New River Gorge

an installment of what happens to my photos when i die?

Beckley, WV

October 2026

New River Gorge has been on my list for years, and I finally made it there! As a civil engineer, I love bridges so driving through southern Ohio and West Virginia is so fun for me.

Except...we accidentally planned our trip on Bridge Day, which is a huge festival and the park's busiest day of the year. The bridge is closed all day for base jumpers to parachute down (a 900ft drop!) and there are hundreds of vendor booths and food trucks.

Day 1 (Bridge Day)

We spent the morning in Gauley Bridge, which is west of the actual park just to avoid the chaos. The first stop was Cathedral Falls, which might have been my favorite waterfall of the entire trip. It's a real quick roadside pit stop.

This is the Gauley River Iron Bridge, where you have to turn a hard corner and drive up an insanely steep hill, park at a railroad depot, and walk across rotten planks to get to the abandoned railroad.

I didn't feel like going back to the car to swap out for my ND filter so this is just a small aperture and my polarizer with a 1 second exposure.

This bridge was legit kind of scary to walk on, there were a lot of large gaps and rotten planks. #noragrets

Next we went to the Grandview area of the park, which was still pretty far from the Canyon Rim area where the festival is.

The Grand View overlook is just a short walk from the visitor center.

It was raining when we set out but cleared up as we went further down the trail.

We did go to the actual festival with about 2 hours left. It was still packed but it seemed much less busier than in the morning. This is the view from the bridge. There was a nonstop stream of base jumpers and there was an option to get catapulted off the bridge. There were also rappelers and a tour where you could walk the catwalk below the bridge.

There were several boats pulling base jumpers from the river

The human catapult

This is cropped in really close, and I'm surprised the quality held up.

That small bridge toward the bottom was originally the only way to cross the gorge, and it took 45 minutes. The New River Gorge bridge is the longest arch bridge in the western hemisphere, and cut down the crossing time to about 1 minute

After the bridge reopened and the crowds thinned out a bit more, we went to the bridge viewpoint behind the Canyon Rim visitor center to see the sunset. It doesn't look that far on a map, but you have to go down (and back up) 270 steps.

Day 2

We did the long point trail and overlook first thing on Day 2. The park was still super busy but nowhere near as bad as yesterday. When you view it from this direction the weathering steel really helps it blend into the background.

I took like 100 pictures of cool moss

You can take a short detour from the Long Point trail to see Butcher Branch Falls, and obviously I'm gonna do that. I was still too lazy to get my ND filter out so this is another small aperture ~1 second long exposure.

I really wanted to drive down to the old bridge but it was closed yesterday as a landing spot for all the base jumpers. They opened the road back up and I was able to head down there on the way out of the park. You follow an insanely steep, winding road. I can't imagine what this was like when it was the only way to get across.

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