Taking the mountains to Pittsburgh instead of the interstate was the best call of the trip. The 110 miles of US-250 from Staunton, Virginia, to Elkins, West Virginia, are twistier and have more elevation change than anything I’ve driven in Texas or the Ozarks on the Arkansas-Missouri border.

Fog gave way to sun and then to peak color, and we had the road almost entirely to ourselves. I drove all of it like I had a wedding cake in the passenger seat, and it was still a blast.

The wedding cake was Liz. She’d spent several days at a wonderful Airbnb in Afton with her high school girlfriends, the two Debbies, Michelle and Kathy, and I was her ride. We left a little before 9 in the Lizard, our 2020 911 Carrera 4S, a 992.1 in Lizard Green on Michelin PS4S, which are my favorite street tires. The day ended in Pittsburgh after 305 miles, 17,133 feet of climbing and about 17,780 feet of descent.

The Lizard ate up miles like a wild boar through a truffle field, and it never once got to run.

The mountains packed 8,500 feet of climbing into 110 miles

Between Staunton and Elkins we climbed about 8,500 feet and descended about 8,100 in 2 hours and 44 minutes, including a stop in Monterey. The Twisted Sisters are fun, and so are the roads around Eureka Springs. Neither one gives you that much vertical in that little distance.

The first real climb is Shenandoah Mountain, where the GPX topped out at 2,907 feet. From there, the road gives back more than 1,600 feet dropping to the Bullpasture River at McDowell, then climbs again into Monterey at 2,881.

The 45 miles from Monterey to Huttonsville are the stretch I’ll come back for. In that stretch alone we climbed about 4,000 feet and descended about 4,800, over four mountain crossings above 3,600 feet. The road climbs Monterey Mountain to 3,783 and drops to Hightown at about 3,100. It climbs Lantz Mountain to 3,645, then Allegheny Mountain to 4,311 feet, the high point of the day, at 10:33. That ridge is the Virginia–West Virginia line and the Eastern Continental Divide, and by then we’d climbed about 9,000 feet for the day. Off the top, the road falls about 1,500 feet to Bartow. It climbs roughly 1,000 back up Cheat Mountain to about 3,770, then drops 1,700 feet in 9 miles to Huttonsville, the biggest single descent of the day.

On my topo map, the red marks the steepest pitches. They line up exactly with where the Lizard wanted to go play: the climb over Allegheny Mountain and the run over Cheat Mountain. Every one of those climbs came with blind crests and decreasing-radius corners.

After Elkins it was US-33 and I-79 to Pittsburgh. Even that boring half added about 6,700 feet of climbing, which tells you everything about West Virginia.

The weather went from fog to peak color as we headed west

At 9 a.m. the pavement was still wet, and fog filled the valleys. In a few stretches we could see a few car lengths ahead. Wet pavement, blind fog and 443 hp don’t belong in the same experiment, and I didn’t run one.

By Monterey at 10:14 the fog had burned off. It stayed mostly sunny the rest of the way, except where the trees closed over the road.

The color followed the same curve. On the Virginia side it was about a week shy of peak, with plenty of green still on the lower slopes. By the time we came down the Tygart Valley into Elkins at 11:50, the timing was nearly perfect, and the hillsides were spectacular.

Every crest on this road has a story, and we had them to ourselves

West of Staunton, US-250 follows the old Staunton and Parkersburg Turnpike. Claudius Crozet laid out that toll road over these mountains beginning in the late 1830s. His 1838 specs capped the grade at four degrees, so the road loops around ridges it can’t climb straight.

The Shenandoah Mountain crest is the Confederate Breastworks pull-off in the George Washington National Forest, which is also a trailhead into the Ramseys Draft Wilderness. Down at McDowell, Stonewall Jackson won the first battle of his 1862 Valley Campaign.

Monterey is the seat of Highland County, which counted 2,232 people in the 2020 census, the fewest of any county in Virginia. The county’s nickname is Virginia’s Little Switzerland, a nod to its steep mountains and tight valleys. It has the second-highest average elevation in the state, behind only Grayson. Driving out of town with ridges folding away in every direction, the nickname made sense.

At Hightown, the headwaters of the James and the Potomac rise within a few miles of each other. Local legend says a barn roof there once split the two watersheds. On top of Allegheny Mountain, Confederates held Camp Allegheny at roughly 4,400 feet, the highest fortification in the eastern theater, and threw back a Union attack on December 13, 1861.

The descent drops into the Monongahela National Forest at Bartow. The first Travellers Repose inn there reportedly took 26 cannonballs in the Battle of Greenbrier River, and the house standing there now dates to 1866. Durbin, at 10:48, sits inside the National Radio Quiet Zone, about 8 miles north of the Green Bank telescope. On a Friday morning it felt every bit that quiet.

Cheat Mountain carries the road over Shavers Fork at Cheat Bridge and past the site of Cheat Summit Fort, a Union post at about 4,000 feet. The map shows the Little River, Cheat and Huttonsville State Farm wildlife management areas flanking the road. From the driver’s seat it was one unbroken wall of trees. Then US-219/250 runs down the Tygart Valley through Huttonsville, Mill Creek and Beverly, the Randolph County seat since 1790.

We saw almost nobody the whole way. Our first real traffic was in Elkins.

Smooth and slow was the right call, and next year is the payoff

Liz wasn’t feeling great, so I kept every corner smooth and every climb gentle. A C4S loves Crozet’s loops. A passenger who isn’t feeling 100 percent loves them less. The Lizard ate up miles like a wild boar through a truffle field, and it never once got to run.

Next year we drive from Porsche Parade in Boise back to Dallas, through Gateway, Colorado, and down the Million Dollar Highway south of Ouray. Western Virginia was the warm-up. Next year the Lizard might get to run.

P.S. A little help from Scenic Navigation.

I used the Scenic Navigation app to plan, create and record our drive. It captured the route, elevation changes, and other useful driving data, which came in particularly handy when I sat down to write this post. Being able to go back and examine the route, especially those crazy switchbacks between Monterey and Elkins, helped me appreciate just how entertaining those 64 miles really were. Nice to have the data to back up what my backside was telling me.