New River Gorge - The Newest National Park

We made this detour into West Virginia because we wanted to visit the newest national park in the country. The New River was designated as a national river in 1978, but it wasn't until December 2020 that this entire area became our country's 63rd national park.

While there are five different sections that are spread along 53 miles of this gorge, the main visitor center is at the Canyon Rim, near Lansing, West Virginia. A short walking path--and then 178 stairs--will take visitors to the best view of the New River Gorge Bridge. This metal bridge is the longest single-span arch bridge in the world, and it spans the 876-foot deep canyon that the New River has carved. 

That bridge has made the trip across the river into a one-minute trip, rather than the 45-minute journey that was necessary before it was built in 1977. We took that 45-minute drive called the Fayette Station Road, which winds its way down to the bottom of the gorge. On the way down we drove beneath the new bridge to see another view of the 3,000-foot span 

Fayette Road is a gravel trail that zig-zags its way to the bottom of the gorge on very steep inclines. The warning sign at the top of the gorge lets drivers know that long vehicles like RVs are not allowed on the road because of the tight turns. This bus makes the trip up and down to pick up people taking the river float trip. It took several tries at backing up and inching forward to get the bus around this hair-pin curve.

Once we got to the bottom of the gorge, we crossed the one-lane bridge that has been in use since 1889 to get residents to the other side of the gorge. Now it is only used by tourists like us that want to get a look at the bottom of the New River Gorge. That's the old bridge behind Mark in the picture below.

Looking the other direction, we can see the new bridge high above Denisa in the next picture.

Besides getting a view from the bottom, of course we're going to take a hike for views from the top. We were glad to get a parking place at the trail head of the Endless Wall Trail, because it's a very popular hike with a small parking lot.

We had read that rock climbers love the sheer rock walls of the gorge, and it wasn't long into our hike before we saw an arrow pointing towards the rock climbing section. We decided to see where the arrow led us, and we soon came to a series of long and steep ladders.

We went down three ladders . . . 

before we got to the rock climbing area. We were disappointed that we didn't find any climbers today, so we eventually headed back up to continue our hike.

Back on the rim, we took every little spur trail out to the edge of the gorge to get more views of the New River far below.

Sometimes some people like to hang out over that edge a little too far.

We played the game where Mark would go on to the next ledge, and take a picture back of Denisa on the ledge we had just left.

Then Denisa would take a picture of Mark on the new ledge. It's our own version of leap-frog hiking.

While looking down from those ledges, we could see the tiny boats on the river below us. Almost too small to see with the naked eye, we could picture them with a maximum zoom to see these tiny boats were actually rafts carrying 6 or 7 passengers.

They are all required to wear crash helmets, because they will pass through serious white water sections on the New River.

While hiking between ledges, we ran across this white growth on the trunk of a tree.

We're not sure what it was, but it was covered with water droplets, it was firm to the touch, and we can report that Denisa's finger that touched it hasn't fallen off (yet).

One of us really enjoys finding big rocks to sit on . . .

even if those rocks are rather precariously balanced over a very deep gorge.

At the furthest west point on our hike we could see the outline of the New River Gorge Bridge that we had already seen more clearly earlier. We were hoping for beautiful blue-sky pictures today, but we enjoyed the shade and cooler temperatures that the clouds provided.

This is an out-and-back trail, but Mark could see a dashed trail line on his Alltrails app that looked like we could make this into a loop by going down another set of those climbers' ladders. So we started down into that hole

We were hoping to follow a trail that the rock-climbers use to connect us back to those ladders we used earlier. Again, we went down three different long ladders.

Denisa couldn't help but notice that the third ladder in both places had an orange body board attached in case of injury. Is this a good idea to be going down these ladders?!?

Greeting us at the bottom of the ladders was this eastern box turtle, slowly surveying us. We also ran into a snake, so this quieter area seems to be the place to see the area reptiles.

Now we are hiking 100 feet below the ledge, where the climbers like to climb. We've had a couple days with rain showers, and the only climbers we found had decided that the rocks were just too wet and slippery for a good climb today.

But we continued on our little path that the climbers use to get from one site to another. Our favorite find was this gap in the rock. We noticed that the leaves of the fern were moving, even though it wasn't windy down here. When we investigated further, we found a cool wind blowing out of that gap in the rock. We stood and enjoyed the 50-degree air coming out like a natural air-conditioner.

This trail was taking us to interesting places that most hikers don't get to see.

We found some neat rock formations . . .

but we never did find the loop trail we were hoping for. Eventually we lost the trail, and no amount of rock scrambling could get us around the boulders on the edge of the gorge. After all that, our only option was to go back up the second set of ladders and walk back to the pickup on the rim trail. We have to say that the hike back was much faster since we didn't have to stop at every single spur trail this time. Okay, maybe we did stop at one or two for a second look.

We've now seen the New River from the new bridge, from the rim of the gorge, from the rock climbing areas, and from the river bank. But we are far from finished here at the New River Gorge. It will take us a couple more days to check out the other sections of this newest national park.