We started out the day doing our mundane and suffocatingly boring laundry but, due to large washing machines in the Oak Hill laundromat nearby, we finished in a jiffy and had some spare time to fart around. We headed fro the New River Gorge National River Park just north of Fayetteville.
The New River Gorge is a tremendous tear in the earth. Not surprisingly, the New River runs through the bottom of it. Spanning the canyon from edge to edge is the New River Bridge, the longest single-arch bridge in the western hemisphere. We pulled in at the visitor center and overlook complex but found the view from the overlook is partially obscured by jungle-like vegetation happily growing along the edge. Peggy and I formulated a plan to get to better views so we went searching for some roads that would take us down to the bottom of the gorge and we could look up to see the bridge.
The first efforts were for naught with several failures of navigation, of which I was in charge. Nevertheless, through plain stupid pigheadedness and blunt stubbornness, we finally found a little skinny road to the bottom. We had to back up a few times to negotiate some of the switchback turns but we continued, descending through the temperate jungle until we got to the river. It is a spectacular gorge with massive cliffs of sedimentary rock, gentle waterfalls and vegetation on a mission to cover the earth with green. At the bottom, we found a bridge not visible from the canyon rim hundreds of feet above and ascended back up the other side of the gorge. Peggy isn’t real skookum on abrupt, sure-death dropoffs into a river so she drove at a very leisurely speed and I got to scope out everything. It was wonderful. It was also raining.
Eventually we drove up to the edge of the canyon were we noticed quite a few signs that stated “PCB’s Kills Communities” although I believe they should have run apostrophe check. We continued on into Fayetteville which is a nice little city with some very handsome architecture. It has a nice courtroom building in the middle of the square with an adjacent jail that looks positively medieval. I’m glad I am old and the police ignore me.
We got some photos. To see ’em, click the asterisk *