Pikeville, KY
Pike County-Hatcher Field perches on a ridge above Pikeville at 1,473 feet — a single asphalt runway 09/27 carved from the Appalachian highlands. Pikeville sits at the heart of the Tug Fork country where the Hatfield-McCoy feud played out between 1863 and 1891. The McCoys lived on the Kentucky side of the Tug Fork, the Hatfields on the West Virginia side; the feud took at least a dozen lives and reached the U.S. Supreme Court in Mahon v. Justice (1888). Pikeville's annual Hillbilly Days festival, founded 1976, raises money for the Shriners Hospital and draws a hundred thousand people every April. The Pikeville Cut-Through, completed 1987, is one of the largest earth-moving projects in the western hemisphere — a 1,400-foot-wide canyon cut through Peach Orchard Mountain to relocate US 23, the railroad, and the Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River out of downtown Pikeville to end repeated flooding.
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.
About 46 nm east-southeast of Lexington — a real cross-country leg, not a quick hop — the Daniel Boone forest folds up into the Red River Gorge, a 29,000-acre maze of sandstone cliffs and more than 100 natural arches: the largest concentration of stone arches east of the Rockies, second in the country only to Arches National Park. Climbers know it simply as "the Red," some of the best sandstone in the world. The crown is Natural Bridge itself, a 78-foot sandstone span you can walk across, with a sky lift running up to it. From altitude it's a sea of forested ridges slashed with pale cliff lines and the thread of the Red River.
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.