Yeager Airport

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.

Ashland anchors the south end of US-23, the stretch Kentucky named the Country Music Highway because no road on Earth has produced more million-selling country stars per mile — Loretta Lynn, the Judds, Billy Ray Cyrus, Chris Stapleton, Tyler Childers, Ricky Skaggs, Keith Whitley, Dwight Yoakam, Patty Loveless, Tom T. Hall, all from these counties. Ashland itself is the hometown of the Judds and Billy Ray Cyrus, and its 1931 Paramount Arts Center — a jewel-box movie palace — is where the "Achy Breaky Heart" video was filmed in 1992. The town sits in the corner where Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia meet on the Ohio River.

You're at Ohio University's own field, Snyder Field, in the hills of Athens. OU is the oldest university in the Northwest Territory, chartered in 1804 — its lineage runs back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and its promise that "schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." The College Green at the campus's heart, with Manasseh Cutler Hall facing true north, is a National Historic Landmark. Across the valley stand the Ridges — the former Athens Lunatic Asylum, a sprawling Kirkbride-plan hospital now owned by the university and home to an art museum. Athens is deep Appalachian-foothill country, eighty miles southeast of Columbus.

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.