April 24, 2008
If you have not ridden in the mountains of West Virginia, you’ll want to read further. On a recent trip to the Buffalo Mountain Trail System, which is part of the Hatfield McCoy trails, we satisfied our demand of off road riding and then some. The winter played a toll on our group. Even three days of rain could not stop us from enjoying this legendary ride. In total we logged about 70 miles of trails, and put about 115 total miles on our quads in four days. The system has about 95 miles of trails, most of which are easily marked in green on the handy trail map. More difficult trials are marked in blue. For those of you wanting a bigger challenge trails marked in black are the hardest. 10% of the trail system is single lane and marked as orange on the map. We rode all of the easy and most the blue and black trails and ended up having a blast even in the extremely muddy conditions.
After our five hour drive we came to the very small town of Delbarton, WV. Home sweet home was now at the Split Pine Lodge for the next four days. The rain was a bummer, but we quickly unpacked the gear, quads and food and looked forward to hitting the trails nonetheless. Once Barbara the lodge owner handed us our $47 yearly trail pass we bolted down the road. Yes, you read that correct, the road! In this area quads are legal on the streets! We rode countless times down the street and filled up at the gas stations without anyone even blinking an eye. How cool is that? Even with 12 quads humming down the street no one even looked at us. It’s all normal there. Now the trail system is sweet, but cruising up the mountain road in route to the trail entrance was out of this world. The rain that we rode in made it perfect to slide out the tail end at 40 miles per hour up the mountain road. This place was just too cool.
Once we got off the road we found very clearly marked trails, which were also perfectly maintained. There were some technical parts but for the most part my Suzuki Z400 took me any place I aimed it. However, since it was raining, the best quad on this day was a 4x4 utility. We stopped a few times to coax the 4x4 riders in our group to hit the holes while we shot photos. Trust us, seeing water up to the bars on the big utilities was kind of scary and cool at the same time. Cool because it was a blast, scary because we weren’t interested in towing anyone back to camp, since camp was over 30 miles away.
