BACK WHEN THEY WERE COURTING—back before their garage in McConnell, West Virginia, was filled with two monster all-terrain vehicles and three teeny-weeny ones—Bruce and Kim Browning used to go riding together. Just the two of them, squeezed close on Bruce's old Suzuki LT 500. Kim's hands laced Bruce's belly, Bruce's thumb worked the throttle, the aroma of gasoline danced about them, and they rolled through the hills.

"We'd go up a holler near where my mom lived," recalls Bruce, a 34-year-old manager for a mining replacement parts company, "and we'd ride around for a while, and then we'd get hungry or whatever and we'd basically go somewhere where we knew a little store was and we'd get some pop and some chips, like that, and then we'd head back."
"And it was real pretty up in those hills," says Kim. "I miss riding like that."

Kim, 29, has not had a single day off from mom duty in five years, which is why this afternoon's ramble through the jagged hills is so sweet. The Brownings have enlisted Kim's mom to baby-sit so that they can attend the grand opening of the Hatfield-McCoy Recreation Area, a 360-mile trail system that will eventually expand to more than 2,000 miles and could well become the Disneyland of outdoor motorized recreation.

There are other trail networks, but as ATV Connection, an independent online newsletter, puts it, the Hatfield-McCoy represents "the dawning of a new trail renaissance." The Hatfield- McCoy Recreation Authority, created by the West Virginia legislature in March 1998 as a public corporation—in this case, a nonprofit whose 19 employees oversee the trail system and work for the citizenry—has paid close attention to the needs of your average ATV user. Field technicians spent a full year whacking through native oak, hickory, and poplar stands in Mingo and Logan Counties, widening existing outlaw ATV tracks, and smoothing old coal-mining and logging roads to create trails that are famously, ferociously steep. The authority's hopes are high: to draw more than 600,000 visitors a year and, by 2005, to have a network of trails sprawling over eight counties.

On this warm early-autumn weekend, 300 red-blooded Americans are already on hand. The Super 8 in nearby Logan is full, and the Speedway Super America over in Man has been doing a brisk business in glazed crullers and pigs-in-a-blanket. The Hatfield-McCoy Recreation Authority will be hosting a free pig roast, and the City of Logan is staging an ATV Tug-of-War and a Poker Run, which involves contestants gathering playing cards from dealers at checkpoints in the woods. License plates from 15 states—some from as far away as Florida and Massachusetts— are represented in the parking lot at Bear Wallow, the most popular of the Hatfield-McCoy trailheads.

Right now, though, my attention is fixed on Bruce, who is engaged in a jaw-dropping feat: a four-wheel assault on a 100-foot-high pile of coal tailings.

The heap is absurdly steep, curving elliptically up to almost vertical, like a skateboard ramp. As Bruce climbs its flanks, his motor screeching, flecks of coal spitting from his tires, there is a very real chance that his four-wheeler will pop up, roll back, and crush him. This does not seem to worry him. He has won the ATV Amateur National Hill-Climbing Championships two years running. He rides standing straight up, his head canted forward like the prow of a Viking warship.

"That boy's crazy!" one onlooker hoots.