New River Gorge

One of my concerns on this long journey was being able to stay fit on the road.  We planned to hike whenever we could, since we would be in National Parks, but I am used to running at least three days a week and working out with weights at home or at the gym a couple of times a week.  Fortunately, all of the places we stayed were in safe locations, and some of them even had fairly decent fitness rooms.  I was able to go out the front door of the hotel in Wytheville for my daily Tai Chi on this cool Virginia morning and witness a bright orange sunrise over rolling fields and patches of woods, not much different from our part of the country except for the trucks rolling by on I-81.  Then I ran around the parking lot two or three times, a mile or so, and was also able to lift weights in the fitness room.

 

One of the benefits of breaking up our first day of travel was that it would allow us more time to explore New River Gorge, which was only about an hour-and-a-half from Wytheville.  Because we had the extra time, I found a route that took us on two-lane roads through the countryside instead of I-81, something we tried to do throughout the trip.  This morning’s destination was Big Walker Scenic Overlook, which was at the top of a mountain pass on Stony Fork Road.  

 

The vistas were very nice, and there was a little shop (closed at this time of morning) and a picturesque old truck nearby.  A friendly cat ran across the empty parking lot and greeted us warmly as we stretched our legs and took in the scenery.  

 

There was little traffic on the road, which is the way we like it.  But the road grew less scenic as we continued through the dismal small towns of West Virginia toward Fayetteville.  There was so much poverty and despair in these abandoned coal towns with nothing but the usual Walmarts and fast food chains, dilapidated shacks and single-wide trailers with five, six, seven trucks parked outside.  What if I lived in a place like this, I wondered?  Could I escape?  Or would I just resign myself to the squalor of poverty? - drugs and TV and fast food and a suitcase of cheap beer, not even a good pub to share a miserable pint with your friends.  An illuminated sign along the highway advertised DENTAL IMPLANTS, and I caught myself making a crude joke about missing teeth.

 

My apologies to the rest of West Virginia.  The countryside is still very beautiful in this part of the world, especially so when we reached the New River Gorge and its graceful suspension bridge, barely noticeable when driving across it but spectacular when seen from the Visitor Center below.  It was an engineering marvel, 3030 feet long, 876 feet high, with a 1700-foot arch span.

Our daughter had been following our trip and I sent her a photo of the bridge.  She remembered that, years ago in a different job than she has now, she had flown with her boss in his small private plane over this bridge, and she sent us this photo she had taken at the time.

We had plenty of time in this first National Park on our trip, and we made the most of it by hiking the Endless Trail out to the Gorge, a wooded trail not unlike trails that we hike in Western North Carolina, with precipitous drops to the gorge below.

We took our Mini down the old one-way switch-backing Fayette Station Road and crossed the river on the rickety old Tunney Hunsaker Bridge, which offered beautiful views looking up at the new bridge. A man we had met at the Visitor Center earlier told us that there was a catwalk you could walk on suspended under the bridge, available only on special tours, which seemed to me as frightening a thing to do as skydiving.

The busiest restaurant in Fayetteville seemed to be Pies and Pints - good pizza, good beer, and friendly service.  This well-preserved little city was doing pretty well for itself, in large part due to the visitors to the National Park, and there did not seem to be any of the rural poverty we had seen out on the road earlier in the day.