Booneville to Brutus Ride

Four cyclists from Team Bag Balm in Louisville traveled to eastern Kentucky for a 100 kilometer cycling route in Owsley, Clay, Perry, and Breathitt Counties on Saturday, June 11, 2011.

There's a more complete set of photographs posted on Picasa.

Here's a clip of the group riding on KY 11, between Booneville and Oneida:






When we arrived in Oneida, we stopped by a Baptist boarding school for high school students, and visited with the president's wife and the director of international admissions. Here are two of the riders outside the president's office:



From Oneida, we rode on even smaller roads, toward the hamlet of Brutus, and then to Saul. The road to Brutus was mostly following a creek, which made for moderate riding, but once we turned on KY 484 toward Saul, the serious climbing began. In Brutus, we tried to find out if the Saul post office was still open (answer: no, it burned to the ground.) One of our team members, Ted Wathen, had photographed the PO back in 1977.



The store in Brutus -- calling itself the Bullskin Trading Post, after a nearby mountain creek -- featured a couple of local fellas lounging on the front porch, discussing what the best time was to paint a house. It seemed to us that the best time was about three hours earlier, but we did not volunteer that theory.



We climbed on up to Saul, a bit of a tough, winding ascent over the ridgeline which separates Clay County from Perry County. Saul, isolated from the rest of Perry County by Buckhorn Lake, is very remote and poor. There is some mining in Perry County, and logging in the Daniel Boone National Forest, but not much else. We discovered a strange, folk art school bus in Saul, across the road from an inactive store. We took several photographs, but when we heard a gunshot on the adjoining ridge, we decided it was time to go! (To be fair to the fine people of eastern Kentucky, at no point did we think the shot was toward us or that we were ever in any danger. It just seemed like an appropriate punctuation mark for our brief visit.)




After leaving Saul, we hit a very isolated, very hilly road, KY 2022. It runs north through the Daniel Boone Forest, making two county ridgeline traverses, while passing within a mile of the oddly named (and now deserted) hamlet of Whoopflarea. .

As we descended KY 2022 gradually along a creek to Buckhorn, I grabbed a bit more video of Ian riding next to the creek. Watch for the classic eastern Kentucky footbridge at the very end of the clip:



After lunch at the Buckhorn store, we headed back on KY 28 to Booneville. This winding and hilly segment of road is part of the Transamerica Trail, the bicyclist's network of roads which runs from Yorktown, Virginia across the continent to Astoria, Oregon. It's always a spot to meet some hearty wanderers, and we encountered a fellow from New York City riding the trail all the way on a 49 cc, two stroke moped. He thought we were the crazy ones, riding across the ridgelines on our human-powered bicycles.

Overall, the route as we rode it was 61.4 miles long, with about 3,800 feet of climbing. When we rolled into the Booneville courthouse square, the bank thermometer registered 92 degrees. The loop is demanding, although the navigation is straightforward. There's essentially no cell service anywhere. There's a minor store in Oneida, one in Brutus, and one in Buckhorn. If you were to ride this, you would want to be in strong riding shape, and have the navigational and mechanical skills to problem solve on your own. We encountered no coal haul traffic while riding this loop, and saw no signs of any signifcant, active mining other than one mine entrance road near Brutus. Here is the map of the route, from Google maps:


View Larger Map

In closing, eastern Kentucky has some beautiful, obscure, challenging riding for the self-reliant cyclist.