Dan Casey

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Bright red, milky white and soft lavender flowers dotted the green landscape that spread out below the top of 3,000-foot Cahas Mountain. It had been a long bike ride up, on a sliver of road only slightly wider than your average bike path. We rested on the third-story deck of an improbable stone tower and peered into a deep, V-shaped notch that opened up toward Roanoke, 15 miles to the north.

In the other direction, 20 yards across a small clearing, was the cave-like entrance to the mostly underground house in which John Gabel lives. The Franklin County schoolteacher has labored a decade to build it and the tower with his own hands. The house is done and he's getting close with the tower.

"Bet you'll be glad when you're finished," I said. Gabel paused briefly.

"Well, it's not the destination," he replied softly. "It's the journey."

Erin Garvin and I slapped the sides of our heads in simultaneous fits of karmic delight. The simple, magical truth in those words very neatly explained a strange malaise we'd each felt in different places and times.

The deep funk had fallen on me in the fall of 1983, after a Seattle to New York bicycle trip. The end-of-the-epic-ride blues bit Garvin hard in the fall of '98, after she wrapped up an off-road, Canada-to-Mexico route. She was the first woman to do it.

The elation at the conclusion of those rides quickly melted away. That's because the end of the road was the end of the adventure, and that's what we longed for -- not the destination. Perhaps that was why we were riding in a 30-mile circle on this cloudy Saturday morning on Franklin County's rolling two-lane roads. The good thing about a loop is there's no real beginning or end.

Milk and back-roads miles

WSLS news anchor John Carlin led this ride out of Boones Mill, a low-lying little speed trap in northern Franklin County about 15 miles south of Roanoke. Carlin's a member of the Franklin Freewheelers, the local bike club. Jim Lovell, his cycling buddy and fellow Freewheeler, was along for the ride, as were Josh Meltzer, Missy Warp and Manly Aylor.

It is along Franklin County's 702 square miles that the Piedmont's red-clay, tobacco-bearing swells butt up against the granite-tinged eastern edge of the Blue Ridge. All by itself this geological intersection makes for some interesting and challenging terrain. And Franklin bikers have another theory about what makes it an even better place to ride. The county, that theory goes, has the biggest dairy farms in Virginia. Big 18-wheelers must come pick up milk from those farms every day. Those trucks need wide, smooth, asphalt ribbons to roll across the green countryside. And so do road bikes.

Voila!

On the itinerary this day was 23 rolling miles. Then we climbed the mysterious Cahas -- three miles up on a horse-cart road that was cut by settlers and never widened very much. It's paved now, but parts are still a squeeze for two cars, and there are no guardrails between the road and some steep drops off the edge.

The best part of the ride is the final five miles, beginning from the top of the mountain. It's all downhill.

A different kind of mountain

Compared to many of the peaks that surround the Roanoke Valley, Cahas (it's pronounced ka-HAZE) is unusual. The mountain is utterly rural, unlike peaks closer to Roanoke, which suburban sprawl is gnawing away. A threadlike Wade's Gap Road climbs and descends Cahas with serpentine twists and hairpin turns. At midday on a Saturday, hardly any cars passed us on our way up the mountain or, a bit later, on our way down.

There's a good chance Cahas will stay that way. In 1996, the federal government designated the mountain a Rural Historic District; since then, little seems to have changed. Cattle pastures claim most of the Callaway (south) side, and apple orchards dominate the Naff (north) side. The gaps of land between the occasional farmhouses are large and open.

Dan Casey | The Roanoke Times

Cahas Mountain in Franklin County rises in the distance as our group heads toward it on a recent Saturday. This 30-mile ride beginning in Boones Mill offers plenty of rolling roads, a tough climb up Cahas, then five miles of downhill at the very end.

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Map

• Map of Cahas Mountain

The route from 220

• Go up Bethlehem Road 3 miles
• Take a left onto Green Level Road (Virginia 693) Go about 2.5 miles.
• Take a right onto Grassy Hill Road (Virginia 919) go about 4-5 miles.
• Take a right onto Callaway Road (Virginia 641) Go about 5 miles
• Take a right onto Bethlehem Road (Virginia 643) @ Retreat Store (closed) (photo) Go about 3 miles.
• Take a left onto Dillons Mill Road (still Virginia 643) at Hodges Grocery; go about 4 miles.
• Bear right onto Wades Gap Road (726) at the Monte Vista Church. You are now headed to the mountain!
• Climb and descend the mountain.
• Take a right on Naif Road stay on Naff Road to 220.
• Make a right on 220 and take it downhill (1.5 miles) back to the Texaco in Boones Mill.

The mountain had fleeting fame, back in April 1996, when it separated the men from the boys during a 113-mile stage in the Tour DuPont. Lance Armstrong, who in future years would win two Tour de Frances, won that particular race from Mount Airy, N.C. to Roanoke. Cahas was the first of two tough mountains the cyclists climbed before wrapping up the race in downtown Roanoke. The other was Lynville Mountain.

More recently, Gabel, his hand-built home and the amazing stone tower have put Cahas in the news. In a story last year, the 47-year-old bachelor told The Roanoke Times' that he's put about $19,000 into it. That doesn't include the thousands of hours he spent collecting the rocks from a nearby creek and hauling them up the mountain in a beat-up car, or building it. When it's complete, he plans to let families and married couples use it.

"The greatest purpose I have for this is to bring people together,'' he told the newspaper. As a teacher, he says he sees the harmful effects of families whose members don't communicate and don't spend enough time together.

Gabel is a quiet and friendly guy who doesn't seem to mind visitors and likes to show off his unusual work. When we stopped along the road at the top of the mountain to rest, we couldn't see his tower through the trees. But he could hear us talking, and shouted an invitation to visit. It was the highlight of the ride.

The ride

From Roanoke, take U.S. 220 south to Boones Mill. We parked on the side of a small road directly behind the Texaco gas station and convenience store on the right side of 220. Bethlehem Road intersects U.S. 220 here, and it's where you'll begin the ride. Warning: the first three miles of the ride has hardly any shoulder and a fair amount of traffic. But the cars thin out soon afterwards. There is one convenience store on the left at around the 15-mile point.