8am. We leave in the cold. Preparing for more cold. Possible snow. Ride starts with what Dave was calling “the commute” – a 20-mile ride west along 76 to the main mountain loops we’d be doing for the next four days. Or at least what we’d thought we’d be doing the next four days. Mama Nature had other plans for us, that conniving devil. The commute was excellent. 1000 feet of climbing right there, just up and down and up and down, low traffic, beautiful woods filled with dead trees (hey, it is February). I spent most of the time thinking about the coming climbs and how those would go with nine other guys all wanting to show their stuff.

Brasstown Bald – we get to the right-hand turn-off, and the road is blocked by a gate. Closed. Screw that. I was quite adamant about going up, at least a little bit, so we collectively decided to go around the barrier and head up until the ice got too bad. The climb was nasty the whole way up, and we didn’t even do the hard part. Can’t imagine racing up this bad boy. Powertap’s dead, so I don’t know what I’m doing. “Does this ride even happen without the numbers?“ I ask jokingly. If only I had known how surreal it was about to become. The descent sucked, real sketchy with the ice, the sand, loose gravel. Descending would end up being the least-fun thing of the day. No rip-roaring on these hills, kids.

We stop at a general store, which was really quaint, quite neat. Huge bags of peanuts, lots of jams and preserves. And water. Always a plus.

Hogpen Gap – Brian is the first to test his mettle. He took off and was maybe 400+ meters in front of me the whole time. Normally that’s nothing, but on a mountain this consistently steep it’s a good 20 seconds. Dave was maybe five seconds behind him, and Tom was another five seconds behind me. More than halfway up, I encounter a random glove, knowing it’s either Dave’s or Brian’s, and attempt to pick it up while riding, a la Randy’s water bottle pick-up drill. Not so much. The effort would have been comical to witness. So I stopped, grabbed the glove and threw it into the front of my jacket, and got back onto the bike, facing downward so as to be able to actually clip in without falling flat on my face. Tom passes me. Grrrrr. Ego time. Randy is right there, asks if I’m OK, and I immediately sprint back up to Tom, catch him, and continue right past him. Got to the top behind a couple of beasts Brian and Dave. Snow abounded, we ate some quick food, and began the most fun descent of the day. The only one we could actually attain some speed on. Scorched down, got around Ed and Morrissey, to bridge up to Newt, Tom, Dave and Brian. The five of us were pulling through, doing a wickedly fast ride down Hogpen Gap. So fun to be going 45 down a hill. Infinitely better than Chicago. I love to eat my words.

Unicoi Gap – A bit before Unicoi, it started to snow. Nooner, just like the meteorologists predicted. At first it was just a light dusting, a miniature sprinkle, something more to add to the beauty of the coniferous surroundings than something that scared us off our bikes or caused legitimate concern. But that would obviously change. We all took it slow, Brian and I rode together up front, doing a chatting pace, the rest were 10 or so seconds behind. We all get to the top, eventually, and it’s snowing. Not the earlier waterfalls on the side of the road are freezing kind of snow. Not the man this is so beautiful kind of dusting. Full-on, road-covering snow. The watershed of the day’s ride happened right there at the top of Unicoi Gap: all the events and all the weather that happened on one side flowed into the Awesome Ocean, and the weather and legs and everything else on the other side flowed into the Ocean of Raging Despair. The snow is maybe a half-inch thick, covering the road in frightening white. Brian Hill goes all Brian Hill on us and does an “OK, I’m Brian Hill, I’m going, see y’all later,“ and takes off down the slippery slopes while we discuss, urinate and regroup.

We descend, through snow, and sleet, and freezing rain, depending on how far down the mountain you are and whether the water hitting you is from the sky or being kicked up from the road. Seth had been having trouble all day, and by this time it’s sub-30 degrees, we were descending and freezing our asses off. We’re coasting the whole time, rubbing the brakes every so often to rid the rims of any loose water or ice build-up, and praying to any deity that’s listening to deliver us in one piece, or maybe two pieces, assuming they can be sewn back together again. It feels as if someone is throwing porcupine needles at my forehead as I’m shooting down the mountain, literally carving a line through thick snowflakes draping the road. My beard gradually gains weight in the form of ice and snow ; I am an Iditarod musher, the Trek my pack of huskies.

After what seems like countless hours in my head, but was mere minutes in reality, everyone regroups at the bottom of the descent. Seth uses that graduate school noggin of his and decides to go knock on a door and wait while we all go on to the house. This guy’s won races, folks, his tactics are sound. We soldier on, all split up, visibility near zero, and Ed has hit the end of his rope. “I just don’t feel safe on the road,“ he tells Dave, and turns around to join Seth in random old people‘s house (guy‘s also won himself some races). The rest of us, now eight-weak, I mean, eight-strong, trudge on in various states of cold and insanity. The ride quickly goes from a simple group ride through the mountains to something of a fight for survival. The tone morphs from Hey, this is insane, totally ‘epic‘, dude, awesome! to a much more serious, We need to get together, fight this cold, and get back to the van so we can pick these people up. Frowns win the fight for space on our faces, and we simultaneously flick our survival switches. Bare legs on a day like this was obviously not the best option, and thus Brian Hill drops out. He sees a fire rescue building, turns off. I yell at him through the fog of snow that we’ll be back to pick him up. “Find shelter, get warm,“ I remember saying, only it came out much more garbled, as my mouth had gone a bit numb by this point. Only cold part on me, really. I sprint up to Dave and Ben to tell them, in case something happens to me, where Brian will be waiting.

