Almost Heaven!

October 3-10, 2022

Fall found us while we were in West Virginia!  Last fall, we were in California and, while we saw some subtle fall colors there, there is no comparison to the vibrant burst of colors that filled the hills of the Appalachians!  Simply a party for the eyes!  

Home for this stay was Little Beaver State Park, located in south central West Virginia.  The park was lovely, with a small lake and lots of hiking trails in addition to being filled with the stunning colors of fall!  The campsite itself was a fully shaded site which would have been perfect for one of those hot summer days.  As it was, we had below average temperatures during our stay with highs in the 50s to low 60s and lows in the 30s to low 40s.  It wasn’t a big deal, as we were rarely at the campsite during the day anyway.  One completely new experience for us was the downhill slope of the campsite!  Our camper has an auto leveling feature which makes unhitching pretty easy but, for the first time, we ran into some difficulty.  I thought I had made accommodations for the grade with the number of leveling blocks I placed under the support legs, but fell a little short!  As the front legs came down, they ran out of stroke and caused an error message on the system that we had to troubleshoot to correct.  After over 2 ½ years of traveling, we are still learning new things about this camper! 

I think Frankie really enjoyed the cooler temperatures.  While living in Minnesota, winter was her favorite season.  Chasing snowballs was a fierce competitor to her frisbee!  Thankfully, we didn’t have any of the white stuff during our stay, but we did have a couple of mornings with a beautiful white frost blanketing the grass!

We went on a handful of hikes on the trails the campground offered.  One of the trails was an easy hike around their lake.  The reflection of the trees off the lake was gorgeous and we couldn’t resist taking several photos!

Other trails we enjoyed took us through the woods.  The moss-covered rocks and logs combined with the ferns were fun, but what really captured our attention were the tunnels of rhododendrons the trails wandered through!  Don’t get me wrong, we are loving fall here, but can you imagine what this place is like in the spring?  Walking through a tunnel of rhododendrons in their full pink bloom must be spectacular!

Rhododendrons!

The tune, “Take me Home, County Roads” by John Denver kept running through our minds during our stay.  In fact, I found Dick with his guitar in hand one afternoon and, before long, he was playing it!  Having never been to West Virginia before, we really didn’t know what to expect.  In fact, while applying the West Virginia sticker to our map, we wondered why there was a bridge on the sticker.  

New River Gorge Bridge Overlook

It didn’t take long to discover why!  In 1977, the state put in the longest single span arch bridge in the world!  The bridge crosses the New River and shortened the 45-minute drive down the gorge, across the river and back up the gorge to a 45-second drive across the river!  Now, that’s progress!  The community celebrates this bridge annually with Bridge Day, where the bridge is shut down to vehicles and opened up to pedestrians.  If you have the nerves (and cash – it costs $3,000) you can even base jump off the bridge that day.  This huge celebration is held the third Saturday of October each year.  Unfortunately, we were there on the second Saturday of October and had to be content with experiencing the 45-second drive and taking in the view from various trails!  It would have been pretty cool to watch people’s parachutes open up and float down to the bank of the river at the bottom of the gorge.  

What once was the only way to cross the river has now been turned into a historic drive within the country’s newest national park.  In 2020, New River Gorge National Park became the nation’s 63rd national park.  Although neither of us had ever heard of this park before, we were excited to check it out!  

Sandstone Falls Overlook 

The park is filled with a history of mines, mining towns, and coal trains.  It’s really a sad story how immigrants were recruited to be miners as they entered this country, only to be held hostage by the mining companies that recruited them.  The only housing available were the houses the companies would rent to the miners, as were the stores the miners and their families shopped in.  The workers were paid in scrip rather than cash.   They used every cent earned to pay for housing and life’s necessities and it was all but impossible to get cash for train fare to escape.  This huge coal mining area was a very smoke-polluted mess from the trainloads of coal being transported from there.  

Today, very little remains of any of these towns and the mines have all been closed.  The air has now cleared and everything has returned to its natural beauty.

Driving the historic Fayette Station Road was very interesting.  This was the main travel route for vehicles for over 100 years!  At the bottom of the gorge is a bridge that was once flanked by two towns (Fayette and South Fayette) with railroad lines running on each side of the river.  Today, there is no trace of any towns ever having been there.  The bridge is a replica of the original bridge built in 1889 and is part of the historic drive.  It was strange to close your eyes and imagine what life must have been like here 130 years ago.  

New River Gorge Bridge as seen from Fayette Station Bridge

On one of our favorite hikes, we experienced the word fall in several ways!  First, we hiked around the Sandstone Falls!  These falls pretty much span the entire width of New River!  There is a wonderful board walk on an island giving you stunning views of the falls.  At the end of the boardwalk are stairs that invite you to walk through the woods for a closer look at the falls.  Well, I got a little too adventurous with this opportunity and tried to get closer than I should have.  One wrong step on a moss-covered rock and I took a fall!  Fortunately, no damage was done.  My pants needed a good scrubbing but, amazingly, they came clean!  Of course, all of this was in the woods with the colorful fall leaves all around us!  

Another great hike was the Grandview Rim Trail combined with the Castle Rock Trail.  Along the Castle Rock Trail, we were able to experience the Endless Wall that lines the gorge in this area as well as more tunnels of rhododendrons!  Once this trail joined the Grandview Rim Trail, we found ourselves at the very top of the gorge headed for views of New River way below us!  Our best-loved view of the river was from Turkey Spur Overlook where you see the entire horseshoe shape of New River’s Stretchers Neck.

                                                                    

We found New River’s name a bit curious and learned at the visitors center that this river is actually one of the oldest rivers in the world!  They believe its name came from explorers who came across this river which was unmapped.  They added it to the map and named it “New River” as they hadn’t expected to find it!

Diamond Point Overlook

Diamond Point Overlook

This area is well known for its white-water rafting.  This being said, I was really intrigued with the idea of taking a guided tour!  We signed up with Adventures on the Gorge and are thrilled to say we lived through the experience!  During our eight-mile trip down New River, we encountered 17 rapids including Lost Lunch, Thread the Needle, Endless Waves, and Cartwheel.  The rapids varied from class II – V.  I thought it would be a thrilling experience and it exceeded my expectations!  I’m glad we did it, as it’s a classic activity here, but I don’t need to do it again!  We didn’t take our phones on the adventure so I don’t have any photos to prove we did this crazy thing!  Adventures on the Gorge had a professional photographer along who took tons of photos, but you can only imagine our expressions in the photos he captured!  Maybe we should have paid the inflated price for one of the photos, but they showed no expression other than terror on our faces!  On a hike to Diamond Point Overlook, we did get a photo of a raft going through one of the sections we encountered.  That photo is as close as we have to pictures of us on this adventure.  It actually is much scarier than it looks!  It’s kind of strange that the one activity we did that I never want to repeat is probably the favorite thing we did while we were in West Virginia.  Our guide was a local fella who grew up on this river.  He knew every twist and turn, every rock and boulder and gave me confidence that we were going to live to see another day!  If you are in the area, go ahead and give it a try!  And yes, I recommend renting a wetsuit!  The waves are not only endless, but really big and you WILL get wet!

Do you think they are screaming?

Next up:  North Carolina

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