Long Day in the Mountains. Appalachian Chinese Food.

West Virginia Travelog #15
Beckley, WV - Mon, 18 Sep 2023. 10:30pm

It's late evening on Monday and we're back at our hotel in Beckley, WV, after a long day of driving and hike. We visited, like, six waterfalls and logged 386 miles in the car. By way of comparison that's more than the 324 we drove coming up here from Charlotte (and round-tripping to the national park) on Saturday.

After our last hiking stop, at Douglas, Kennedy, and Albert Falls, we knew we'd be getting back to Beckley too late for dinner. We started looking for eats in small towns along the way. The choices in small-town Appalachia aren't great. We settled on a pizza-and-pasta restaurant, but after we sat down there we found that service was running really slowly. We bounced out and tried a Mexican restaurant next door (yes, we stopped in, like, the one small town with a Mexican restaurant) but it was closed for the next several days.

Dejected and about to get back in the car, I spotted a Chinese buffet restaurant across the parking lot. Hawk was reluctant at first, but I suggested we could look at the food on the buffet and bounce again if it looked disgusting. It looked... surprisingly good, for small-town Appalachian Chinese. When we walked in we were the only customers there, but apparently us breaking the seal on the doors let everyone in town know that cosmopolitan urbanites thought it was edible, and soon there were six other tables of people dining with us.

We got back to the hotel just in time to slip into the hot tub for a soak. Now we're feeling more relaxed and ready for bed. We have a lot planned for tomorrow— t's our last day in West Virginia! How how time flies.

Ahead Today: 4 States, 2 Waterfalls, and 1 Bridge

West Virginia Travelog #16
Beckley, WV - Tue, 19 Sep 2023. 9am

We have an ambitious plan for today. It's out last day in West Virginia so we're looking to pack in everything else we wanted to do that we didn't do already.

...Wait, leaving West Virginia? you might ask. Wasn't the whole plan of this trip to visit West Virginia?

It was, when we initially planned this trip 6 months ago. But then more recently when we started planning out specific things we wanted to do we found that WV wasn't quite as rich in them as we'd initially thought... and that North Carolina is. So today we're driving to North Carolina, after finishing up here in West Virginia.

Like I said, we've got ambitious plans for today. We'll start with a self-guided tour of the New River Gorge Bridge. That's been on my to-do list since reading about it in a Civil Engineering class in college decades ago! Then we'll finish up some unfinished hiking business here in WV, with Twin Falls State Park. If there's time after that we'll hike a falls in Virginia. ...Yes, Virginia, because to drive to Brevard, North Carolina we have to drive through 4 states: West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina.

It's going to be a long day. Time to get going!

The New River Gorge Bridge

West Virginia Travelog #17
Fayette, WV - Tue, 19 Sep 2023. 11am

We've already driven over it 4 times this trip. It's easy not to give it a second thought. After all, one's interaction with it is over in about 43 seconds. But it's an engineering marvel that reduced a slow, 45 minute drive down a mountain, across a river, and up the other side, to less than a minute. It's the New River Gorge Bridge.



Today we spent some time with this marvel. We stopped at the visitors center on the north side of the bridge to walk to a viewing platform, then we went on a self-guided driving tour down into the canyon with the help of an audio track Hawk downloaded and played through the car's stereo.

For a long time this part of the country— much of West Virginia, in fact— was considered too remote. Steep gorges like this crossing the land were the key reason why. Yet new reason to try harder came with the discovery of considerable coal deposits in the late 19th century. Railroads forged lines through the New River Gorge in 1873, and with this transportation network now available, more than a dozen coal mining towns sprang up along the river.



There were still the challenges of how to cross the river— and how to get from the rail station at the bottom to anything built atop the gorge. At first ferries were used to cross the river. Then in 1889 the Fayette Station Bridge was built.



The bridge that stands today is a rebuilt copy of the original bridge. It's safe to drive; in fact we drove across it before parking on the south side and walking back to take pictures.

While the bridge replaced slow and apparently dangerous ferry service, there was still the issue of the time taken to drive up and down the steep hills. Even with modern roads and cars, the trip from the top of one side of the gorge to the other takes about 45 minutes. With early motor cars and motor roads, say ~100 years ago, it could easily have been double. In horse-and-carriage days, probably quadruple.

Now the New River Gorge Bridge goes straight across the top, from side to side:



A few facts about this bridge:

• Construction was started in 1974 and completed in 1977. The steel looks old because of a rust-color treatment that makes painting it unnecessary.


• The span of the arch is 1700 feet (518 meters) long. Its curvature rises 360 feet. The suspended roadway is 3030 feet long.


• When it was built it was the longest steel arch bridge in the world, a title it held for 26 years. China subsequently built four longer arch bridges. This one remains the longest outside China.


• The road deck is 876 feet above the river. When it opened it was the highest bridge (of any design) in the world bearing regular vehicular traffic. Since 2001 a number of taller road bridges have been built, most of them in China.

My interest in seeing this bridge stems from studying it in a civil engineering class in the early 1990s. Back then this bridge was still relatively young— not even old enough for a learner's driving permit— and still retained multiple #1 designations. Even though it's been surpassed in length and height it's still a great piece of design that ties together the landscape aesthetically as well as logistically.