Parachuters flock to New River Gorge

FAYETTEVILLE, W.Va. — At the bottom of the 174 wooden steps from the Canyon Rim Visitor Center to the lookout on the New River Gorge, Jim Dill removes his woven straw hat, as if he has entered a holy place.

"This is breathtaking," he says softly, as wife Rita begins snapping photos. A few minutes later, he adds: "I can't look enough! I've got a sore neck, twisting my head one direction and then the other."

Dill, of Caldwell, Idaho, is one of some 300,000 people who stop at the New River Gorge National River each year. Most are here just to get a glimpse of the world famous New River Gorge Bridge and the canyon below. The steel-arch span, the second-longest in the world, is a sight in itself, made famous by jumpers who parachute from its edge at a festival the third Saturday of every October (Oct. 21 this year).

In May, Roads & Bridges magazine ranked it one of the top 10 bridges of all time, in the company of such icons as the Brooklyn Bridge in New York and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

And while they don't yet have the numbers to back up their theory, guides with the National Park Service swear that tourism has increased since the release last year of the West Virginia quarter — a coin bearing the image of the bridge.

But there is more to the New River Gorge than the steel that stretches over it. And there is more to it than the blue and yellow rafts that ply the whitewater below the bridge, carrying 100,000 people a year down Class 4 rapids that qualify as the park's most traveled "trail."

There is the rest of the New, beyond the bridge.

The river begins at a spring in Blowing Rock, N.C., and winds north for 320 miles until it intersects with the Gauley. For 53 miles in West Virginia, it is a national park encompassing 70,000 acres between Fayetteville and Hinton.

The park was created in part to preserve the legacy of coal mining towns like Kaymoor and Thurmond, though its valleys are now free of the smoke that once belched from coke ovens and freight trains. Today, it offers recreation in many forms, from rock climbing and biking to fishing, birding, swimming and hunting.

Each of the four visitors' centers has something different to offer.

Twelve miles south of Fayetteville, travelers turn off U.S. 19 into the village of Glen Jean, then onto a narrow road that winds for seven miles through a community of tin-roofed homes that give way to orange lilies exploding from the greenery. A few miles in, a mountain waterfall roars over a stream filled with boulders and lined with moss-covered trees.

Eventually, the road offers up a choice: Left or right. History or nature.