A Long Day Trip In The Mountains, July 25, 2019

"The Miner's Home", Photo By Roger D. Hicks

Yesterday, July 25, 2019, my wife Candice and I took a long road trip in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky.  We left home at about 8:30am and never got back until about 7:15pm.  I drove 289 miles across parts of seven counties, Morgan, Wolfe, Breathitt, Perry, Leslie, Harlan, and Letcher.  We covered a lot of ground and still got a lot done, met one or two interesting people, had a pretty good lunch, and still got home in time to watch Jeopardy.  I will post just three or four photos on this blog post and will write at least two other posts about specific sites we visited with a lot more photos specific to those sites on the blog posts about them.  The original intent was to see the Kentucky Coal Museum in Benham, Kentucky, and for Candice to be able to say she had been to the top of Black Mountain and had been to Harlan County.  Actually, by the time we had made it home, we had been across the two biggest mountains in Kentucky, Black Mountain and Pine Mountain.  And, due to the time and distance, we did not get to stop and see several, perhaps many, of the things we would have liked to see such as the statue in tribute to Mary Breckinridge and the Frontier Nursing Service and the Hurricane Creek Mine Disaster Memorial both in Hyden .  We also had thought about trying to see the Portal 31 Exhibition Mine but it is not possible for Candice to see it in her wheelchair and I decided to try to do more of other, more accessible things.  I do plan to return to Harlan County sometime soon, see some of the things I had missed and shoot some photos in the old coal camps we saw such as Harlan, Lynch, Benham, Loyall, and Evarts. Lynch is actually one of the more preserved sections of coal camp homes I have seen.  We were also struck by the similarity of one section of the street in Lynch to that in Wayland, Kentucky, in Floyd County.  Even with modern remodels, many of the homes in both coal camps are built along a very similar and basic coal company plan. 

Pro-UMWA Poster, Photo by Roger D. Hicks

We left home through Cannel City, KY, actually another old coal camp town, and passed through Jackson and Breathitt County, Hazard and Perry County, Hyden and Leslie County, and finally got to Harlan about lunch time.  We had seen an Indian restaurant advertised on the internet known as "Little India" and wanted to have lunch there but we couldn't find it.  We did find a police officer on duty in Loyall, KY, and asked him.  He grinned and said, "She changed the name of it to "Good Eats" because people around here...".  I interrupted and said, "...wouldn't eat Indian food."  We had a chuckle about it and he said, "I was eating there just this week.  People said it was too spicy but it's not really."  I thanked him and we went back to Good Eats which we had actually seen while searching for Little India.  We went in and found a local Caucasian woman behind the counter and met the wonderfully friendly Indian-American female owner a bit later.  She actually grew up in Oklahoma City and was raised, as she put it, "By  my grandmother and she was a very traditional Indian Muslim woman."  There was only one Indian item on the menu, Chicken Tikka Masala, which we both had while nearly everybody around us ate fish.  When I told what the police officer said, the owner said "He eats here a lot."  The server told us to choose a degree of hotness somewhere from 1 to 10.  Candice chose 3 and I chose 6.  I could not have handled 7 but I liked the food except for the fact that it was served in Styrofoam containers with plastic utensils.  But the overall impression I got from the encounter is that I am glad this woman came to Harlan and I never asked her why.  But it is great to see a friendly, intelligent, welcoming Muslim raised Indian-American woman helping to spread brotherhood around Southeastern Kentucky.

Candice Hicks In The Fountain at Mine Museum, Photo By Roger D. Hicks

After lunch, we toured the Coal Mine Museum, went to the top of Black Mountain and headed toward Kingdom Come State Park where I hiked an hour along the primitive road, actually known as the Little Shepherd Trail, which runs from the park to Whitesburg, KY, fourteen miles away.  It is the heart of bear country and has cautionary signs posted everywhere.  During my hike which must have been three to four miles along the ridge, I never saw any wildlife of any kind and got back home to learn that one of my old high school teachers had a bear in her yard in Knott County that day.  But I never saw bear, elk, deer, coyote, bobcat, fox, coon, possum, rabbit, or squirrel for the entire hike.

I Always Wanted A Photo With A Long Legged Cheerleader, Photo by Candice Hicks

Then we left the area on US119 to Whitesburg, turned on KY 15 South through Isom and on to Hazard and Jackson.  I will write more about this trip on separate blog posts about the individual sites we saw, so please come back and look for those posts.

Poster For The Day Hank Williams Died, Photo By Roger D. Hicks