magaw
Magaw
This is a series of Short road and camping trips , in and around the mountains of West Virginia, that me and my closest friends and family have enjoyed. Not all of the trips we take are off road but we think they are interesting, none the less.
Our group has a plethora of options when it comes to transportation. Here are some of the rides we use on our trips as well as daily drivers:
My Jeep ZJ
Stacy's 4runner
Lorne's Ural
Jeremy's Frontier
Disclaimer: These trips aren't in order I will do my best to tell when they took place. I wanna start with a recent trip to Fayetteville, WV that my wife and I took this weekend (While it's still fresh in my mind).
There is a little historical back ground to the motivation for our trip to Fayetteville. A year ago I was searching the interweb for some interesting destination ideas and came across a list of ancient stone faces in America, to my surprise there was one listed in West Virgina. The description was vague and it included a picture from a post card printed in the 1940s. After scouring the internet for many hours I could find only three pictures and barely anything about this stone head , called "the Old Man of the Canyon". Supposedly it was located at the intersection of route 19 and 21 in a place called Chimney Corner. After looking at my Gazetteer I realized that the description on the post card was so old that the Route numbers have since changed . Looking closely at the map for a few, I nailed down, the location where I thought the old post card was describing. With nothing better to do on a Saturday, my wife and I decided that we would go check it out, since it was only a little over an hour away from our home town.
The Fayettville area has tons of stuff to do and lots of great places to eat. With the location of the "Old Man of the Canyon" being right in the New River Gorge, we knew it would be a great trip even if it was just for the day.
We stopped to read a historical marker along the way. I don't know if the giant stone head is man made or a coincidence of nature, but either or, I would have to think it was revered by the ancient people of the area. That marker is a whole other trip but one for my Jeep and not our 4runner. So we found Chimney Corner. As you can see on the pic of the map it is at the intersection of route 60 and route 16. After turning onto 16 you will drive about 200-300 yards and right before you start to cross a small bridge look up to your left and low and behold there it is! This thing is enormous I'm guessing that the length of the face is around 25 feet tall
The funny part is that we have driven right by this thing like fifty times and missed it some how. I want to try to find out more about it, maybe see if there were any native Indian tales or even if it was a product of the road being made? The black and white picture shown above was taken from the Fayette County Historical Society so that seems like a good place to start. I wanted to try and get a pic of the 4runner in front of it but there was too much traffic and the old man sits in the middle of a blind turn.