6 Days at Breaks Interstate Park (Kentucky & Virginia) - Day 5

Mountain Home Trail at Breaks Interstate Park

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This is the sixth post in a series for this trip. You can view links to the other posts at the bottom of this one.

Having exhausted most of the trails in Breaks Interstate Park, we considered finding a new place to hike on our last full day and found a few trails that piqued our interest in Pikeville, KY, at Bob Amos Park. I already knew that Pikeville was having its annual festival (none other than Hillbilly Days) but figured a hike nearby would be okay and also allow us an opportunity to check out Pikeville. When we looked online for park info in the morning and - thanks to Google - saw that the park was exponentially busier at that moment (at 8am) than normal, we realized the entire area was probably tied up with the festival. So, change of plans.

Our back-up option was to hike the one main trail we hadn’t gotten to yet – Mountain Home Trail (2.5 miles). When we combined it for a loop, we were able to tack on a short trail we hadn’t done yet - Fern Hollow Trail (0.5 miles). We used the Flatwoods Trail, which we’d hiked the prior day as the way to connect it all for a full 4-mile hike, which took us just over 2 hours to complete. The full hiking map for this park is viewable here.

Building ruins along Mountain Home Trail at Breaks Interstate Park

We did back track (read our post about Day 2) a bit to check out the Wildlife Viewing Area in hopes we’d see the resident elk (nope). The hike had a lot of switch backs as it meandered through ridges and slopes. We were met with beautiful small yellow flowers dotting the trail side, sections with ferns, and many bird songs, including the Ovenbird, which we have both learned to identify pretty successfully as opposed to others that require us to rely upon our bird identification app. We saw interesting plants with a black chevron-style marking that we identified as jumpseed and others that we identified as mountain magnolia (which explains the magnolia we saw the prior day hiking along the mountainside).

Fern Hollow Trail at Breaks Interstate Park

Downed tree on Fern Hollow Trail at Breaks Interstate Park — This tree blocked our path while hiking Fern Hollow Trail at Breaks Interstate Park

If you can’t go around it and you can’t go over it, you’ve gotta go under it!

Again, we saw no other hikers during the entirety of this 4-mile hike!

Having pretty much exhausted what Breaks Interstate Park has to offer, we were happy to have a relaxing afternoon at the cabin spent reading on the back deck overlooking the lake, doing some preliminary packing, and reviewing our plans for our next trip, which is to West Virginia’s New River Gorge National Park and Canaan Valley.