We’re then riding the commute back toward the house through dark, cloudy rainy sleety snow, getting soaked, and pelted with cold, wet, hard water, in whatever form. Tom is hurting. We don’t want to know whether there’s 20 miles to go or only 10 (there were 20). The 88-mile ride was slowly becoming worthy of being called epic. I’m literally laughing at how stupid it all was; since I was usually the last to depart after the meet-ups, I’d be riding down a mountain, completely alone, no other human in sight, laughing maniacally to no one in particular. That was a large chunk of my ride. Ben would occasionally pass by me on a small hill descent. Ah yes, humanity does exist. Descents turned into an exercise in applying maximal pressure to the brake levers, as it was icy brake pads rubbing against icy rims that served as friction to slow us down. Descents were also an exercise in forgetfulness. Sure that a tire was bound to slip out, we had to put aside any memory we had of physics and rubber and ice and two in-line wheels and centers of gravity and anything else that would prevent us from actually getting down the mountain. Ascending the hills on the commute was an exercise in putting as much weight on the rear wheel as possible, so as to not spin out completely. At one point, Dave, Ben, Tom and I stopped to eat something and de-ice our bikes. Not only had the ice prevented us from being able to shift, but so much had gathered in the brakes that the wheels were in a constant rub. Eighteen-pound bikes were now weighing in around 25 or so. Re-starting on the bike was near impossible. Dave, somewhat stupefied, says, half-joking, half-dead-serious, “How do you start?“ as we both fight the slippery conditions and try to remount our bikes going uphill, making more like a child on the Crocodile Mile than grown men on bicycles. We were fighting the climb, we were fighting the ice-braking, we were fighting the inability to shift gears, and we were fighting the freezing cold. And we were losing. One by one we were losing. At one point Randy told us there were eight miles to go. Until then, we were operating under the assumption that we were two, maybe three miles out. Just when we couldn’t take it physically, Randy found a way to demoralize us even more. My brain hesitates to recall what took place for these last eight miles, as my body had by this point shut off and decided it was best not to remember such things. I do recall ambulances: two of them, with a couple fire trucks. Loud, frightening sirens. Like babies wailing, only there‘s snow everywhere. So much snow. Where are the baby-wailers driving to? An accident. Nearby? We all say meaningless phrases to each other in icy attempts at encouragement. Is the group all here? Another ambulance. We’re dead. It’s over. This is heaven. This is hell?

Supposedly hell is hot: high flames, fire, brimstone, the stench of death. That depiction is wrong. Hell is cold. Icy, cold descents, snow like a tiger claw swiping at your face, looking down at a cycle computer and seeing 30mph and snow kicking up from your tires as you brake frantically. A Friday in hell.

“I just wanted to get warm,” Andy Hampsten once said of his now-legendary stage over the Gavia Pass in the 1988 Giro d‘Italia. “I was really concerned for my health. I’ve never been in a place like that. Psychologically, no one can explain how tough it was - 25 kilometers of descending in freezing snow and sleet. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Everyone who crossed the finish line that day had to dig incredibly deep to get there. When I talk to the other riders today, it’s never, ‘So and so did this,’ or, ‘Yeah, Breukink won.’ It’s, ‘Wow, you were on the Gavia in ‘88.’”

Wow. We were on the Unicoi in 2010.

We all made it out alive. The front door of the cabin is actually a doorway to delirium, and I enter unknowingly. We all disrobe as quickly as possible. I look at Tom. He’s huddled on the floor with a blanket and towel, shivering with a mild case of frostbite. In my head I see Brian Hill, curled up on the side of the road somewhere, possibly in a fire rescue station, if it’s open. Seth and Ed are still shivering somewhere, in someone’s house, next to their fireplace, sipping hot chocolate as they relay the idiocy of our ride to an old couple who won’t understand but will nod understandingly. I leave the house Seth and Ed are staying at, and fly through the air, over all the trees, flying back to our cabin, back to the warmth. I glance down mid-flight and notice the shape of Lake Burton, a killer octopus with deadly tentacles reaching out for me. Lake Burton is trying to get me. Georgia is trying to get me.

I’m back in the cabin, two pounds of snow in my beard, Dave is taking care of Tom, Newt is already cleaned up in street clothes and preparing to hop in the van to pick up the pieces. Where’s a camera? “Morrissey, where’s your camera?”

I need a photograph of my beard. Somehow a picture -- however blurry, however inappropriate at the time -- of a beard full of ice, on a face mired in vacuity, in a February Georgia with four inches of snow on the ground, will rectify the situation, will un-foul-up the SNAFU, will transcend any suffering we endured and are still enduring. I need this to document our stupidity. To document the epicness, to document the 80-mile event that began as a simple team ride and ended in a bizarre two-wheeled fight for our lives. Brian snaps the photo, and I remain in a state of delirium. I sit on a nearby chair. My beard melts, drip by drip, onto the rug below. I want to do this again.