Recently I happened to visit the website of BMW Motorcycle Club of Georgia and found several "dual-sport" routes for BMW GS riders during their Georgia Mountain Rally on the first weekend in May. Perhaps someone with better local knowledge than I could look them over. After slight modification, these routes may be suitable for our NGC in April.
Don
Don
I took a cursory look at the Georgia Mountain Rally routes. I was able to open 5 of them and the .gpx links to the other two doesn't work. You can view the route for these two but no gpx file.
The GMR_DS_Cherohala_Tellico_HiawasseeDam_BlueRidge_Nottely_Loop goes up Tatham Gap out of Andrews. That road has been closed for more than a year due to heavy rains washing parts of the road away. It's part of the Trail of Tears Route.
Before taking this route you should contact Bill Champion at the Tusquitee Ranger Station at 828-837-5152 to verify if Tatham Gap has been opened.
The other four routes are all doable on a GS depending on rider skills. There's nothing particularly hard on these routes.
Many parts of these routes are in the ADV routes we'll have for Spring Fling.
One thing I'll mention is that these five routes have many waypoints, often very close together. These will announce in your GPS very often and is distracting.
Most of these waypoints should be changed to shaping points so they won't announce. This can be done with Basecamp.
Also the routes have the same starting and ending points with the route coming and going on the same road. This often confuses the GPS. There needs to be separate start and end points for the route. Or have a separate return route so you're not covering a road in both directions.
Since the North Georgia Classic event is a just for fun event, MSTA rules say we can't have official routes. I have offered up a collection of my personal routes in the Helen Georgia area for anyone attending NGC. There are no dual sport or ADV routes in that collection.
You can find my Georgia routes in a link on the NGC web site.
http://msta-se.com/helen/If you'd like to work some ADV routes for the area that could be used for those attending NGC that would be great.
I could add a link to them on the web site.
If you'd like more information on what I've mentioned above please contact me at
d_pippin_89@bellsouth.netDoug
