I like to ride this park when I visit the Hilton Head, SC/Savannah, GA area over the holidays. Tom Triplett Community Park is located right off of Interstate 95 in Pooler, GA- a suburb of Savannah. It’s one of the few places to ride in the “Low Country”- as the locals call it- around Savannah. It’s a good place for a quick after work ride in an area where riders will head to the mountains on weekends to do most of their riding. It’s a small place with a maze of tight, twisty trails that will test your cornering and braking skills. It’s possible to get a good workout in by accelerating out of the tight corners that come one after another. The system consists of about five miles of riding with a long and short loop and connecting trails. In the northern part of the park, the trail runs through a Frisbee golf course, and you need to watch out for of flying disks. The soil is slightly sandy in most places, but in some areas you’ll find the notorious Georgia clay, that sticks like glue when wet and then dries as hard as cement. There are no rocks but enough roots that a little bit of suspension will come in handy. Geographically it’s almost completely flat, the only hills being some old dikes and levees along an abandoned canal that runs through the park. The ideal bike would be a singlespeed 29er with suspension fork.
As far as wildlife, the most common sighting will be the armadillo, or armored possum, as I call it. Despite their strange appearance they are harmless, and a lot more fearful of you than you will likely be of them. Since they can’t climb trees, their defense strategy is to hide in piles of leaves, and they’re very good at it. They’ll normally run away from humans but sometimes they’re so preoccupied with foraging for insects that you can get up very close to them, as I was able to.
The fortunes of this park have ebbed and flowed with the popularity of the sport in general. Mountain bikers had an established presence here in the late 1990s and early 2000s- you can see the remains of old stunts and bridges that were built during the freeride craze. The park then began to suffer from some “negative use” that drove legitimate users away. Mountain bikers seemed to abandon the place, the trails became overgrown, and the stunts and bridges succumbed to rot. But my latest visit in December 2010 confirmed that the place has rebounded. The negative users are gone and the mountain bikers and Frisbee golfers have returned. The trails have been re-established and I even found a new trail just built- the tread way still soft. The decayed stunts and bridges are being removed and replaced. There’s now an active chapter of SORBA in Savannah and they’ve designated Tom Triplett as their home riding area, so it’s likely to continue getting better.
If you ever visit the Savannah or Hilton Head areas you should bring your bike and check this place out. It’s a riding experience unlike anything we have up here in the Northeast. Just be on the lookout for armored possums, flying disks, and wet Georgia clay.
- Glenn Vernes
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