Spruce Knob, WV by bike... A new way to high point

I have been living in Pittsburgh for two years now and as such I have been scouting out local places to go and fun things to do, whenever we move to a new city we come up with a "while we live here bucket list"  and one of the items on my list was to complete the three close by high points.  I did the Pennsylvania high point last year but since the three local ones were all drive ups there was little incentive to head out to do them.  Then one day while riding my bike home from work, I thought hey if I can ride my bike up the drive up it adds a bit of a challenge and so the planning began.  I did a quick google search and found a great resource for this ride.  Link Here and I convinced a friend of mine to go along.  It turned out to be a great way to experience a high point that otherwise didn't have a lot of appeal.  The bonus was that with over 3,000' of climbing on a bike you really felt like you earned it when you hit the top.  Below is my Strava Entry showing the route we took.


We started out driving around 5:30 am from Pittsburgh and got to the starting point about 3.5 hours later.   The weather wasn't supposed to be the best that day but the forecast showed highs in the 60's with rain in the morning that should stop by 6am well before we planned to start.  However, at 9 am the rain was still falling in a steady drizzle and the temp was more like high 40's.  The low temperatures actually felt nice during the climb though.  The first four miles are steep averaging between 7.6% and 8.3% grade but after that it leveled off a bit and went into a much more manageable climb.  The mileage markers and elevation of the climb shown below are from the Cycling Scenic WV website and are pretty true to form.

Mile

	Total Elevation Gain	Average Percent Grade to Mile	Elevation Gain From Last Mile	Percent Grade for Mile
1	440	8.3%	440	8.3%
2	834	7.9%	394	7.5%
3	1260	8.0%	427	8.1%
4	1600	7.6%	339	6.4%
5	1788	6.8%	188	3.6%
6	2007	6.3%	219	4.1%
7	2170	5.9%	163	3.1%
8	2358	5.6%	188	3.6%
9	2483	5.6%	125	2.4%
10	2582	4.9%	99	1.9%
11	2744	4.7%	162	3.1%
11.8	2900	4.7%	156	3.0%

The directions on the site are also well developed.  I won't recreate them here but I encourage anyone planning on doing this by bike to visit this web page, great info. We hit the summit after a little over an hour and 40 minutes of climbing, took a few quick photos and hit the descent.  By the time we got to the top the winds had started picking up, the clouds rolled in and there was no view to speak of so we had little incentive to stay at the top for long.   The descent was fast!  It was probably the fastest I have ever been on a bicycle, at several points I hit over 40 mph.  As far as high points go, I absolutely plan on doing more of the drive ups by bike. I'd love to hear of other drive up high points others have done by bike.  Feel free to leave a comment if you have done any.  So far the quick list I have compiled are the following: Mt Greylock, MA Mt Washington, NH Mt Davis, PA Mauna Kea, HI Mt Mitchell, NC Climgman's Dome, TN