A Week in the Heart of the Appalachian Mountains: West Virginia & Pennsylvania

[mortonm]

Next Friday my brother and I will be heading out on a weeklong trip through the Appalachian Mountains on Americas East coast, they are one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world. You can read about our other adventures in the region from the links below:

http://www.expeditionportal.com/for...s-Allegheny-NF-Bald-Eagle-SF-Pine-Creek-Gorge

http://www.expeditionportal.com/for...le-State-Forest-Victoria-Day-Weekend-May-2014

We will be taking my 2001 Xterra, it isn't the prettiest or most capable vehicle but time and again it gets us there and back again. It has a beefed up suspension to hold the load over bad roads and 235/85R16 BFG AT tires

My build thread can be found here:

http://www.expeditionportal.com/forum/threads/79780-Mortonm-s-2001-Xterra-Build

We had a lot of help from the guys at Mountain State Overland in planning our route through West Virginia, If you are looking to explore the area I HIGHLY recommend contacting them.

Here is a picture of the route they set up for us: 350 miles over three days mostly through Monongahela National Forest

After finishing up in West Virginia we will be heading North into Pennsylvania, taking a full day to stop in Gettysburg before continuing North into Rothrock and Bald Eagle State Forests.

I will be posting a few teaser pictures here along the way and more on Instagram during the week (when we find wifi). Feel free to follow us

mikemorton0
mortonbry

Stay tuned for the full trip report when we get back!

 

[fireball]

Looking forward to hearing about your trip!

 

[KLT88YJ]

Looking forward to your future updates/ posts! I don't live far from the area(s) however I've never really explored them...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[4runnerteq]

Cool. Have a great trip. Lookin forward to report

 

[msoverland]

Sub'd! Glad we could help boys; can't wait to hear more!

 

[fortel]

Nice panoramic photo, reminds me of some of the roads I used to drive in western North Carolina. Looks like its gonna be a great trip.

 

[gilberto.cano.5]

Next Friday my brother and I will be heading out on a weeklong trip through the Appalachian Mountains .
We had a lot of help from the guys at Mountain State Overland in planning our route through West Virginia, If you are looking to explore the area I HIGHLY recommend contacting them.

Here is a picture of the route they set up for us: 350 miles over three days mostly through Monongahela National Forest

After finishing up in West Virginia we will be heading North into Pennsylvania, taking a full day to stop in Gettysburg before continuing North into Rothrock and Bald Eagle State Forests.

How do you contact this guys??

 

[live2travel photography]

How do you contact this guys??

Mountainstateoverland @ gmail.com

 

[msoverland]

How do you contact this guys??

Mountainstateoverland @ gmail.com

10 4 That's us! Please feel free to reach out if there's any thing we can help you with. These guys are having a lot of fun; we've been repositng their trip pics on instagram.com/msoverland. Cell service is limited but they'll be making updates to this thread soon - stay tuned!

 

[highlandercj-7]

My old Stompping grounds! Swampped my CJ on 35's over it's hood in the water just above those falls.
[/QUOTE]

 

[hikingff77]

I love it. Esp. that you're doing it with a mostly stocker that can be had somewhat affordable. Awesome! I might be stealing your route some day and doing it myself.

 

[mortonm]

Thanks guys!

Headed home tomorrow, look for the trip report to start this weekend

 

[mortonm]

Trip Report Begins!

Let me Start off saying that we had camera issues and ended up having to use my Nexus 5 smartphone for basically all of the pictures, but they aren't so bad (and my camera isnt that good anyways).

This story begins Thursday August 28th 2014, but it has been in the works for almost a year. The same week last year we planned and executed a week long trip to the Pennsylvania Wilds. We wanted to try some place new, as well as revisit a few areas we had missed in previous trips in Pennsylvania. We spent the winter time scouring Expedition Portal and anywhere else we could find with trip reports and places of interest in the North East. We had narrowed it down to Maine or West Virginia. In the end West Virginia won out. We spent countless hours trying to figure out where to go, what to do and see as it is not an easy task with almost no local knowledge.

