Took a ride up to Rich Mountain yesterday. I haven't been up there in over 10 years when the good section was gated off. I really hated to see it closed because I loved riding there. Not too hard, not too easy, just an in-and-out day trip kinda place that wasn't too far from home. I was hoping against hope that since the place had been off the radar for a decade that maybe it would be open again. No such luck. Once I got about a mile in, I met the gate that blocked the road just before the area where it used to start getting good.
I remembered there being a rock quarry or some other type of open pit mining operation going on just by the entrance to the trails, but what I saw yesterday seemed pretty extreme considering the location. Other than the "private ownership" issue, it is absolutely mind boggling to me how this is allowed to be done on one side of the mountain, but four wheelers are no longer allowed to ride on .01% of the dirt on the other side of the ridge.
Here's the Google satellite view of the mine.
Just to the northeast is where the trail used to be
This picture was taken from the edge of the open pit. Pictures don't do this giant hole in the ground any justice at all, but to give it a little bit of scale, see the red circle in the upper right? Inside that, if you can blow up the pic big enough, you'll see an excavator's boom that is parked up there.
The other end of the area road is apparently still open, so I will try and take a ride on it some other time in the near future, but as I remember it was pretty passable with a 2wd so it'll just be a nice ride in the woods, but that's still a whole lot better than wasting another Saturday working on something.
eace:
