Today, up onto the Allegheny Plateau. It's an uplifted area west of (and immediately adjacent to and in contact with) the Allegheny/Appalachian mountains. The plateau is uplifted as a block with basically horizontal sedimentary strata, whereas the mountains to the east are tilted up with sharply inclined or near vertical strata. We're going through the southern part of the plateau which was not glaciated in the most recent glacial era, so wasn't buffed by the continental ice sheets and therefore has sharper relief and erosion than the northern glaciated portion of the plateau. It's not a plateau recognizable to us westerners: it's so old that more of it consists of the eroded gullies, ravines, and valleys - and when one is actually on the plateau, it doesn't seem flat at all.
At the eastern edge is a fault that separates the plateau from the Allegheny mountains which are parallel ridges comparable to the front range ridges.
Today we rode the first half of the plateau, to the Ohio River which cuts through the plateau from Western Pennsylvania. The area is known as Hocking Hills, and consists of the heavily furrowed/eroded western edge of the plateau and is quite a jumble of small cliffs and bluffs of sedimentary rock and broken off pieces of the cliffs. Might look like this in some parts of Utah if Utah had trees. Tomorrow we ride the second half of the plateau and Saturday start through the Allegheny ridges.
Sorry, no pictures - rain day and kept the camera hidden.
The image is Wikipedia's terrain map showing the boundary between the plateau and the Allegheny Mountain ridge system.
Never climbed as much as 300 feet at a time today, but it was all up and down and up and down.
Our destination town is Parkersburg, named after Fess Parker. (For those of you too young to know, or for our Australian-speaking friends who may have missed this: Fess Parker played Davey Crockett (King of the Wild Frontier) in the TV show of the 1950's - perhaps the most important cultural event of the era - along with Roy Rogers. The premier scene of the series involved Davey firing his muzzle loading rifle over his shoulder, striking numerous candelabra and other metal pieces around the fireplace, and finally catching the bullet in the gap in his front teeth. In doing so, he won some sort of bet from his nemesis, Mike Fink, shortly after "rasslin' a 'bar'" - the days before spell-checkers. A true tour-de-force in the pre-photoshop era.) Unfortunately, Wikipedia has it all wrong and claims that Parkersburg was named after some guy who lived there right after the Revolutionary War. I'll have to edit the Wiki entry to set folks straight.
Heavy thunderstorm at 8:30 AM with lots of lightning along the ridges while we rode in the valley. Pretty spectacular. Then, light rain for a few more hours and a fantastic afternoon through the valleys and over the ridges eventually following a tributary down to the Ohio River.
5.9 hr, 163 km/103 miles, 2931 kJoule, 103 pulse, 154 watts, 27.9 km/hr (17.5 mph). Unsure of total climb - the rain interferes with altitude on the Garmin. (Reportedly about 6000 ft - seems like an overestimation, though climbing 100 feet 60 times may not be that far off.)
BTW the gnarly left arm in Nate's pictures isn't sunburn - remnants of an unfortunate event with a rumble strip on day 1 (several of us).
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