Huntington, WV
Tri-State Airport opened in 1952 on a high ridge in Kenova, where West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky meet at the confluence of the Ohio and Big Sandy rivers. The single runway is 7,000 feet, 12/30, at an elevation of 828 feet. On the rainy evening of November 14, 1970, Southern Airways Flight 932 — a DC-9 carrying the Marshall University Thundering Herd football team home from a game in East Carolina — crashed into a hillside one mile short of runway 12 on a non-precision approach. All 75 aboard were killed: 37 players, 8 coaches and staff, 25 boosters and fans, and 5 crew. It remains the worst air disaster in the history of American collegiate athletics. The town buried six unidentifiable victims in a common grave at Spring Hill Cemetery in Huntington. The 2006 film We Are Marshall told the story of the program's rebuilding under coach Jack Lengyel. A memorial fountain on Marshall University's campus, shut off each November 14 at 12:48 p.m. (the moment of the crash) and turned back on in spring, has run on that schedule every year since 1972.
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.
Where the Scioto meets the Ohio, Portsmouth turned its flood defenses into art. Along roughly 2,000 feet of concrete floodwall, muralist Robert Dafford painted some fifty panels — 2,000 years of Ohio Valley history, from the Hopewell mound builders and the Shawnee through the steamboat era — one of the largest single-artist mural projects anywhere. (Dafford is the same hand behind the floodwall murals down the river at Maysville and Paducah, Kentucky.) Behind the town rise the ridges of Shawnee State Forest, the "Little Smokies of Ohio" and one of the state's largest forests. Greater Portsmouth's airport sits up in Minford, northeast of the river.
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.
A 1,348-foot earthwork in the shape of a serpent swallowing an egg, built by ancient Native Americans (Adena or Fort Ancient cultures, dating contested between 320 BC and 1070 AD). The largest serpent effigy in the world. The site sits on a meteorite impact crater, which may have inspired its location. Best viewed from the air or from the on-site observation tower. The effigy aligns with the summer solstice sunset and may have functioned as an astronomical calendar.