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This October, the Adaptive Climbers Festival will gather in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge for the fifth year. In 2023, Folkways Reporter Emily Chen-Newton covered the event for Inside Appalachia. Since then, the Adaptive Climbers Festival has grown. Organizers say they’re nearly at capacity, with 300 climbers, caregivers and volunteers. Ahead of the festival, the campground has made accessibility improvements. Volunteers with the ACF have also been sprucing up the trails.
A local-food nonprofit based in the Northern Panhandle is busy this week reclaiming abandoned property.
“Once upon a time this was the Lincoln Home site,” said a founder of Grow Ohio Valley, Danny Swan. “There were three apartment buildings here with a parking lot. We’ve taken the parking lot and the three apartment buildings – which were torn down decades ago – and we’ve reclaimed those two terraces. Each are about 40 feet wide and about 200 or 300 feet long. And we plan to build greenhouses on them.”
Grow Ohio Valley’s nonprofit mission is to make Ohio Valley communities healthier by growing and providing more fresh, local food, and teaching how to grow and prepare that food. The group also hopes to boost the local economy through economic development initiatives.
Swan and others have cleared and flattened enough space here in a field of mud that overlooks downtown Wheeling, and the Ohio Valley, for six high-tunnel greenhouses. Two will go up during the next month with funding provided by the Catholic congregation at Saint Joseph’s. Grow Ohio Valley hopes to begin production in the spring, as well as programs about growing and preparing food.
Old blueprints of the Lincoln Home site were found, but Grow Ohio Valley hasn’t located any photographs of the site.
On the other side of the hill excavation is also ongoing at the site of the organization’s future urban orchard. Planting was scheduled for this spring but has been delayed for a year, anticipating the impending invasion of 17-year cicadas.
And atop the hill, there’s a small building that houses Grow Ohio Valley’s offices. The nonprofit won a $2,280 award this week at a community funding contest called Show of Hands that will enable them to begin to turn the space into a small grocery, Grandview Grocer.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.
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Two federally important facilities located in West Virginia require a strict limit on radio frequency interference. But for decades – increasingly as communication systems have become more advanced – those limits have made it difficult for emergency crews and first responders in Pendleton and Pocahontas counties to do their jobs as safely and effectively as possible. Now the results of a lengthy federal study show exactly how precarious the situation is. We caught up with Pendleton County Emergency Management’s Rick Gillespie to find out what the study shows and what happens next.
In recent years, physicians across the country have monitored surges of a condition known as Alpha-Gal Syndrome, which can cause allergic reactions to red meat. Hannah Saad with Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom member station WKMS reports that, now, farmers, restaurateurs and the afflicted are flocking to a new source of protein.
Kianoosh Nawai, an eighth grader at the West Virginia Virtual Academy, was the only West Virginia student chosen from close to 2,000 entrants from across the country for a national science competition.
