THIS MONTH:

Participating in this year’s Ladies Offroad Challenge which begins May 13th and continues for ten weeks. Designed by Charlene Bower as a fun way of building skills, the challenges offer something for everyone, and can be as hard or easy as desired — though at least one is designed to push participants outside their comfort zones…

COMING UP SOON:

Attending the Ladies Offroad Network Convention in Atlanta, GA. The 3rd annual convention will be held August 1-4, 2019, with lots of hands-on opportunities to gain all types of offroading skills, learn and engage with other offroad ladies as they share their stories, and laugh the whole way. The convention is an action-packed, interactive 4-day weekend educating, motivating, and guiding offroad ladies…


Heading to a small village in Serbia to help out with the annual plum harvest and spend some time exploring the countryside with friends …


Back to Pennsylvania Coal Country to guide for the 2019 Women’s Wheeling Day at Rausch Creek Offroad Park hosted by Jeep Girls Rock. The day focuses on learning, enjoying the trails and meeting new friends, and is for all trail levels, from beginners to advanced. Female Guides will be assigned to each group and will encourage those who have never wheeled before as they build confidence out on the trails and learn what their vehicle is capable of (guys are welcomed to attend and ride along with women drivers at this family event) …

ABOUT THE SHENANDOAH NP:

Just 75 miles from the bustle of Washington, D.C., Shenandoah National Park is an escape to recreation and re-creation. Cascading waterfalls, spectacular vistas, quiet wooded hollows all encourage visitors to take a hike, meander along Skyline Drive, or picnic with the family. 200,000 acres of protected lands are haven to deer, songbirds, the night sky–and you. Skyline Drive runs 105 miles north and south along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Shenandoah National Park and is the only public road through the park. It takes about three hours to travel the entire length of the park on a clear day. In 1924 the search for a national park site in the east brought the Southern Appalachian National Park Committee to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Their job was to find a site accessible to the 40 million Americans living in eastern cities including Washington, DC. The committee recommended the site that is today visited by millions of Americans each year, Shenandoah National Park. As part of that recommendation the committee, recognizing the proliferation of the automobile, suggested that the “greatest single feature” of the proposed park should be a “sky-line drive along the mountain top, following a continuous ridge and looking down westerly on the Shenandoah Valley…and also commanding a view of the Piedmont Plain stretching easterly to the Washington Monument.” Construction of such a roadway was a pioneering work of landscape architecture and engineering, as well as a famous work-relief project. Work was begun before the park was even established using emergency employment relief funds, and continued by the boys of the Civilian Conservation Corps who spent thousands of hours building beautiful rock walls and landscaping sweeping overlooks to make Skyline Drive the experience it has been for over 75 years.

ABOUT RAUSCH CREEK:

Rausch Creek Off Road Park is devoted to providing a fun, legal place for off-road enthusiasts to go four-wheeling. The park consists of almost 3,000 acres of easy, intermediate, and difficult trails featuring rocks, bowls, hills, club friendly trails, and free, on-site camping. The park is located in Pine Grove, in Schuylkill County, the heart of the anthracite Coal Region of Eastern Pennsylvania. It can be reached by Interstate 81 (exit 107, south via Route 209) or Interstate 78 (exit 13, north via PA-501).

ABOUT AOAA

AOAA Trails is an extensive off-road trail system conveniently located in Eastern Pennsylvania. Named one of the top 10 destinations in the country for ATVs, full-size vehicles and dirt bikes, the park has hundreds of miles of diverse trails on 6,500 acres and top-notch facilities. The coal lands in lower Northumberland County are leased by AOAA for the purposes of actively managing a family-friendly motorized and non-motorized recreation facility. AOAA officially opened in May of 2014 and in addition to recreation, the property has many unique environmental features, rich mining history, and varied terrain.

PENNSYLVANIA COAL COUNTRY

The Coal Region is a historically important coal-mining area in Northeastern Pennsylvania in the central Ridge-and-valley Appalachian Mountains, comprising Lackawanna, Luzerne, Columbia, Carbon, Schuylkill, Northumberland, and the extreme northeast corner of Dauphin counties. The discovery of anthracite coal was first made near the Schuylkill–Northampton line in the vicinity of Summit Hill by a hunter in 1791 and the first mine was established in 1775. The anthracite mining industry loomed over the region until its decline in the 1950s. The Knox Mine Disaster in 1959 served as the death knell for deep mining which faded away in the mid 1960s; almost all current anthracite mining is done via strip mining. Tours of underground mines can be taken in Ashland, Scranton, and Lansford, each of them also having museums dedicated to the mining industry. Also evident are patch towns, small villages affiliated with a particular mine. These towns were owned by the mining company. Though no longer company owned, many hamlets survive; one of them, the Eckley Miners’ Village, is a museum and preserved historical town owned and administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, which seeks to restore patch towns to their original state.

Nesconset | Paris | Belgrade | Atlanta

MORE NOTES FROM THE ROAD:
1-15 July – Cape Cod
15-30 June – Eastern Long Island
1-14 June – Bantam Jeep Festival
May – PA Trail cleanup
22-30 April – Minnesota
16-21 April – PA Trails
1-15 April – New Jeep
15-31 March – Paris
1-14 March – Arizona
15-28 February – San Antonio
1-14 February – Sedona and Glamis
January – Iran
December – Holiday Road Trip
16-30 November – Senegal
1-15 November – Paris
October – New York
September – Southwestern Deserts
22-31 August – New York
8-21 August – Serbia
1-7 August – Ladies Offroad Network
22-31 July – Moab
9-21 July – Woman and Machine
1-8 July – DC Dirt Camp
Archive

REFLECTIONS

EGYPT: CAIRO REFLECTIONS

A quick overview of impressions from a stop in Cairo during our recent scouting mission in Egypt and Sudan … [read]

SPECIAL REPORT

ALGERIA SCOUTING

A look into south-eastern Algeria on the border with Libya and Niger: overlanding with the Tuareg in one of the most remote corners of the Sahara … [read]