Bluefield, WV
Mercer County Airport sits on Pinnacle Mountain at 2,857 feet — among the highest paved runways east of the Mississippi. The single asphalt runway is 5,004 feet, 05/23. Bluefield itself, half in West Virginia and half in Virginia (the state line runs through the middle of downtown), was built by the Norfolk & Western Railway in 1889 as the gateway to the Pocahontas Coalfield. At its peak the Pocahontas seam was the largest single source of high-grade metallurgical coal in the world, fueling US Navy ships in two world wars and steel mills across the Atlantic. Bluefield called itself "Nature's Air-Conditioned City" — the Chamber of Commerce served free lemonade to all comers any day the temperature reached 90 degrees (a tradition begun in 1939 and revived periodically). The town's elevation is the same as Denver's. Bluefield State University, founded 1895 as a teachers' school for Black coalfield children, was one of the original Historically Black Colleges and Universities and produced a generation of teachers, engineers, and miners.
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.
At 5,946 feet, Grandfather Mountain is the highest peak on the eastern escarpment of the Blue Ridge — a craggy, rugged summit named for the profile of an old man's face that early settlers saw in its ridgeline. It's a UNESCO biosphere reserve with 16 distinct ecological zones stacked up its slopes. The famous draw is the Mile High Swinging Bridge: a 228-foot suspension footbridge built in 1952, spanning a chasm at exactly 5,280 feet of elevation, swaying over a thousand-foot drop. Just below, the Blue Ridge Parkway curves around the mountain on the Linn Cove Viaduct, an S-shaped elevated roadway hung off the slope — the last piece of the entire parkway to be completed, in 1987.