Beech Mountain, NC

This past weekend, my fiance and I stayed at a cabin on the slopes of
Beech Mountain, near Banner Elk, NC. On Saturday morning, we hopped
on our touring bikes and rode up to the top of the mountain. I was
really impressed with the setup there. At the Chamber of Commerce,
they had appropriately-sized, detailed, and accurate (to .01 mile) cue
sheet books including 5 routes, and all of the bike routes actually
had signs on the roads. The hills on the routes were pretty hard
(Beech Mountain was used as a mountain-top finish in the Tour duPont),
but we quite an enjoyable time. The vistas were pretty even though
the fall colors were gone from the area, and traffic was really light,
though we were there at about the slowest time of year.

http://www.bikebeechmountain.com/

The only potential problem we had with the trip was that the closest
bike shop is around 20 miles away in Boone. We forgot to swap out her
road cassette with an MTB one. She pushed through fine, but we did
avoid some of the steeper climbs. A cursory internet search made it
look like "Beech Mountain Sports" carries bike stuff, but they
apparently stopped doing that a couple of years ago and are now
exclusively ski/snowboard in terms of their sporting equipment.

If you're looking for a nice weekend bike ride in warmer months, I
heartily recommend it. We got pretty lucky with the weather: we did
the ride on Saturday (mostly sunny, high temp in the upper 50's), and
it started raining in the late afternoon after we got back to the
cabin. By Sunday morning, it was snowing fairly hard (predicted high
of 33), and there was already a couple inches of accumulation by the
time we left in late morning.

-alan

--
Alan Hoyle - - http://www.alanhoyle.com/
"I don't want the world, I just want your half." -TMBG
Get Horizontal, Play Ultimate.