In July my brother ran into the guys from Mountain State Overland at the Mid-Atlantic Overland Festival and mentioned to them about our proposed trip to their native state. They offered to help us plan our route through the Mountain State, which was a great bonus for us. This ensured that were able to visit a lot of great sites and drive a lot of great back-roads (technical and beautiful) in a shot amount of time. The route they had planned for us our span four days, not including the day it would take us to get down there from Canada.

They provided us a GPX file, which point by point navigated us through beautiful mountains, valleys and everything in between. This was a new navigation method for us, as we had just used paper maps before (Delorme, Purple Lizard, Back Road Map Books etc). My brother has an ipad (full size 9.6" screen) with the GPS receiver and this allowed us to follow our trip close hand and we didnt get even remotely lost once over those days. Its a great setup and the only improvement we could have made was to fabricate a mount for the ipad before we left, but there wasnt enough time. We cant thank those guys enough for their help, it definitely improved the quality of our trip. I should also mention we spent a few hours the weekend before "map truthing" the track on the Delorme Atlas marking out key parts in case we had technical difficulties.

Thursday night we met up at our Mothers place to get all of our equipment sorted and loaded into the truck properly so we could set out first thing Friday morning without any hassle. It was the Friday of the last long weekend of the summer and we wanted to get to the border as quick as we could to hopefully avoid delays.

Before: All of this has to go in there...



After: It all fit, room to spare



We BBQ'd some dinner and had a couple beers and went to be early ready to get out on the road for a week of Adventure in the Heart of the Appalachian Mountains

 

[mortonm]

We got up and left around 7am and rolled up to the border around 8, thankfully it was only a 15 minute delay or so and we headed West along I90 until Erie, Pennsylvania and then headed south on I79 down passed Pittsburgh. Our plan for the day was merely to make it to Morgantown, grab food and beer and then find a campsite for the night. Our estimates had us arriving in Morgantown around 1pm so we had plenty of time. This part of the drive isn't particularly interesting to there aren't many pictures.

Before we knew it we had crossed over into West Virginia just North of Morgantown, but not before we got a crappy picture of the sign



We managed pretty easily to find a grocery store and stock up, and more importantly found a craft brewey called Morgantown Brewing Company. They had a pretty large selection of their beers, all of them available for purchase in a Growler.



We ended up getting a growler each for the night. I got the Oktoberfest Lager and my brother the Alpha Blonde Ale, both were spectacular to say the least. Although we would be looking for more beer again the next day...



The track that we had been given by Mountain State Overland Started the next morning, but we decided to do the first 30 minutes of it the first day as it drove right passed a state campsite. Mere minutes out of Morgantown (after ridiculous Friday afternoon traffic we thought we had left behind...) we were onto dirt, and almost right away the road got steep and pretty rough, we were both looking at each other thinking how spectacular, the county roads in West Virginia were rougher than half of the "drivable trails" we encountered in Bald Eagle State Forest (PA) last year.

A couple sections were steep enough to require 4lo, we got a few pictures but we were a little giddy and thirsty so didn't stop long. The pictures never do justice



A the top of the first section was a campsite called Chestnut Ridge, it was a West Virginia State Park. We had not looked it up before we came, but decided to give it a shot. We ended up with a spectacular site right on a small pond. It was particularly private and mostly your typical state park site but better than we could have hoped for.



We bought some wood and had a rough time getting it to go, as it was pretty wet. I had just received a new Gransfors Bruks Scandinavian Forest axe for my 30th birthday and it quickly became very useful. Especially since we were cooking over the fire that night!

 

[mortonm]

We cooked sausages, beans and potatoes over the fire, we improvised a grill from my Coleman propane stove for the sausages, worked pretty good although we lost a soldier during battle and were down to just 4 sausages left by meal time.





Decently steep driveway to the site



Brought out the frying pan after we lost the sausages, wasn't any more to spare after that!



Attempting to Dry out the wood





View out of the tent



With that, we enjoyed our craft beer and the fire and hit the hay early, as we had a long day ahead of us over rough roads where we had never been before, after the little trek into chestnut ridge we weren't sure what the next day had in store!