Today was absolutely full of twisty mountain roads.
We started out at an old coal mining town called Nuttallburg. To get there we had to travel about 5 miles down this one lane road to the bottom of the mountain. Thankfully we didn’t meet any other cars coming up because there was literally no where to pull over.
We didn’t hike up to the mine itself because it was quite a ways up a very steep trail, but we did wander around the remnants of the town. There was this awesome conveyer belt that brought the coal down from the mine to a structure called a ‘tipple’, where they sorted the coal and loaded it directly onto train cars. Henry Ford bought the mine in 1920, and his son Edsel ran it for eight years – before he created the most famous car flop ever – and they did a bunch of improvements. It was really quite clever.
A little farther away there was this really long line of old stone coke ovens. When the mine was first built, the miners put the coal in these coke ovens and ‘cooked’ it for a few days to remove the impurities. They looked like a seriously awful place to work:
After making our way back up the crazy one lane road, we wandered north to a different section of the park. We made a rather fortuitous wrong turn, and ended up driving down an even crazier twisty one lane road to something called Fayette Station, which is just about underneath the New River Gorge Bridge. We ended up down at the river and had a nice picnic.
After making our way back up the mountain on another twisty one land road, we drove across the bridge to the Visitor Center. This definitely involved me squealing and hyperventilating – that bridge is high and really open, and I hate heights. From the Visitor Center we walked down a boardwalk to get some awesome views of the bridge (well, Jon did – I gave up about halfway down, I couldn’t deal with the heights thing).
After leaving the Visitor Center, we drove to Hawks Nest State Park for more river views. Then we headed to Babcock State Park, which turned out to be awesome. There was an old grist mill on Glade Creek. The mill was completely picturesque and the creek was beautiful – we were really glad we stopped.
On our way back to our hotel, Jon decided to take a detour to see a covered bridge:
Which was fun, but what really got us was Google claiming it ‘was busier than usual’ when we were literally the only people within sight.
Jon definitely enjoyed all those mountain roads much, much more than I did.
Tomorrow we’re off to Harper’s Ferry for our last stop of the trip.