The Best Mountain Biking in West Virginia

Purpose-built flow

The Arrowhead Trails in New River Gorge National Park are the state's best-known purpose-built system — Clovis, Adena, Dalton and LeCroy, machine-cut with flowing grades and berms, designed for bikes and open to hikers. They are the right introduction to riding in the gorge and they are close to Fayetteville.

The Summit Bechtel Reserve, next door, holds a very large purpose-built network with public access arrangements that vary; check current status before making the drive.

Snowshoe runs lift-served downhill in summer on a limited schedule, which is the only real bike park experience in the state.

Highland singletrack

Canaan Valley and Canaan Mountain hold the classic West Virginia riding: rocky, rooty, wet in places, and genuinely demanding. The Plantation Trail system is the reference point, and it will humble people who have only ridden flow trail.

Around Davis and Thomas the network connects to the Blackwater Canyon grade, which gives a long gentle descent as a reward or a return leg. Further south, the Tea Creek area in the Monongahela is one of the best and least-known singletrack clusters in the mid-Atlantic.

Mountaineer Country around Morgantown has a growing trail network plus the Mon River and Deckers Creek rail-trails for connectors.

Rail-trails and gravel

The Greenbrier River Trail is the headline: roughly seventy miles of former railroad grade along a river with almost no elevation change, which makes it the best multi-day bikepacking route in the state. Camping along it is straightforward and the towns are spaced sensibly.

The North Bend Rail Trail crosses the Mid-Ohio Valley through tunnels. The Blackwater Canyon Trail drops down a spectacular gorge. The Mon River system links Morgantown north and south.

Gravel riding on the Monongahela forest roads is superb and largely undiscovered — long climbs, big views, and almost no traffic. The roads around Canaan, Dolly Sods and the Highland Scenic Highway are the obvious places to start, with the caveat that several are unmaintained in winter.

Motorised is a separate world

The Hatfield-McCoy Trails are a very large ATV and off-road system across the southern coalfields, running as multiple named trail systems with permits required and ATV-friendly towns built around them. It is one of the biggest such networks in the country.

It is not mountain biking and should not be confused with it. If you want quiet singletrack, this is the wrong end of the state; if you want to ride a machine on hundreds of miles of legal trail, there is nothing else like it east of the Mississippi.

Seasons

June through October is the core season. Spring is muddy and highland trails take damage when ridden wet — the local etiquette on that is strict and worth respecting. Autumn is the best riding of the year, with the additional benefit that the leaf cover makes rocky descents interesting.

Summer at elevation is genuinely pleasant, which is the argument for Canaan and Snowshoe in July while the rest of the region bakes.

Questions

Read next

Destination · Greenbrier Valley

The Greenbrier River Trail

A guide to the Greenbrier River Trail: trailheads, camping, bikepacking it end to end, tubing alongside it, and the best sections for a day out.

8 min read Destination · Southern Coalfields

The Hatfield-McCoy Trails

A guide to the Hatfield-McCoy Trails: the individual trail systems, permits, difficulty, ATV-friendly towns and how the network actually works.

8 min read Destination · Potomac Highlands

Things to Do in Davis and Thomas, West Virginia

A guide to Davis and Thomas, West Virginia: Blackwater Falls, Dolly Sods access, Canaan Valley skiing and two of the best small towns in Appalachia.

8 min read