WV Ride

Sunday Sonja and I were out in WV with the dogs and decided to do a little ride. "Little" is a bit of a misnomer as any ride that you do in WV winds up being epic. It started innocently enough with the descent down the front side of the mountain on Howard's Lick Road. The views from here are magnificent. Case in point.

Along the way we ran into Heidi. She and the ABRT/Latitude girls were staying at the barn. This was Heidi's second day on the bike since her horrible crash at the Christiana stage race back in August.
Me posing with "Eddy".After descending Howard's Lick, we started the long dirt climb up to the Fire Tower. The descent from here was a scary ordeal for me on my cross bike as the trees were casting shadows on the road and I had a hard time seeing the potholes, rocks, and whatnot.

The next climb was Liberty Furnace. I have a love/hate relationship with this climb. I think it's one of the hardest climbs in WV. It's long, extremely steep in some sections, and has 2 false flats. Some may say that the back side climb is harder, but I find Liberty Furnace to be more taxing. I have to look at my garmin, but I think it took us an hour to get to the top.

After descending Liberty Furnace, we headed to the Mathias General Store for some grub. I chose the white chili. It was yummy and exactly what I needed to face the final climb of the day back up to the house, Hemlick Rock Road.

Sonja enjoyed her food.

Hemlick Rock Road is infamous. It is pretty much straight up the mountain and it's not paved. We couldn't take pictures here because, frankly, if we had stopped, we'd probably not be able to get back on our bikes. It's that steep. Fortunately, the recent rain had the road in good shape and our tires weren't sliding out so much in the dirt.

At the end of the day we had ridden something close to 50 miles, 4 and a half hours, and almost 7000ft of climbing.