Day 85 (August 7). East Kentucky

From: Somerset, KY

To: South Point, OH

Miles today: 237

Total miles: 17421

It was overcast the entire day, but it didn’t rain. This was much more of an issue today than normal, because I spent the day riding the incredible twisties of eastern Kentucky, and rain makes this much harder. This isn’t the horse country / plantation part of Kentucky.  This is the coal mining part, and it closely resembles West Virginia in terms of terrain, the required lifestyle (little mountains everywhere), and even accents.  It looks to the untrained eye like a sea of regular mountains, but these are not caused by folding as is the case with the Rockies, the Sierras, and further east with the Appalachians.  This is the Cumberland Plateau, one of a small number of dissected plateaus in the world.  The entire region was uplifted, strata intact, several million years ago, and it went from flat to “etched” by water erosion.  There are “mountains,” but no ridges or really even any pattern.  See the terrain images below from Google Maps.

Dissected Plateau, KY and WV.  Blue line is part of my route.  Note the relief gets bigger as you go east.

Closeup of above.  Mountain Chaos, all peaks about the same height, etched  by water.
Towns tend to be small, long, and narrow.

Dissected plateau from street level.  Left: low but very steep mountains everywhere.  Right: note the strata are basically flat, despite the roughness of the terrain; the hallmark of a dissected plateau.

It was a lot of fun to drive.  The first hundred miles today were over KY 80, a two-lane road that followed the terrain to a fairly large degree. There were lots of road cuts, but nothing too deep; typically the civil engineers just carved a roadbed into a hillside.  Lots of tight turns, and I’m glad the road was dry and I didn’t have to deal with rain and fogging on my visor.  The next hundred plus miles were really amazing, from a road construction viewpoint.  Part of this was the northeast end of KY 80, and most of the rest US 23.  The road crews have created roads through the Cumberland Plateau that you can actually drive at 65 mph (although the posted speed limit is 55 mph).  The roads are a lot straighter. They way they created these straighter roads was obvious: lots and lots of dynamite. The road cuts were so deep that at times I felt like I was driving though a narrow canyon.  I wanted to get some pictures, but there was no safe place to pull over and the traffic was pretty heavy.  Maybe tomorrow, through West Virginia.

US 27 follows the river that separates Kentucky from West Virginia for a ways; this is called the Big Sandy River. It joins the Ohio River near the small city of Huntington, WV, and across the Ohio River is the state of the same name.  I am on the north bank, in Ohio, tonight. There is a smaller town in West Virginia called Kenova that is located on the confluence of the two rivers.  I took a short side trip to a small park at the point where they join.  Thus, you can see three states in the picture below.

This is Virginia Point Park, WV.  Not a great photo, but that's the Big Sandy River coming in from the left, joining the Ohio coming out of the background and going off to the right.  Thus, the foreground is West Virginia, the land in the left background is Kentucky, and the land in the right background is Ohio.