Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional

A 215-foot limestone arch — twenty stories tall — spanning a gorge cut by little Cedar Creek, so massive that US Route 11 runs across the top and most drivers never realize they're crossing it. For two centuries it was as famous as Niagara, billed as one of the "Seven Natural Wonders of the World." Thomas Jefferson loved it so much he bought it from King George III in 1774 — 157 acres including the bridge — and built a cabin to host visitors; he called it "the most sublime of Nature's works." Legend (unproven but enduring) says a young George Washington surveyed it and carved his initials into the rock wall. It's now a Virginia state park in the Shenandoah Valley.

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.

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.

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.