Gorge-ous

Our group split up this morning.  Those of us with bikes set off towards Ansted, to ride a bike trail from Ansted down to the New River at Hawks Nest State Park.  The others took off to do the auto scenic road on the Fayette Station Road.

I queued up the parking area on Google Maps and we set off towards Ansted.  Here is where Google Maps failed me again.  In an effort to save perhaps a few hundred feet of driving distance, Google Maps routed me down several miles of one-lane road.  At least that was paved.  The last half-mile or so branched off on a gravel road that looked OK until we were fully committed.  Then it began to curve sharply and climb steeply.  Large ruts appeared, along with large rocks jutting out of the road.  This section was obviously intended for high-clearance four-wheel-drive vehicles and we were attempting this road in a motorhome.

Backing up at this point would be even worse, so I soldiered on, hoping it wouldn’t get any worse.  It did.  Rounding a tight corner, I thought I had avoided the large rock in the road but heard a bang as the rock hit the tailpipe.    Just a few hundred feet farther we arrived at the parking area.  Looking at the surrounding area, I could see a nice paved road leading off towards the town of Ansted.  It connects with Highway 60.  I didn’t have to go four-wheeling to get here.

The Ansted Rail Trail is only two miles long, so we thought we were going to be done in a half hour but we were wrong.  This beautiful trail slopes rather steeply downward, following Mill Creek, and offers views of several little waterfalls along the way.  We stopped at several of these, and one of them even had a little whirlpool where we spent some time tossing leaves into the whirlpool and watching them spin and get sucked under.

It took us quite a while to reach the bottom as we stopped so often to see the many interesting things along this trail.  So it was well worth almost losing an exhaust system on the RV to get there.

At the bottom, along the New River, is a small building being restored by the National Park Service, a dock that an outfitter uses for jet boat rides, and a tram which connects to an overlook in Hawks Nest State Park.  The tram was being rebuilt and the NPS building is also in the process of modification.  We talked to someone from the outfitter for a while.  He pointed out some wineberries along the road which we enjoyed.  He was a friendly guy, seems like a lot of the people we have met here have been very pleasant.

We hung out by the river for a while, then biked back to the vehicles on the access road on the other side of Mill Creek.  We had lunch under the shade of some large trees near the parking area but had to cut it a little short because we could hear thunder in the distance.  It started to rain just as we got underway.

Since it was raining, we drove to the visitor center, dropped off the RV, and piled into Russ & Amy’s truck to drive the Fayette Station Road.  This was the road used to cross the river before the New River Gorge Bridge was built in 1974.  A crossing back then took 30 minutes or more.  Today it takes mere seconds.  And, since this is the longest steel span in the Western Hemisphere, we’ll add it to our Largest collection.

It poured rain for much of the drive but we got to see the gorge and bridge from a different perspective.  I took a picture of the new bridge from the old bridge at the bottom of the gorge.  It could barely be seen through the mist and the rain.

We had several recommendations for Pies and Pints, a pizza restaurant in Fayetteville, less than a mile from our campground.  The recommendations were valid, the pizza was very good.