A Road Less Traveled

Today we took leave of New River Gorge and headed to our next destination; Natural Bridges State Park in Kentucky, just under 4 hours’ drive away.  That is, if you take the Interstate.  We had all day available and generally don’t like Interstate driving so we instructed Google Maps to avoid highways and followed minor roads for the entire trip.

I normally have a GPS tracker running on my phone which maps our entire trip, but today it was turned off so I have no record of the rather complicated route we took.  I’ll try to describe it at the end so I can remember.

The map suggested a drive time of 4.5 hours.  We arrived at Natural Bridges at 5:15pm after leaving New River Gorge at 8am, so we took a bit longer than 4.5 hours.  

A couple of these roads were super curvy.  They would give the Tail of the Dragon good competition for steepness and the number of curves per mile. Would be lots of fun on a motorcycle.  A bit more of a challenge in a motorhome.

Challenge accepted.

We made several stops along this route:

Hawks Nest State Park.  Situated on a bluff overlooking the New River, many of the structures were built by the CCC in the 1930’s.  The tram that we saw yesterday from the bottom could now be seen from the top.  This also offered some dramatic views of the gorge.  The CCC fingerprint was all over the place, even the bathroom building, which looked almost like part of a castle

Cathedral Falls.  Right along US-60, this was an easily-accessible gem.

Kanawha Falls.  Just a few miles west of Cathedral Falls, this appears man-made, a low dam across the river with cascades over the entire width.

Sky Bridge.  A natural bridge at the end of a six-mile one-lane twisty road.  At least this road was paved.  Meeting cars going in the other direction was always interesting.  Especially drivers of large pickup trucks who were not expecting someone bigger than they were.  The bridge was at the end of a short loop hike that allowed access to the top and the bottom.

We arrived at the Middlefork Campground at 5:15.  We were one of the first to leave camp this morning, and arrived last this afternoon.  So we’re not super fast.  But we were here in time for dinner.

After dinner we hiked up to the park’s namesake: Natural Bridge.  Biking to the lodge made the hike just a half-mile long, which was plenty for a rather warm and very humid evening.  The trail is also quite steep, with lots of uneven stone stairs.  We figured it was better to hike now instead of the heat of the day.  Also, there is a good chance of rain tomorrow so we’ll do this while it’s not raining.  An added bonus is that there were relatively few people so it was very quiet.

You can also take a lift to the top which some of our group will probably do tomorrow, but since we’ve already been here, we’ll do some other trails instead.

Nice hike, some good overlooks, and we were back before sunset.

A few other things about today...  I discovered this morning that the fridge had inexplicably turned itself off sometime during the night.  This happened once before on another road trip and the effect was the same.  Warm milk.  And runny ice cream.  I turned it back on but these fridges take hours to recover from something like this.  I warned Deb to keep the door closed as much as possible.  She used the excuse to start her day with a biscuit from Tudor’s Buscuit World.  She said they were the best biscuits she has tasted.  She also bought a cinnamon roll for our afternoon snack.  It also was amazing.

The humidity here is super high.  You don’t have to do anything to break a sweat, it just comes for free. The windows on the RV are completely fogged over on the outside because the air conditioner is running.  Maps and anything paper feel like wet rags. We’ll be spending another night sleeping to the roar of the air conditioner.

Approximate route taken:

• US-19 North from the Bear Mountain Campground to US-60.
• West on US-60 past Ansted (where we biked yesterday).  Stopped at Hawks Nest State Park, Cathedral Falls, and Kanawha Falls.
• Cross the Kanawha River just before Belle, parallel I-64 on McCorkle Ave for five miles into Marmet.
• Take 94 west out of Marmet, meet up with state highway 3 at Racine.
• Route 3 dead-ends into US-119, took this south, then north on US-52, stopping for lunch in a school parking lot in Kermit.
• State highway 40 west out of Kermit, then 645 west, which dead-ends into US-23.
• US-23 south until almost Paintsville, where we stopped at a Walmart for ice cream.
• Then US-460 out of Paintsville, merging onto 9009 (The Mountain Parkway, as it is called).  This was almost like an interstate, wide divided highway with virtually no one on it.
• Leaving the Mountain Parkway, we took 191, then 15, then 715 towards Sky Bridge Arch, where we hiked the short Arch trail. Then back towards Natural Bridges State Park where we met our friends already there.  We were among the first to leave, and the last to arrive.

Miles driven today: 254.  And it took us over 9 hours to drive those miles.