I spent the past week with family, getting acquainted with the southern end of West Virginia on a Sierra Club multi-sport camping trip.

The trip was led and organized by Marty Joyce of Pittsburg, PA, and drew a lively group of the very best sort of people, if I do say so myself.

Evan and I were joined and sponsored by my parents, Bill and Betty. We camped at 4,100-acre Babcock State Park, an area I would recommend mainly for its proximity to more exciting places in the New River Gorge region.
We hiked the cliffs and slopes along the river, which is actually quite old, and spent two days paddling north with the current on an overnight rafting trip with Songer Whitewater, one of several rafting companies in the region. It’s been a dry summer down there, and the New River was running low and warm. That suited our group just fine. Ev and I paddled most of the trip in a two-man yellow rubber ‘duckie,’ an inflatable kayak. We did some swimming along the way, much of it on purpose.
The topography of "Wild and Wonderful" West Virginia is notorious. It’s like Vermont on steroids. There’s hardly enough flat ground in the entire state to pitch two tents, and much of our travels around the region (Kanawha, Fayette, Summers and Greenbriar Counties) took us along the twistiest and steepest stretches of tarmac I’ve ever encountered. I wouldn’t want to bicycle beside the local traffic, but it would be a great destination for a motorcycle tour.
There are copperheads and timber rattlers in those hills, but we didn’t stumble upon any, which was OK with me. We spotted herons, deer, beaver, hawks, a hummingbird and turkey vultures, and heard owls and tree frogs. Our most interesting wildlife encounter involved insects. While admiring some butterflies feeding on flowers at the Canyon Rim visitor center, Evan and I spotted a praying mantis preying on one of the butterflies (black wings, blue, white and orange spots, no idea of species but they were very common). We watched it gobble up all but the wings in 15 minutes flat. Proportional to body size, that would be like eating a whole hog ion one sitting.
We trekked down a mile of switchbacks and then 800 stairs to the Kaymoor Mine, a defunct coal mine. Though sealed by a steel gate, the shaft openings provided natural air-conditioning for a cool respite halfway down the slope.
On Thursday we bicycled (and ran, in my case) along an old rail line to the old railway town of Thurmond, population four, where the C&O rail line served as Main Street.
On our way back to Charleston and home we explored the Lost World Caverns in Lewisburg, and visited the Great Bend Tunnel in Talcot, one of a few places with plausible claim to being the actual place where the real John Henry beat that  steam drill down. It was a fine trip, and I ate enough biscuits to last until the next time.

Here’s a photo my folks took of Evan and myself, on a sandstone cliff overlooking the New River: