West Virginia Trip Post #7 - Hiking in Chief Logan State Park

The day following our visit to the Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, WV, we slept in and then went hiking in Chief Logan State Park, the location of our lodge on this trip.  We hiked the Rattlesnake Trail, supposedly a loop of 1.8 miles.  We completed this in 25 minutes and that was with a couple of longer stops going down a muddy slope.  In other words, not a 1.8 mile loop.  We then took the Coal Mine trail, a supposedly 1.0 mile loop that took us 1.5 hours, so much longer than a mile!  I think the park map needs an update.  :-)  Here are a few shots of our hike.

There was a light rain for most of the hike, but that was okay.  It kept the temperature cooler and given all of the foliage above us, we really didn't get very wet.  Our feet, however, were a different story!  It was quite muddy and wet from the previous days rains, so all of us had soaked shoes and feet by the end of the hike.  Oh well, the beautiful scenery more than made up for soaked feet!  Along the Coal Mine trail we saw the old site of a coal silo.

Very interesting!  We also saw some wildlife.  A few deer, a few squirrels, and this orange salamander!

To sum it all up, we had a great time hiking on this day in West Virginia!  Beautiful!