This is my favoirte place to go riding, so far. Mainly because it's only 2 hours from my house, and I've been riding there since October, I've been about 8 times and each time we go down new trails and find places we've never been before, often times getting a slight sense of "what have we done" when it involves a hard rock crawl or climb to get in or out.
Anyway,
This week just when I thought we'd seen it all we decided to follow three rail buggies that we'd been watching climb rocks all day. They led us off the main trail towards a trail that takes you to the lake area (near the interstate) then veered off on another trail I think we'd never followed because of the rocks and not knowing how to get around them previously. At one area where the rocks were nearly vertical for about 15 or 20 feet we had to go off through the woods and make our own trail around while the buggies climbed up. They said we were going to the "natural bridge". We ended up in an area that is stil being logged, there was machinery parked there, the logging roads were not rutted and showed little signs of ATV use, like they'd been cut in, in the last few months. Regardless we went down to one area so the buggies could take pictures under a huge ledge. They headed out and I got separated. Not knowing my way on these traisl and having so many of them look alike, also as far as I knew there was only one way in or out to get back to the main riding area I stopped. I was lagging behind, I ride a Bayou 220 and my friend has a Raptor, so it's easy for him to get way out in front while I'm still hopping rocks and tree limbs. The other thing is since I didn't know the route and there were about 4 or 5 different ways they could have turned off I just stopped at the intersection and waited. The guys and gal on the buggies had said from here we were still a 40 minute ride from "natural bridge" this is not the same one as is near Red River Gorge, KY.
My question is, doese anyone know if there is an aerial survey or maps of the area anywhere online? We were South and west of the main riding area. My friend came back to get me, but the sun was getting low and given the number of rocks we were going to have to crawl and the steep cliffs that some of them dropped off of we didn't want to be riding back in the dark.
Anybody have pictures of the "natural bridge" ? Anybody know the whole route for getting there?
We'll probably go back and camp later this month. Hopefully we can hit those trails earlier in the day and find it next time. We had to have been several miles in (maybe 10-12 miles), riding hard it still took about 30 minutes to get all the way back to the pink rock where we parked our trucks.
Anybody have anything to add? Like where there might be an aerial pic, information on current logging projects that show the logging roads, etc?