Elkins, WV
Elkins-Randolph County Airport sits on the floor of the Tygart Valley at 1,987 feet, in the high Allegheny range. Elkins was a railroad town built by Henry Gassaway Davis and his son-in-law Stephen Benton Elkins, both later U.S. Senators — the Western Maryland Railway ran logging operations through here that stripped the surrounding mountains of virgin red spruce in twenty years. The town now anchors the Monongahela National Forest. Cass Scenic Railroad State Park, an hour south at Cass, runs original Shay geared steam locomotives on the old logging line up to the 4,842-foot summit of Bald Knob — the same trains that hauled spruce out of these mountains a century ago. Snowshoe Mountain ski resort sits on Cheat Mountain just east. The Mountain Rail Adventures excursion train runs from Elkins itself: New Tygart Flyer, Salamander Express, and the Cheat Mountain Salamander all depart the historic 1908 depot in town.
The Blackwater River drops 57 feet over a sandstone ledge in a deep gorge in the West Virginia highlands, its water stained amber-black — not by mud but by tannic acid leached from the fallen hemlock and red spruce needles upstream, the same thing that darkens tea. The falls anchor Blackwater Falls State Park, near the high, cold twin towns of Davis and Thomas, in a corner of West Virginia that feels more like Canada than Appalachia: it sits at over 3,000 feet, gets heavy snow, and the nearby Dolly Sods Wilderness is a windswept high plateau of bog, heath, and stunted spruce that mimics a far-northern ecosystem. The amber falls plunging into the dark gorge are the signature.
A startling blade of rock standing nearly 900 feet above the North Fork valley in the Allegheny highlands — a fin of Tuscarora quartzite tilted almost vertical by ancient mountain-building and eroded until only the hard spine remains, sharp enough that the summit is a true knife-edge reachable only by technical climbing. It's the premier traditional rock-climbing destination in the eastern US; generations of climbers learned multi-pitch climbing on its faces, and the Army trained mountain troops here in WWII. The lone surviving pinnacle of "the Gendarme" stood here until it collapsed in 1987. Seneca Rocks is one of the most photographed natural features in West Virginia, rising right out of the valley floor where three roads meet.
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.
Frank Lloyd Wright's 1935 house cantilevered directly over a waterfall on Bear Run, in the Laurel Highlands southeast of Pittsburgh. Built for the Kaufmann family of Pittsburgh department-store fame as a weekend retreat, Fallingwater is widely considered the finest American house of the 20th century — a horizontal stack of poured-concrete terraces that float over the stream rather than facing it. Smithsonian named it one of "28 places to visit before you die." The cantilevers were already sagging by the late 1990s; a 2002 structural restoration added post-tensioning cables to save the house from collapsing into its own waterfall.