Above is part of the "road" I was touring on.
See, I went back to google maps for some more abuse, and she obliged by telling me how to ride my bike from Charleston, WV to Rock Creek, WV. Take a look at this routing, and pay special attention to Location B.
Location B, the intersection of County Rd 77/1, aka Fields Creek Road, and Public Road 77/3 near the tiny town of Winifrede, WV, is important because, in a nutshell, Public Road 77/3 isn't public. Right where that weird little dogleg starts, going east on Fields Creek, there's a guard shack. For a massive mining operation. That is very, very not open to the public. The security guard was pleasant, but there was absolutely no way I was getting in. She recommended that I talk to the people at the top of the hill (continuing east on Fields Creek Road.) But she had never heard of Fields Creek Road, or County 77/1, or Public Road 77/3 (which he guard shack is situated on), nor had the next three people I asked: a coal processing plant worker walking along Fields Creek Road, aka 77/3, nor the trucker driving coal out along Fields Creek Road, aka 77/1, nor the West Virginia Department of Transportation employee driving his pickup along Fields Creek Road, aka 77/1.
(Confidential to the West Virginia Department of Transportation: it'd be kinda neat if your employees knew where in the fuck they were, or at least the name of the road they are driving on, or the names of any of the roads anywhere near it, or maybe just which county they are currently in.)
I was faced with turning around and riding back to Marmet, WV (which is a southern suburb of Charleston, about 20 miles back) or chugging up the dirt hill. In the rain. With minimal cell phone coverage. Of course, I chose to chug up the hill. Hell, yeah: let's do this. I mean, I had food and camping gear, an endless supply of energy, and not a little recklessness.
So I rode, roughly following the blue line from the top of this image, to where I have the cursor and the little circle:
Right about where the cursor/circle are, things got interesting. The road actually ends, notwithstanding the lies, damned lies, and statistics that google maps would have me believe. A guy was driving along in his pickup truck, and was happy to help me out by asking several different neighbors who live in the half a dozen or so houses at the end of the road what the best way was for me to get down to Route 3.
After several conversations, where I learned that rural West Virginians love to give directions, and fortunately, are happy to repeat them over, and over, and over, and over, clearly understanding that my dumb ass has no idea where in the hell I am, I ended up here:
The other option, which was vaguely tempting, was to turn around, go back down the hill to just before the intersection of 77/3 and 77/1, cut across the railroad tracks and through the coal processing plant, and bushwhack through the forest back to 77/3 toward Bloomingrose. Unfortunately, this almost certainly would have required cutting through the part of the mining operation that is active, so it didn't sound all that great.A neighbor at basically the end of another road directed me past his house and gave me clear directions on how to take the above-pictured dirt road until it turned into an ATV trail, and descend into Kanawha Eagle Coal land. Woot woot!
This involved, more or less: go straight, stay on the ATV trail, and when I get to the gate:
climb down into the ditch (sound familiar?), lift my bike over or around the gate (I chose over), turn left (and make sure you don't turn right, even though you'll think you need to, or you'll just go in a big circle), go down the hill, turn right, and pass by the guard shack.Guard shack? Oh, hell, yeah! Another guard shack! But he confidently clarified: "the fuckers gotta let you out. They just won't let you in." He was quite pissed about the above-pictured ditch, which the gate picture doesn't really do justice to how deep it is. It was cut by "the fucking company" with a bulldozer to prevent access to the ATV trails he and other locals had been using for decades. He was not pleased. Another of the roads that google maps tried to send me on near there also had a ditch cut into it, and had been allowed to overgrow. (I found out later that the state and counties let these roads go to hell, and then abandon them, to allow Big Coal to buy them and turn them in to private roads.)
This was getting good.
Fortunately, at the crest of the ATV trail, deep in overgrown woods and riddled with poison ivy, I got some cell coverage, and confirmed my directions and location on the map. Google maps thought I should take another route, and get to Joe's Creek, but I was not then on speaking terms with google maps, for obvious reasons, so I decided to ignore it, and go with my friend of "the fuckers gotta let you out" school of thought.
So I do all this, and show up at the guard shack with the road barrier down. On the inside of company land. The security guard looked at me like the bike-riding-Martian I was, and I said "Bet you didn't expect to see me here!" with a big shit-eating grin, doing my best I'm-A-Stupid-Bike-Tourist routine. He sure didn't expect to see me, but he was friendly, and lonely, and wanted to chitchat. So we did for a while, and he gave me some water, and asked a couple times, more apparently out of curiousity than anything else, how I'd arrived there. I answered vaguely, 4x4 trails, blah blah blah. It was true, but I was uninterested in discussing it at any kind of length.
Finally, I rode on, made my way down to WV Route 3 near Orgas, and continued on my way, being passed every couple minutes by overloaded 20 wheel coal trucks:
Google maps and I remain in therapy, and while I'm genuinely trying to make progress, I just don't know. I might might need to quit her.
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