The Trails of West Virginia Monongahela National Forest – Trails Of West Virginia West Virginia’s has become well known to bikers for it’s abundance of off-road trails that offer some of the best rides on the planet. The site to visit is the Eastern Central area of the state where the 900,000 acre Monongahela National Forest is home to many hundreds of kilometers of interconnected trails, most of which are mapped and very well marked. The Monongahela is among the premier hard wood forests on earth, and a wonderful location for biking. Some of the support roads allow you to travel right up to the trail heads. The forest range rises from 2,800 to 4,500 feet and is a wonderful location for biking through plenty of ferns, rhododendron and moss covered trees. This region of West Virginia is rural but there is quite a busy nightlife. The nearby Snowshoe Resort provides five restaurants and four bars (try Skidder’s Pub on Monday nights or Yodler’s Pub for happy hours and late night gatherings). It’s also possible to pay eight dollars to mountainbike on Snowshoe’s 100 plus miles of mapped, well marked out biking trails.
Black Creek Trail: starts its upstream journey in the lower Black Creek valley, cris-crossing the thick woods of South Mississippi. A lot of the trail is situated inside the corridor of the federally designated wild and scenic part of the river. The trail then heads for the Red Hills, making the earliest of the many forays into the remarkable and challenging pine forests lining the watershed. The trail predictably turns toward the river, then heads away again, entering more hill country, where it begins a long winding trek through the Black Creek Wilderness. Down Mill Creek, up Black Creek, and around Beaverdam Creek-the biking trail meanders among before exiting the wilderness at a parking area near Janice Landing.
: is a moderately rated 13.3 mile ride. The first half is single track and the second forest service road. The trial head is off of Gauley Mountain Road, on the west side of route 219 (about 1.5 miles south of the Elk River Touring Center). The loop begins on the Tea Creek Connector biking trail and follows a ridge for 1.5 miles to the Bear Pen Trail. At around the 3.5 mile mark you top out in a rocky clearing which is a good spot to rest because you are about to experience the best downhill on the trail. The top of the trail is quite rough due to the rocks but then smooths out and drops fast through forest. You will find there’s few big turns and several rocky stream crossings, then you bottom out at Tea Creek. Keep straight on the Bear Pen you’ll climb the next few miles up double track then you’ll top out into a grown over strip mine. Ride through the clearing then you must negotiate a washout across the trail. It’s about six feet deep and eight feet across. About a quarter mile past the washout, take a
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sharp right onto forest service road 135. From this point you climb about four miles back to Gauley Mountain Road and turning right it’s 1.3 miles back to the trail head.
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