Day one-Florida to Dahlonega, Georgia

On 09/12/09 I went to Bull Mountain trail, which is located in northern Georgia (Dahlonega). This trail system consists of a doubletrack fire road that loops for 13 miles along some varying terrain. There are a bunch of offshoot singletracks that run off the main trail. A lot of the singletrack was fast and flowed well, and had some technical rocky sections and some quad-burning uphills.


The only issue was the poorly marked trail cards, and the lack of maps in the information kiosk at the trailhead. I ended up taking my GPS, which I thought was sufficient. I started at the Bull Mountain trailhead parking lot and wound my way counter-clockwise up the fire road. This was kind of boring- not much scenery, and nothing major in the way of downhills. I decided to turn around after a mile and work the trail clockwise, and it provided some better distractions. There were a lot of nice trails off the main trail that weaved through dense forest. There were a little section of fast whoops where you could do some jumping, and there were a few sloping downhills that really got the heart going.
For the most part, the trail was fun, but the lack of a decent map and trail markers turned a 2 hour ride into a 3 hour.
What was worse, is after getting lost I finally emerged back on the fire road....but at the FAR end of the trail, and easily 5 miles back to the trailhead via a steep climbs and short downhills. Thank goodness there was a trail worker truck heading my way. I hitched a ride with them in the bed of the F250 and they took me back to the trailhead- I tipped them $20 and thanked them for cutting a good hour out of my return trip- great guys.
They informed me they are in the process of changing all the signs on the trails and making it more user-friendly. They gave me two maps- one with trail NAMES and the other with trail NUMBERS. You technically needed to use two maps to match up the names and the numbers at this point. They told me I was riding "during the transition"...once the signs are changed, one map with trail numbers is all you need to know exactly where you are. They said this job should be done by the end of the month.