees and trying to balance at the same time.
Once we got to the Aucilla river it became clear that neither of us had figured out the reroute for the hurricane damage from Helene. In retrospect, I am glad that we chose to stick to the original route and stay along the river where I had my bear spray incident four years ago. Not only was it nostalgic, but I have come to have a lot more appreciation for the purity of this water and ecosystem. It has a very serene and calming energy about it. Unfortunately, the cost this time was having to navigate the trail through tons of downed trees and branches. We got most of the way down the trail before having to re-route, fighting our way through downed trees and branches, only being able to ride about 50 percent of the trail. Once we got off onto the sandy doubletrack leading to JR’s Aucilla store, the rain and the cold front that were expected to come in hit at the same time. Over the course of an hour it went from 64 to 45 and was a constant light rain for 2-3 hours.
JR’s is a little country store in the middle of nowhere, but heat and a bathroom made it the greatest place we had seen in a long time. The store attendant was sitting at a welcoming picnic table in the store, and looked just like Uncle Jesse. The first thing he asked us was ‘Y’all ride here from Tallahassee?’ He knew exactly what kind of fools just walked in. We sat and chatted with him while we warmed up. I told him my Dad told me to look for Skunk Ape in the Aucilla WMA, and asked him if he had seen any crazy stuff. He told me about the Bougainville Booger. Said one time, a long time ago, he and a buddy were hanging out at night and saw something about 4’ tall, that walked funny on goat legs, upright, with a human torso and had a head like a goat. He mentioned that to a fella a while later and he told him he had seen the Bougainville Booger.
He said he hadn’t seen any Skunk Ape down there but pointed to the counter and said he had seen a Swamp Monkey. Sure enough he had the head of one on display (see pics). He had some young guys making burgers in a shack next to the store. I don’t really eat red meat, but man that was the best cheeseburger I can remember.
I was having a hard time with the rain and the cold and made the call at JR’s to say screw putting up a hammock at 37 degrees in the dark. I knew there was a hotel at mile 90 on the route, and it was worth every penny to know that I was riding somewhere warm and was already more than halfway there. From JR’s we headed into Saint Marks WMA for a good long stretch of some of my favorite marshy wilderness. I made it through the first half of it before my legs were toast at mile 80. The route leaves the WMA there and picks up some nice, paved greenway that goes by a couple of stores before heading back into the last 10 miles of WMA before hitting the hotel. I looked at the route and saw that the greenway ran another 10 miles straight to the hotel. I let Jenn go stick to the route and gave it the rest I had to get to the hotel.
Saturday morning, I decided to ride solo. I wanted to leave when there was a little bit of light on the horizon. I learned doing the Scratch Ankle XL that started at midnight, waking up in the dark to ride wet sand in the rain is kind of my kryptonite. Plus, it was 39 degrees when I headed out at first light. Fortunately, the rain was gone, the sand was still hard from it and I knew that the sun would come up soon.
I had the last 10 miles of Saint Marks WMA ahead of me before a store stop in Sopchoppy that would be the last spot to get water for the next 60 miles. The sun came up in the middle of that beautiful estuary. It’s one of the most magical experiences to watch nature go from dark to daylight. For the rest of my ride, I survived by quieting my mind and looking at the untouched beauty around me.
The next 60 mile stretch from Sopchoppy that runs through Bradwell Bay Wilderness and Apalachicola National Forest and is all sand. Most of it was wet in the morning, and remembering what it felt like dry 4 years ago was motivation to keep it moving. There were a lot of hunters out, as in one truck per line of sight. The first one I rode by said ‘Mornin’, that lady on the bike went by about an hour ago and said to say hi.’ That was pretty cool.
By noon the sand was getting pretty soft, but I dredged through 20 more miles of it before getting to Freebird’s store at mile 155. I filled up bottles and was happy to leave the forest sand pits and get back into the flowy single track south of Tallahassee. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of climbing, and the guys that clip the shrubs from the trails edge haven’t been around, meaning the trail was 10” wide in spots with some really strong 4’ tall needle oak branches scraping your legs as you passed through. But after many miles of dry sandy forest roads, it was a much-needed mental distraction that I thoroughly enjoyed. I needed to be engaged, and that flowy single track is what got me through the rest of it.
By it I mean that I thought I was closer to the car than I was when I got off the single track. It got dark and it got cold, and I don’t like riding through the city. That last 12 miles was the hardest. I started the day in winter gear with lights, had lunch in the sand in my summer kit, and by the end I was back in the winter kit with lights and starting to shiver. I have never been so happy to see my car. If you’re reading this, I made it back alive, or who knows, I might be hallucinating in the sand somewhere.