After a disastrous plane flight which turned into a long bus ride and a missed day of work, the auditing team was able to catch up on our Quality and Food Safety audit enough to get out of the Pikeville, KY, manufacturing facility about a 1/2 day early. It appeared that the KY state Highpoint was about 1 1/2 hour west of where I was staying in Pikeville, KY, so I left early Friday morning and drove out to Black Mountain. Black Mountain sits on the border of KY and VA and required a drive much longer than 1 1/2 hours that MapQuest estimated as the roads were foggy and icy. I made it to the cutoff road, traveled about 1.5 miles down another icy side road, smacked the bottom of the rental car a couple times on the frozen ruts, parked the car and walked the 0.1 mile to the marker plaque and summit marker. Glad I brought my hiking boots along for the strenuous hike to the 4,139′ summit- HAHA! The marker sits next to a bunch of antennas and is close to an active mining road. One has to get permission ahead of time to be on the property and carry a waiver – I guess that is for if you get run over by a coal truck en route! Due to the fog and trees you couldn’t see anything from the top – pretty boring and uneventful. That makes State Highpoint #9.

The area that I was in (Pike County and the city of Pikeville, KY) is famous for several reasons; namely the fact that it was the location of a majority of the feuding between the Hatfields and the McCoys and is also the site of the Pikeville Cut-Through project which was the second largest earth removal project in U.S. history.

The feud was formally over in 2003 when both families signed a truce but the area is still capitalizing on the feud via tours, museums, re-enactments, and various festivals and events. When I was at the manufacturing facility I saw several rosters that contained the last names Hatfield and McCoy. I asked the QA Manager about it and he said it was all completely overblown and sensationalized.

The Pikeville Cut-Through Project was started in 1973 to relieve the flooding that happened in the City of Pikeville every year. The project was completed in 4 phases spanning 14 years and cost $80 million dollars. A total of 18 million cubic yards of dirt were removed and dumped into the riverbed of the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River, creating 400 acres of usable land for the city.