Best Tent Camping: West Virginia: Your Car-Camping Guide to Scenic Beauty, the Sounds of Nature, and an Escape from Civilization

by Johnny Molloy

Overview

From the Allegheny Highlands to the Feudin' Country of the Hatfields and McCoys, camping in West Virginia has never been better. Best Tent Camping: West Virginia, now in its third edition, is a guidebook for tent campers who like quiet, scenic, and serene campsites. It's the perfect resource if you blanch at the thought of pitching a tent on a concrete slab, trying to sleep through the blare of another camper's boombox, or waking up to find your tent surrounded by a convoy of RVs.

In Best Tent Camping: West Virginia, outdoor adventurer Johnny Molloy guides readers to the quietest, most beautiful, most secure, and best-managed campgrounds in the Mountain State. Painstakingly selected from hundreds of campgrounds, each campsite is rated for beauty, noise, privacy, security, spaciousness, and cleanliness.

Each campground profile gives unbiased and thorough evaluations, taking the guess work out of finding the perfect site.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780897324977
Publisher:	Menasha Ridge Press
Publication date:	07/21/2014
Series:	Best Tent Camping
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	24 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Johnny Molloy is a writer and adventurer based in Johnson City, TN. He has written more than 40 books about the outdoors, including hiking guidebooks, camping guidebooks, paddling guidebooks, comprehensive guidebooks about a specific area, and true outdoor adventure books throughout the Eastern United States. Molloy writes for varied magazines and websites, and he is a columnist and feature writer for his local paper, the Johnson City Press. He continues writing and traveling extensively throughout the United States, endeavoring in a variety of outdoor pursuits.

Read an Excerpt

Bear Heaven

Ratings
Beauty: 5 stars
Site privacy: 3 stars
Spaciousness: 4 stars
Quiet: 5 stars
Security: 3 stars
Cleanliness: 4 stars

Address: Bear Heaven, P.O. Box 368 Parsons, WV 26287
Operated by: U.S. Forest Service
Information: [phone]
Open: Year-round
Sites: 8
Each site has: Picnic table, fire grate, lantern post
Assignment: first come, first served; no reservations
Registration: Self-registration on site
Facilities: Pump well, vault toilets
Parking: At campsites only
Fee: $5 per night
Elevation: 3,600 feet
Restrictions: Pets: On leash only. Fires: In fire grates only. Alcoholic beverages: At campsites only. Vehicles: None. Other: 14-day stay limit.

Bear Heaven lies on a spur ridge high on Shavers Mountain outside Elkins. It can be pretty cool on summer nights. I can only imagine how cold it is in mid-January. Most tent campers will head up this way during the warmer months to enjoy a small, quiet campground tucked away on the back side of the Otter Creek Wilderness.

The Otter Creek drainage forms the centerpiece of this preserved national forest land. Mountain ridges are the borders, where spruce stands and bogs hold strong. Lower in the wilderness are tangles of rhododendron over which grow northern hardwood species such as cherry and yellow birch. This area was once logged and many trails follow old railroad grades. In other areas, apple trees mark homesites long since abandoned. On the edge of this wilderness, Bear Heaven campground awaits your arrival.

What does this mean for you? It means a great place to explore the heart of natural West Virginia, where the woods are king. After a day's hiking and sight-seeing, you can return to your ridgetop camp and reflect on the day's sights. (One of those sights will be what a fitting campground to be adjacent to the Otter Creek Wilderness. Another might literally be a lookout-from atop the jumbled rock outcrop near the campground picnic area where you can gaze south over a sea of wooded ridges.)

Leave the spur road off Stuart Memorial Drive and enter Bear Heaven Recreation Area. To your right is the picnic area and rock outcrop. This spur ridge is level by mountain standards and covered in a northern hardwood forest dominated by beech and cherry trees. The canopy thickens in summer, with an understory of sugar maple and striped maple. Come winter, you can better see the numerous gray boulders strewn about the campground like childrens' toy blocks tossed around a room.

Three sites occupy the main road. Wood log borders keep campers where they ought to be. The campsites are dispersed and large, even though this spur ridge is narrow. There are winter views into the woods below. Some less-than-level sites have tent pads.

Entering a five-campsite loop, sites #4 and #5, the two prettiest and most used, are integrated into the boulder-dominated landscape. Swing around the loop and pass the final few campsites. This small campground has only eight units, offering the good and bad of small campgrounds: intimate, yet easily packed with campers, as well. Bear Heaven fills during mid-summer weekends and traditional summer holidays. Other than that you should have no problem getting a campsite.

There are no trails leaving directly from the campground, other than the short walk to teh rock outcrop by the picnic area, but there is a whole wilderness just to the north. Less than a mile away, on Forest Road 303, which you passed on the way in, lies the main trailhead for the southern side of the Otter Creek Wilderness. The area's 20,000 acres of rocky ridges and rhododendron-lined creeks thrive, along with its wildlife, under wilderness protection since 1975.

Here, you can start the upper end of the Otter Creek Trail. This 11-mile footpath is the backbone of the trail system. Several loop hikes can be made using a combination of trails. One circuit starts north down the Otter Creek Trail and turns right on the Mylius Gap Trail. Climb up to Mylius Gap, then turn right on the Shavers Mountain Trail and follow it for 4.3 miles to the Hedrick Camp Trail. Turn right here and you'll soon intersect the Otter Creek Trails for a 9.4-mile loop.

Or start at the top of Otter Creek Trail and walk 4.4 miles down to Pothole Falls, Otter Creek's tallest fall. Then return the way you came. To stay in the high country, start at Alpena Gap near U.S. 33 and walk out along the Shavers Mountain Trail.

Even as remote as Bear Heaven seems, the fully equipped town of Elkins is just 10 miles away, in case you need supplies or any civilized trappins. Between Elkins and Bear Heaven is the Bowden Fish Hatchery. If you have never visited a hatchery, check it out. There are fish of all sizes swimming in the tanks. It may inspire you to take a rod down to Otter Creek and toss a line for the native brook trout lying secretively in the cool pools.

Table of Contents

Working Table of Contents

Allegheny Highlands
Bear Heaven
Bishop Knob
Blue Bend
Cranberry
Day Run
Horseshoe Run
Island
Kumbrabow State Forest
Lake Sherwood
Laurel Fork
Pocahontas
Seneca State Forest
Spruce Knob Lake
Summit Lake
Tea Creek
Watoga State Park

Eastern Panhandle
Big Bend
Blackwater Falls State Park
Brandywine Lake
Camp Run
Hawk
Red Creek
Seneca Shadows
Sleepy Creek
Trout Pond
Wolf Gap

Feudin' Country
Beech Fork State Park
Cabwaylingo State Forest
Chief Logan State Park
Kanawha State Forest
Panther State Forest
R.D. Bailey Lake

Heart of West Virginia
Audra State Park
Bakers Run/Mill Creek
Bulltown
Cedar Creek State Park
Coopers Rock State Forest
Holly River State Park
Pleasant Creek Wildlife Management Area

New River Valley
Army Camp
Babcock State Park
Bluestone State Park
Camp Creek State Park and Forest
Glade Creek
Greenbrier River State Forest
Moncove Lake State Park

Ohio River Valley
Lewis Wetzel
McClintic Wildlife Management Area
North Bend State Park
Tomlinson Run State Park

Appendices