There is a bridge in West Virginia so large that BASE jumpers leap from it once a year and it takes them four seconds to fall far enough to open a parachute. The New River Gorge Bridge is 876 feet above the river, the longest steel arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere, and when it opened in 1977 it collapsed a forty-five minute ordeal into a drive of less than a minute.
Which raises an obvious question: what was the ordeal?
Before the Bridge
The answer is Fayette Station Road, and it is still there if you want to find out for yourself.
Before 1977, anyone needing to cross the New River Gorge had to do it the hard way. Eight miles of switchbacks and hairpin turns descending from the rim to the river below, across a narrow bridge at the bottom, then eight miles of the same winding back up the other side. Loaded coal trucks, family sedans, farm equipment — everything that needed to cross the gorge went down Fayette Station Road and came back up again. On a good day it took the better part of an hour. On a bad day, with traffic or weather, considerably longer.
The road was the only option for the better part of a century. People used it because they had to.
The Drive Today
The road didn’t disappear when the bridge opened — it just stopped being necessary. Today Fayette Station Road is part of the New River Gorge National Park, open to visitors and largely unchanged from the era when it was the only crossing. The switchbacks are still tight. The descent is still steep. The views through the trees are the kind that make you want to stop the car and stand still for a moment.
At the bottom, the old Fayette Station Bridge crosses the New River in the shadow of the modern span high above — the contrast between the two is one of the more striking things you’ll see in a park full of striking things. Standing on the old bridge and looking up at the arch overhead, the scale of what changed in 1977 is difficult to miss.
The drive down and back up takes about forty-five minutes. The same forty-five minutes it always took.
Worth the Detour
New River Gorge became a national park in 2020, the newest in the country, and most visitors come for the hiking and the whitewater. Fayette Station Road tends to attract the people who read the historical markers and want to understand a place rather than just pass through it.
It’s a road that existed out of necessity and survived out of luck. The fact that you can still drive it — still feel the same descent, still cross the same river at the bottom — is the kind of thing that doesn’t last forever. Worth doing while it does.
