New River Gorge

We heard the river before we saw it. Standing at the overlook at Canyon Rim, mist still burning off the trees, there was a low continuous roar coming up out of a gorge so deep and green it looked drawn rather than real, and across it leapt the bridge — 876 feet of steel arch, so long that the cars on it looked like a line of ants. Lia gripped the railing and said she felt it in her stomach, that particular vertigo of a very big space. We had planned one night in West Virginia. We stayed four, and I would have stayed four more.

The bridge and the drop

You cannot come here and ignore the New River Gorge Bridge. For years it was the longest single-span steel arch in the world, and once a year, on Bridge Day, people leap off it with parachutes. We came the other 364 days, when it simply stands there being magnificent. We took the catwalk tour that runs along the underside of the deck, clipped into a harness, 800 feet of nothing below our boots and the river a pale ribbon at the bottom. Lia, who does not love heights, went white and then, halfway across, started laughing — that helpless laugh you get when the fear tips over into joy.

Whitewater and the old river

They call it the New River, but it is thought to be among the oldest rivers on the continent, older than the mountains it cuts through. We put in on the lower gorge with a guide named Dale who had run these rapids since he was a boy and named each one like an old friend. The water came up brown and muscular, and we hit a wall of it at a rapid he called Double Z that filled the raft and my boots and my lungs all at once. Between rapids the gorge went quiet and enormous, cliffs streaked with rust, a hawk turning overhead, and Dale told us about the coal towns that used to fill these hollows before the river took them back.

Ghost towns in the green

The best afternoon was the quietest. We hiked down to Nuttallburg, an abandoned coal town swallowed by forest, where a rusted conveyor still climbs the hillside and stone foundations sit under a canopy of rhododendron. Nothing moved but the river below. Lia found the old schoolhouse site and we sat on a wall eating apples, imagining the noise this hollow once held — the tipple, the trains, the miners — all of it gone silent, the mountain patiently taking everything back. West Virginia does melancholy well, and beautifully.

Getting There

New River Gorge lies in southern West Virginia, about an hour southeast of Charleston, whose Yeager Airport is the nearest with regular flights. Most visitors drive in along US-19, which crosses the famous bridge; the Canyon Rim Visitor Center sits just at its northern end. There is no public transit to speak of, so a car is essential, and the gorge’s roads are steep and winding — allow more time than the map suggests. Rafting outfitters cluster around Fayetteville, a small, welcoming town that makes the best base for a few unhurried days.