Visiting Every National Park Part 1/63

I have a goal in life to visit every National Park in America before I die because America is awesome and so is nature. To start off this series I will be visiting the most recent National Park, New River Gorge, West Virginia.

I visited New River Gorge in September of 2024. I was there for one day and one night, tenting along the river. It was a beautiful day in September when I got there. The visitor center was nothing spectacular, but it wasn’t terrible. The little museum that they have is neat. It shows you how gorges are made, and about how the bridge that crosses over the gorge was made. The Bridge is really cool to look at from the ground, but when you’re driving over it, you would never know that you’re on the longest steel span bridge in the western hemisphere. All of these pictures are mine as I took them with my phone while I was there.

This is the view from the lookout at visitor center

Excuse my finger, this is the view from beneath.

One of the main attractions is that you can actually walk on the catwalk of the bridge with a Ranger, but it costs around $40 to do so. You can also go white water rafting on New River which is what New River is known for, but again for a price. It costs no money to get into the Park though, and because I am broke, this trip was done on a budget.

New River Gorge has a lot to offer for recreation lovers, as stated earlier with the catwalk, and the white water rafting, you can also camp, fish, and hike. The hike to the endless wall is noted as one of the best trails in the entire country, of course I learned this after I visited. But I still was able to do a hike to a neat little waterfall that had blue water. Like the water was actually blue. I took a sip of it and immediately wanted to become a dirt broke coal miner and live in a trailer park.

That is not the New River Bridge, or the New River

There was also this waterfall into this little creek that had the softest moss ever, I thought about keeping some to sleep on for the night, but I got respect for the nature.

This was also a very peaceful place with the running water

After my hike I decided to drive the original route that the New River Gorge bridge replaced. Even with both hands on the wheel with full focus of getting my 1999 Honda Accord across to the other side, it was still challenging. I have ridden the Dragons Tail in North Carolina on my motorcycle, and I think this road rivals that for twistiest road.

I got to my camping spot on the river and it was, lets say a little eerie, but not to the parks fault. There was another tent set up and it looked like someone was there. After getting set up, trying to start a fire with wet wood, and cooking a nice grilled cheese, there was still no movement from the other tent that was about 50 feet from mine.

This is just a textbook camping sight right here folks

I tried to do my best Outdoor Boys impression and tried to catch and cook a fish, but after about an hour and no bites I stopped and just enjoyed nature. The random tent was still putting me on edge so I slept with my hatchet under my pillow. During my restless nights sleep, I thought the following things were happening around me, my car was being towed because I was in an illegal spot, a bear was attacking our cooler, and the guy came back for his tent. None of those things happened, it was just some wind, and the trash truck came to empty out the dumpster. But what did happen though was some very inconsiderate person was blasting hispanic music in the dead of night for about 2 hours.

The stars at night went CRAZZYYYYY

I packed up and left in the morning for the long drive home. I am not from West Virginia so when I stopped at a Tudor's Biscuit World at a town nearby, I was blessed with the best biscuit of my life. 5 big booms. Also, it was like $10 in total for a breakfast for 2.

Overall, New River Gorge is a good National Park east of the Mississippi. It is the newest National Park and if I were to give it a rating, it would get 3/5 booms. If you are going to visit I would highly recommend planning it out and not winging it like I did. If you’re within a couple hour drive from New River Gorge National Park I would go. West Virginia itself is a really cool place, besides all of the poverty, homelessness, and drug addicts. The drive to and from was also really neat with the rolling mountains all along eastern West Virginia.

Please like and share with your nature buddy, or a crackhead in West Virginia.

That my West Virginians, is the Tea, with T.