A Park Made of Bridges

16 Jan 2025

I found a bridge, is that it?

No, we're still in Pittsburgh!

What about this one?

No, but we're closer!

A short 2 hour drive later...
We made it! Welcome to New River Gorge National Park and Preserve!

Of course, the very first thing we did was visit the Canyon Rim visitor center and get our bearings.

From there, we popped over to the scenic overlook to get a good view of the big bridge.

While impressive, we wanted a better look and it was later in the day, so we rushed over to Long Point Trail to see what we could see. It was a good little hike, but what would have been pretty easy quickly proved to be extremely tough. The entire trail was just a giant block of ice.

Fortunately, we had hiking sticks and good boots and coats so we didn't have any trouble.

Well, mostly at least. Sara slipped once on an ice patch right at the end of trail

However, the views we captured were absolutely worth the work.

We took about 2 hours to go 3.2 miles on Long Point Trail, which considering the terrain, was pretty good time for us.

The sun was starting to set so we decided to head to dinner. Pies and Pints came highly recommended by random strangers on the internet, so that was the clear option. Turns out, it was really good!

The next day was a driving day, so we decided to try to drive the old road that the big bridge replaced. The National Park Service has a cool audio book to listen to on the 30 minute drive, so we put that on and headed down into the valley.

The road was pretty icy and had not been plowed at all. We slipped and slid every corner for about 10 minutes before the audio book told us that the fork ahead was the last opportunity to turn around and that it'd be a small one lane road from here on out. We decided that we didn't want to risk the road conditions, so we took the exit. Fortunately, we saw some cool icicles that Sara snapped a photo of on our way back out. We made it okay, but lost traction another dozen times climbing halfway up the gorge.

From there, we headed toward the Thurmond rail station to see if there were any trains around today. Turns out the railroad that runs through the center of New River Gorge National Park is active, running freight three times a wekk. We were in luck too! Not 10 minutes down the road we found a train! Sure, it's missing everythig between the engine and caboose, but it's still a train!

On the way to the train station, we also found some much bigger ice formations that were at least 30 feet tall.

And finally we found the thing we were looking for... a bridge!

Alright, alright, we found a train too!

To round out our time before we headed out we decided to head to Sandstone Falls down south another hour or so. And of course, we had to go looking for our favorite thing: a bridge!

The Sandstone Falls were gorgeous too. They apparently are helped a lot by beavers building dams blocking parts of the rock shelf and making the other parts of the waterfall stronger.

We were getting really cold next to the water with it being 18° outside, so we decided to start heading south again, but within the first 20 minutes of the drive we were stopped by a flock of turkeys and the Bluestone Dam

And with that, we're back on the road! Heading toward Gatlinburg, Tennessee where it's a touch less cold. We are planning to spend a night or two around the town and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park!