Further adventures awaited us after our successful morning in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. We still had an entire afternoon remaining. Fewer people lived along the next stretch of our itinerary though. I had to dig a little deeper to find a way to break up the drive. Beautiful scenery surrounded us at every turn although little else noteworthy happened in these hidden hollows. Settlers largely bypassed this area on their journey to more promising lands. Time stood still. Luckily I could rely upon my old road trip standbys to fill the afternoon. Of course I’m referring to booze and bridges.
Appalachian Distillery
Usually I visit breweries. Not out here. A handful of breweries dotted West Virginia’s Ohio River towns like the one I visited the previous day in Parkersburg. However, the same could not be said so deep in the interior. The craft brewery trend may take a little while longer to filter into these remote corners.
Lots of outside observers unfairly malign West Virginia as a toxic wasteland full of coalmine slurry and Hatfield-McCoy hillbilly feuds. These outdated stereotypes generally do not reflect reality. I’ve confirmed that impression numerous times on repeated visits. West Virginia brims with scenic beauty and a decidedly proud people. Nonetheless in a pinch, and given the opportunity, I ventured straight towards the moonshine.
Now, to be fair, the moonshine in question came from a thoroughly modern facility with an inviting tasting room near Ripley, West Virginia. Nobody hunched over clandestine stills hidden amongst mountainous crags in the dark of night.
Appalachian Distillery made a bunch of different flavor-infused styles too. Visitors could sample as many as they liked. I selected several small tastes and chose the 40 proof Blackberry sold in a glass bottle shaped like a vintage moonshine jug. Folks could also get the throat-burning white lightning if they wanted a traditional recipe, or even a whiskey if they preferred something smoother. We also took a brief tour although my son enjoyed playing with the mash-house kittens more than my fascination with the distillation process.
They seemed to do a decent business, creating local jobs and making plans to grow their capacity.
Staats Mill Covered Bridge
Then we headed towards a couple of covered bridges. We found the first one just a bit up the road on the grounds of the Cedar Lakes Conference Center. The Staats Mill Covered Bridge originally spanned a nearby river upon its construction in 1887. It stood there for about a century until its relocation. Then it became the centerpiece of the conference center where it spanned a small pond instead a river, more decorative than functional.
Vehicles no longer used it. In fact, anyone could easily walk around the entire pond in a couple of minutes. The pond was just large enough to support an assortment of stocked fish, which anglers seemed to enjoy on a beautiful spring afternoon.
Sarvis Fork Bridge
We visited another bridge a little while later; this one called the Sarvis Fork or Sandyville Covered Bridge. An active road ran along its span so we drove across. Boards groaned under the weight of our car in a frightening display of rattles and pops. We couldn’t turn around by that point so we finished crossing and then had to cross a second time to get back to our route. We must have done something right because we didn’t break through the deck and land in Sarvis Fork.
Upon my return home and after some Internet searching, I learned that a complete overhaul had been completed in 2000. Presumably the bridge offered no danger whatsoever, it simply creaked. A lot.
Tracking East
Two more new captures took place that afternoon, Wirt County and Calhoun County. Ordinarily, nobody would travel to either of these places without a reason. Neither qualified as Interstate counties, and in fact no significant road ran anywhere through the vicinity, Interstate or otherwise. Wirt qualified as West Virginia’s least populated county with fewer than six thousand residents. It reached its zenith in 1900 with about ten thousand and declined from there. Calhoun didn’t register much higher, being known more for its stargazing opportunities. Few lights interfered with its nighttime view.
We captured Wirt pretty easily. Calhoun offered more of a challenge. I’ve learned to live with the limitations and idiosyncrasies of my GPS although it threw me for a loop this time. I’d plotted everything out on Google Maps and the route looked fine. My GPS, however, took us down increasingly smaller roads as I approached Calhoun. Then it started taking us up a mountain. Then the road turned to gravel. That didn’t bother me too much because I learned to drive on gravel and I figured we’d get back to asphalt at the next split. However, nearing the summit, the GPS wanted us to turn onto a deeply rutted, muddy path that looked more like a hiking trail.
That’s when I finally figured I’d been led astray. Common sense kicked-in and I backtracked to asphalt so I wouldn’t become one of those GPS horror stories of people blindly following along until stuck or worse. We probably lost about 45 minutes although I paid much closer attention for the rest of the trip. That was our only mishap of the entire journey.
We ended the day along Interstate 79 in a town called Flatwoods. Hotel options seemed almost nonexistent in West Virginia’s sparse interior. The few we found seemed to cater to Interstate travelers so that’s where we parked for the night. Then we had dinner at a Mexican restaurant, because, why not.
Articles in the Finishing West Virginia Series:
See Also: The Complete Photo Album on Flickr
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