Ride Review: Hatfield McCoy - Little Coal River

Friends, Romans, Countrymen...

I'm back from an exciting weekend of riding at the Little Coal River portion of the Hatfield McCoy Trails. Traveled down there about 5 hours from the Punxsutawney, PA area on Friday morning. Unloaded at Big Earl's Campground and hit the trails at about 1:45 and rode until 6:00. We covered about 30 miles on our two RZR's, hitting only green and blue trails.

We started out Saturday morning at about 10:00 and by chance, we ran into some friends who were staying at Kathryn's Kabins. They were piloting a 400EX and 250X, respectively. We covered 95% the trails on Saturday, amassing 55 miles on the odometer. Covered all green's, most blue's, and all black trails in only about 10 hours of riding.

Trails were well groomed, well marked, and the map from the website was extremely accurate. Was glad that I laminated my map before going down there. Trails were marked fairly well, although the brown 'posts' were kinda hard to see sometimes and it was easy to blow past them. An increase in the size of the signage would be a plus.

There wasn't an abundance of mud, just some water holes with hard bottoms in them. Also, for being on the side of a mountain, I was really expecting there to be more hillclimbs. The trails were what I would consider to be very rocky. I think the difficulty levels were based on the number of rocks on the trails. My personal opinion is that rocks don't really make it difficult, it only serves to abuse/beat up your equipment. Overall, I felt that even the 'black' trails were really easy, probably a 2 on a 1-10 scale.

The only other thing I noticed was that there was a lack of what I will call 'play' areas. I expected to come across some mud pits or a set of hillclimb areas where you could just sorta stop, relax and watch people crawling through the mud or rippin' around on some hillclimbs. That was not the case

Had a lot of fun. Enjoyed the weekend. Enjoyed the scenery. Enjoyed the trails. Enjoyed not worrying about being harassed about where I was riding at.

Would I go back? Yes, but not to that same trail. Would definitely want to hit the other trail sections before I went to this one again.

Overall it was still a fun trip and I would recommend it to anyone. I think maybe I had my hopes set a bit too high and I'll be honest that where I grew up, I was spoiled with having tons of places to ride, of varying degrees of difficulty. I can go five minutes from the house and climb hills much, much steeper than I encountered on the LCR trails.

Scale:
* - Poor
*** - Average
***** - Awesome

Fun Factor - ****
Difficulty - * (too easy)
Hillclimbs - * (wasn't many)
Mud - * (wasn't much)
Rocks - ** (a few too many, hard on equipment)
Trail Congestion - ***** (there was hardly anyone there)
Peace of mind - ***** (nice to know you aren't gonna get chased off)
Price - ***** ($50 for the year is pretty dang cheap if u ask me)
Likelihood to return - ***** (yes will return but to different trail)
Overall - ***