People come here to ride those rock gardens. Not everyone summits Mount Everest. But they don't shave down the top. They don't put in an escalator.
DALTON, Ga. - Decked out in a red Spandex kit, bright orange helmet and a pair of sport sunglasses, Jeff Bartlett aggressively propelled his full suspension mountain bike through an appropriately termed "rock garden" Thursday morning on the Pinhoti Trail.
"The less you touch the ground, the easier a stretch like that is," he said a moment later, catching his breath after displaying advanced skill on one of the rockiest, most technical stretches of this multi-use trail beloved by many of the area's best mountain bikers.
Bartlett's command of this trail came the standard way: through days spent wiping out on it while chasing better riders and honing skills on easier trails.
But recently a faction of riders, unknown to leaders in the mountain biking community, has apparently decided to make the Pinhoti Trail more suitable to their ability. They've altered its iconic stretches by moving rocks - and even large boulders - into more easily traversed formations and, in the process, diluted the character of one of the area's toughest trails.
It's a breach of etiquette within a sport that continues to grow in popularity around the Chattanooga area, and an issue Bartlett raised in his May article for rootsrated.com titled, "Save the Pinhoti Trail - from Unauthorized Modifications."
"It's just someone who needs a little bit of education," said Shane Adams, owner of Bear Creek Bicycle Co. in Dalton. "They're just doing a good deed in their minds and don't understand the ramifications of what they're doing.
"People come here to ride those rock gardens. Not everyone summits Mount Everest. But they don't shave down the top. They don't put in an escalator."
The Pinhoti Trail is more than 330 miles long, stretching from the Cohutta Wilderness in North Georgia to Coosa County, Ala., southeast of Birmingham.
This particular 17-mile stretch runs northeast from near the meeting point of Walker, Whitfield and Gordon counties to the Dug Gap trailhead near Dalton. It's home to the Snake Creek Gap time trial races each winter and is included in the Trans North Georgia Adventure, an annual 350-mile bicycle race held in August.
Close to the point where the modifications occurred, rock breastworks established during the 1864 Battle of Dug Gap are still visible.
While the modified rock gardens have largely been returned to their original form, it's hard to know if the iconic stretches of this trail are riding exactly like they have historically.
And mountain bikers agree it is a vital portion of trail that needs to be protected, largely because it is one of only a few within a half-hour drive of Chattanooga that challenge even the best riders.
"I'd never ridden this clean going in this direction, but I came out here last month and I did," said Bartlett, who is the director of content marketing for Roots Rated. "But it's because this had been changed. The hardest stuff, the stuff I couldn't ride, well, I rode it, but it wasn't the hardest stuff anymore. So you're kind of robbed of that sense of accomplishment. I had been riding here for three or four years trying to get that, and now I'll never know."
Bartlett, Adams and officials from area chapters of the Southern Off-Road Bicycle Association agree that educating new mountain bikers can help.
Lee Carmichael, president of SORBA Chattanooga, said trails have been modified at other area mountain biking destinations such as Stringer's Ridge and Raccoon Mountain. Those who are altering the trails have good intentions but not proper knowledge, he said.
Perhaps the culprits are what mountain bikers call "unattached" - they don't belong to SORBA or aren't plugged in with a local bike shop and are making up their mountain biking experiences as they go.
But for the sake of the sport, mountain bikers hope the alterations stop.
Just like it would be frowned upon for golfers to install their own tee boxes and pin placement on a hole they find challenging, it's also contrary to the ethos of mountain biking to modify trails to suit personal ability.
"Ninety-nine percent of the mountain bikers do have good etiquette, and they're not going to move something just to make it more convenient," said Marcus Moore, trail advocacy director for northwest Georgia's SORBA chapter. "But this is someone who is probably pretty new to the sport and thought they were doing good but just did it in the wrong way."
Contact staff writer David Cobb at dcobb@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6249.