Captina Hills
Ryan Mlynek invited me out to far eastern Ohio to ride out of Barnesville on his home turf. It is a bit of a drive out from the Columbus area, but certainly worth the travel time. I can summarize riding in this area pretty simply: everything either goes up or down and almost always super steeply. Even the drive thru at Wendy’s goes uphill. There is nothing flat. And it is about 90% gravel unlike the Blandensburg typical ratio of about 50%.
The area is the southern part of the Egypt Valley geography. It is primarily reclaimed coal mining land. As such, a lot of the route is open and hilly, much like the feeling of the AEP lands. The second half of the route features some mature forests that were not surface mined.
Coal mining is still very much part of this land’s story. As of the time of this report, the last active mine in Belmont County was still in operation, but scheduled to phase out very soon. It is an underground mine, about 1/2 mile under the land we rode upon.
The mining operation is very visible. There are huge slag piles dotting the landscape. As we came over the crest of a rise and viewed one of these pile in the distance, it truly is monstrous. Among all the hills and valleys which themselves are quite noticeable, the giant slag pile in the distance dominates the landscape. It is truly awe inspiring to think that human activity created this giant mountain. The picture below hardly captures the raw emotion of encountering one of these mammoths in person.
There are also ventilation shafts on top of the hills. These are sizable facilities and the fans are very noisy — you can hear them from miles around.
While most of the gravel is pretty typical Ohio and some of it is downright hero gravel, there are adventure segments to the route. There is a creek crossing and an immediate wall up a degraded and semi-abandoned road.
There was a very cool section heading back into Barnesville, climbing up a hill to a small brick one-room school and a Friends meeting house. Some nice tree lined narrow lanes.
I will reiterate that this is a very hilly route. There were one or two sections of a half mile where I was just starting to channel my inner roadie, getting into a nice pace, and bamm, we would turn off and head up a wall. And there are a lot of walls. Everything seems to go straight up at 20% or more. With my 40x42 I spent a lot of time in very low cadence grinding up steep hill after steep hill.
