Stop Dressing Like This In The Forest

Video: Seth // Edit: Curtis // Words Below: Daniel

I started riding in Pisgah National Forest years before I was old enough to drive a car on a $600 hardtail with vee brakes and an elastomer fork. I couldn’t climb everything, so I walked. A lot of it. I couldn’t descend everything either, so I walked that too. A lot of that. I didn’t know how to read a map, so I rode with someone who did. I didn’t know what to bring, so I packed too much, and sometimes way too little, and I was more often uncomfortable than not.

Here’s the part nobody markets: plenty of those days weren’t fun. Not in the moment. I was cold, or cooked, or out of water, rained on, stung, or pushing a bike up something I’d been promised was rideable…only to walk down something else that I thought would be rideable. But that was fine. That was the point, even though nobody told me so at the time. Something kept bringing me back - the experience. The sport of bikes gets sold as fun all the time, every frame, every clip, every ad. It isn’t. It doesn’t have to be. And in some places, it shouldn’t be, as there’s a lot more to life than just fun. Some of the best days in the forest are the ones you’d have quit halfway through if quitting were an option. The discomfort wasn’t the price of the apprenticeship. It was the apprenticeship. And when you apprentice and grow in a place, it becomes special.

It took me years, decades, to get dialed in that forest, and I’m still working on it. Pisgah demands that. It’s what makes the place special, and it’s the real substance behind what people around here call the Pisgah Magic. Which brings me to the thing I actually want to talk about.

Every weekend, the same thing plays out. A group rolls in fresh off a six-hour drive and starts suiting up like they’re about to drop into a World Cup downhill track. Full face, chest protector, goggles. Then they pedal into a national forest that is multi-use, largely unmarked, has few/no bathrooms, no bike patrol, and oftentimes no cell signal past the first ridge.

And let me say this before anything else: we want those groups here. Those drives from Greenville, Charlotte, and Atlanta and beyond are a real part of what keeps this region’s lights on, and every one of us who lives here was somebody’s visitor once. I’m not here to make fun of anyone. I’m here because I believe that we’ve been having the wrong argument about gear for years, and the wrong argument hurts people (and places).

The assumption is that more protection means less risk. That’s not how it works and it’s not what gear does. Gear changes the friction coefficient of risk: it lowers what a crash may cost you, and in doing so, it lowers how much risk you feel. How much risk actually exists out there didn’t move an inch. The perception of it did.

An experienced rider can usually manage that gap. They’ve spent enough time in the saddle to know the difference between feeling safe and being safe, and the pads stay what they should be: a margin for the mistake they weren’t planning to make. A less experienced rider lives inside that gap. The armor or $10,000 bike feels like capability. And we all know what people do with a perceived drop in risk. We don’t bank it. We spend it. Faster, further, the line we’d have chosen to walk in a t-shirt…we’re now riding just because we have a full-face helmet, knee and elbow pads.

So you get the counterintuitive result: among less experienced riders, more gear often means more risk, and the backcountry and harder to access trails are where that bill comes due, because the backcountry is where all the dangers armor can’t touch live. A chest protector does nothing for dehydration. But, that dehydration impacts reflexes and decision making. Knee pads won’t read the map. No amount of padding reveals the blind off-camber turn or shortens the hours it takes a rescue crew to reach someone. The kit handled one variable, impact, and quietly inflated confidence about every other one.

The rider getting wheeled off the helipad usually isn’t undergeared. They’re dressed for a bike park day in a place that was never going to give them one. The kit wasn’t the mistake. The kit was the visible evidence of the mistake, which was never asking what kind of place they were riding into. And underneath that sits something more dangerous still: the expectation that the forest should be whatever they decided it should be that day. That expectation puts the rider at risk, and it puts the place at risk too, because a forest full of people demanding it behave like something it isn’t is a forest that eventually gets reshaped, restricted, or ruined to meet the demand. Seth made a version of this argument from the trailhead in his video this week, and he’s right about the tell: first responders, equestrians, and the old heads can read a rider’s preparedness in one glance at what they put on that morning.

