Beaver, WV
Raleigh County Memorial Airport sits on a mountaintop south of Beckley at 2,504 feet — one of the highest commercial fields east of the Mississippi. The single runway is 6,750 feet, 19/01. Beckley's defining feature is below ground: the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine, opened 1962 in the old Phillips-Sprague drift mine, takes visitors 1,500 feet into a working seam on the mantrip rail cars. It is one of the few mines anywhere in the country where the public can ride underground on the actual equipment. The New River Gorge — designated a national park in December 2020, the youngest in the system — lies thirty minutes west, with the New River Gorge Bridge (1977, 3,030 feet, third-longest single-span steel arch in the world) crossing 876 feet above the river. Bridge Day, the third Saturday in October, is the largest legal BASE-jumping event in the world; the bridge is closed to traffic and jumpers leap from the deck for six hours.
The New River Gorge Bridge carries US 19 across the New River Gorge in Fayette County, West Virginia. When it opened October 22, 1977 it was the longest steel arch span in the world at 1,700 feet — it is still the third-longest. The total length is 3,030 feet; the deck sits 876 feet above the river. The bridge replaced a 40-minute drive down switchbacks and back up the other side with a 60-second crossing. The river below was protected in 1978 as the New River Gorge National River; in December 2020 it was redesignated as the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, the youngest unit in the National Park System. On the third Saturday in October every year, the bridge is closed to vehicles for "Bridge Day" — and BASE jumpers leap from the deck. It is the largest legal BASE-jumping event in the world.
The Greenbrier began as a sulphur springs spa in 1778 and grew over 250 years into one of America's grand resorts. The central wing, completed 1913 to a design by Frederick Julius Sterner, is six stories tall, 250 rooms, and topped by an iron-and-glass dome painted green. The 11,000-acre property includes three championship golf courses — the Old White (1913, by Charles B. Macdonald), the Greenbrier (1924, by Seth Raynor and George O'Neil), and the Meadows (1962). 26 U.S. presidents have stayed at the resort. During WWII the hotel served first as an internment facility for German, Italian, and Japanese diplomats, then as Ashford General Hospital. The East Wing — known as the West Virginia Wing — was built between 1959 and 1962 as cover for Project Greek Island, a secret Cold War congressional bunker buried 720 feet beneath it.
Pike County is mountain country, and two things here are worth the trip. The Pikeville Cut-Through, carved between 1973 and 1987, sliced a notch clean through a mountain to reroute a river, a railroad, and a highway all at once — about 18 million cubic yards moved, the largest earth-moving project in the Western Hemisphere after the Panama Canal, and locals call it the Eighth Wonder of the World. This is also the heart of Hatfield-McCoy country: the feud between the McCoys of Kentucky's Pike County and the Hatfields across the Tug Fork in West Virginia ran from 1863 to 1891. From the air the Cut-Through is a startling man-made gash in the ridgeline with road, rail, and water stacked through it.
Deep in a remote Allegheny valley stands the Green Bank Telescope — the largest fully steerable radio telescope on Earth, a dish 100 by 110 meters (bigger than a football field) on a mount that can point anywhere in the sky, weighing 17 million pounds yet aiming with astonishing precision. It listens for the faintest radio whispers from the cosmos — pulsars, distant galaxies, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. To work, it needs radio silence, so the entire region is the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile federal zone where cell towers, WiFi, and even microwave ovens are restricted; the valley around the telescope is one of the only places in the modern US essentially free of human radio noise. People sensitive to electromagnetic fields have moved here for the quiet.