At the start of the summer, knowing that we were not going to be taking a big national parks road trip this year, we floated the idea of taking a few weekend trips. The summer ended up busier than expected, and most of those trips did not happen, but as the start of the school year loomed we decided it would be fun to try to squeeze in New River Gorge in West Virginia, which had been top of our list of ideas. The park is only three hours away and we had most of the last weekend before school free.
We had already committed to helping install seats at the stadium for Marching Band on Saturday morning, so we did not hit the road until after lunch. This gave us just enough time to hit the two components of the park that we would pass on the way to our hotel and still make it to Fayetteville for an (albeit late) dinner.
Sandstone had a beautiful visitor's center, although in talking to the ranger we realized that it would be an hour out of our way, down a steep mountain, to see the main attraction - Sandstone Falls. We settled for the Sandstone Falls viewpoint:
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| There were great wildflowers at the visitor's center |
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| All they had with the park name were these pennants in the parking lot |
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| Sandstone Falls |
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| You can see we were pretty far from the falls, but it was scenic |
From Sandstone, we made our way to Grand View, so named because it has the prettiest vista in the park. We did not get there before the visitor center closed, but we were able to see both the Grand View viewpoint and a second one at Turkey Spur just up the road:
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| Better sign, but it has not been updated since New River Gorge became a national park in 2020 |
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| Benji trying to cover up the inaccurate part of the sign |
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| This is the "grand view" |
Turkey Spur had a slightly different view, and you had to climb up 150 stairs to see it:
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