There’s a solution people reach for every time someone gets hurt out there, and this doesn’t just apply to Pisgah: make the deep trails easier to access. Smooth the reroutes, add bail-outs, soften the approach, improve access. I understand the instinct, and I’ve thought about it for a long time, and I keep landing in the same place: the difficulty of getting somewhere in that forest isn’t the problem. It’s doing quiet, essential work, and I’d rather explain what that work is than just plant a flag.

That difficulty isn’t a flaw waiting on a fix. It’s the mechanism. Every mile of the approach is teaching trail users something that the deep stuff will eventually test them on. I took that curriculum on foot, pushing a hardtail, because that was the body and the budget I had. The walking, the bad packing, the following someone smarter, the being uncomfortable — by the time the forest let me into its better rooms, I’d earned the judgment to be there. Not necessarily the fitness. The judgment.

And I want to be careful here, because “it should be hard to get places” can be heard as “some people shouldn’t get places,” and that’s not at all what I believe. For some riders, riders with physical disabilities, riders for whom a bike is the one honest way their body gets into the woods at all, the bike isn’t a shortcut into the forest. It’s the door. An adaptive rider who has studied the route, planned the water, checked in with someone about conditions, and shows up with respect for the place has done the apprenticeship before ever leaving the driveway. The apprenticeship was never really the walking. The walking was just how the forest happened to teach me. What it’s actually asking for is judgment, preparation, and respect, and every one of those is available to every rider. Nobody gets exempted from them, and nobody gets excluded by them.

That’s the real dividing line, and it’s why the problem was never any particular tool. I have no problem with e-bikes; for plenty of riders they’re the honest answer, and for some they’re the only one. The question is what the tool is being used for. Used to open a door, to extend a day, ride purpose built trails, to keep riding with friends or to keep riding at all — great. When used to skip the learning entirely, to extract the summit without any of the education of the climb, that’s a different thing, and the forest knows the difference even when we pretend not to. Too much armor standing in for skill and a motor standing in for judgment are the same mistake, wearing different equipment.

Here’s the thing about using a place extractively: eventually the place wins, and it extracts from you.

A bike park exists to serve its clients. Jumps are groomed, trails are rated and inspected, and patrol is a radio call away. The whole operation is built around your experience, and dressing for battle there makes perfect sense, because the crash really is one of the few variables left.

The forest is the opposite. Nobody is out there ensuring your experience. The land doesn’t care about your pads. It doesn’t care about your helmet, your suspension, your allergies, or your schedule. It’s raw, and it’s beautiful, and it is completely indifferent to what someone spends on gear. And that indifference sorts riders more honestly than any trail rating ever could. The ones who show up with respect for the place, who pay attention, who accept the terms — the observant ones — get rewarded, and the reward is real. The ones who show up to take an experience get dealt a harder hand, and no amount of Cordura changes the dealing.

That’s the actual magic, and it won’t show itself to someone padded up for battle, blowing past other trail users, treating the forest like a product that owes them a return on the drive. And it’s worth remembering who those hikers and equestrians are: often the same people who work alongside mountain bikers cutting the drains, clearing the blowdowns, and keeping the trails you drove six hours to ride from washing off the mountain. Respect for the land includes respect for everyone else who’s earned their place on it. It’s not the locals who’ll run an extractive rider out. It’s the land. You can’t have a good experience in Pisgah (or anywhere) with an extractive mindset. You have to have reverence. And that’s true of a lot more places than Pisgah.

So dress however you want. But before you buckle anything, ask what kind of place you’re about to enter and what it’s going to ask of you. If the honest answer is that you don’t know yet, good. Neither did I. Go slower than you want to. Observe, follow someone who knows. Be uncomfortable, but smart.

A hard day in the woods is not the sport failing you. That’s the forest starting to teach and I know I still have a lifetime of learning ahead of me…

We had a tight timeline on this video, so this Substack is going up the same time as the YouTube video this week. It’s unlocked and free to share. As always, thanks for following along, watching, and supporting us. We’ll see you out on the trails!