Bicycling in PA and MD with Friends
An annual tradition is to travel to Confluence PA and ride on portions of the Great Allegheny Passage. This trail has one end at the edge of Pittsburgh and another in Cumberland MD. In Cumberland, the trail connects to the C & O dirt trail that continues on to Washington DC.
On our first ride, we travel to Confluence from the Yough Stop camping cabin, to ride to OhioPyle for our lunch stop. This is a pleasant town that is a tourist town for users of the trail and the river.
This is a crushed limestone trail. That just means that you go slower, and have more time to enjoy the woods and water.
Along the way, Jeff would stop and show us the various parts of the river as he had done various kayak trips here.
Here is an example of the quality map that is available. You can see that there are many services available in towns along the way.
We rode over this bridge and a short distance toward Connelsville, before turning around and back to our start in Confluence.
On our second day we went to Meyersdale for fabulous pancakes (one is enough), and rode up to the Eastern Continental Divide and back. It was a gentle up hill slope to the divide and the Savage Mountain tunnel and then a wonderful ride downhill to town.
I take so many photos and had Jeff take one of me to show that I rode to the Eastern Continental Divide. We returned back to base for a nice supper.
For our last riding day as a group of four, we decide to drive to Cumberland and ride a portion of the C & O Tow Path Trail. Since we had a drier than normal summer, we thought the dirt trail would be ok to ride on. The website shows many interesting pictures, but the section that we rode on was not so interesting. We traveled by several lock houses and canal locks. The houses were locked up and there wasn’t much descriptive signs.
This trail has not been upgraded from a dirt path, so the pot holes and dirt made for a bone shaking ride for Lynne and I, as we had regular road bikes. Unfortunately, when the path needed holes filled in, they chose to use the wrong size of gravel that is difficult to ride on. I would hate to ride on those sections if the trail was wet.