The peak months at the Gorge are June, July and August, with more than 200,000 visitors each month. Park attendance dips below 100,000 in the winter months.
With 325 million visitors last year, park attendance nationwide was higher than any year since 2020 but still not more than 2019’s 327 million.
The Harpers Ferry National Historical Park also set a record for recent years with 427,000 visitors, up from 300,000 in 2019.
The Gauley River National Recreation Area also saw a record 187,000 visitors last year, up from 119,000 in 2019.
Portions of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park are in West Virginia. The park drew nearly 4.5 million visitors last year. In 2021, nearly 5 million people visited the park.
The Western United States is suffering through heatwaves and long-term droughts, raising fears of more out-of-control wildfires burning hundreds of thousands of acres this year. That is on top of record breaking wildfire seasons in recent years.
West Virginia is the third most forested state in the nation, and second in standing hardwoods like maple and oak, according to the National Association of State Foresters. According to a 2016 survey from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service, approximately 78 percent of the state’s total land area is made up of forest land.
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WVPB
Smoke rolls upward from a prescribed burn in Grandview in Raleigh County.
For years, the National Park Service and the forest service put out every fire in the forests as quickly as they could. But they have since learned there is a better way.
Aaron Kendall is the fire management officer for the Monongahela National Forest. He says the forest service has multiple fire units with different goals in mind, depending on where they work.
“Some of them are more towards wildlife or just the diversity of the forest itself,” he said. “And then some of them are to reduce fuel loading, you know, to hopefully prevent the spread of a catastrophic wildfire. It’s a balance.”
Kendall noted that while forest fire risk in West Virginia is not nearly as high as it is in the West, it varies within the state.
“Here in the Elkins area, we have a lot of rain, and so it’s a little less likely to have some type of wildfire,” he said. “But you go just a little bit to the east of us, on the other side of the ridge over towards Petersburg, or White Sulphur Springs on that side of the forest, and it’s a different story. They don’t get nearly as much precipitation. The fire danger can change more rapidly down there.”
Today, the approach has more to do with fires in proximity to houses and buildings.
“You get more and more people moving into what was more of a wild area,” Bieri said. “If you don’t burn those areas, you’ve got to put fires out when they’re close to people’s homes so it just increases that risk.”
Eric Douglas
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WVPB
A National Park Service firefighter emerges from the smoke during the prescribed burn at Grandview.
Fires set intentionally are called prescribed fires. The park service has a “prescription” or a plan for the fire. The recent prescribed fire at Carper Fields at Grandview was for habitat protection.
“That’s a burn that we do for habitat maintenance and restoration,” Bieri said. “It’s to basically burn out the woody shrubs and invasive species to help maintain a native grassland habitat for wildlife.”
Both Bieri and Kendall worked in western states for the park service before coming to West Virginia. Bieri says we do have some of the same problems Western states face.
“We definitely have the urban interface in terms of people living in forested areas around the park. But we luckily don’t have the fire danger as extreme as it is in places out west,” he said.
On the other hand, Bieri brought up the fires that hit the Great Smoky Mountains in 2016.
“That was a major urban interface issue that burned down quite a lot of homes and businesses around the Gatlinburg area. It’s not just a Western problem, it can certainly happen in the East,” he said.
The overall fire danger in West Virginia is moderate right now, but it can increase in the dry fall months when leaves are falling and trees are dried out.
Conor Knighton is an Emmy Award-winning CBS Sunday Morning Correspondent. He’s also a Charleston, West Virginia native who spent a year on the road visiting every national park in the country.
Knighton, who wrote a book about his journey titled “Leave Only Footprints,” spoke with Eric Douglas about his epic trip and how growing up in West Virginia influenced what he saw.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Douglas: One thing that really intrigued me about this book, Leave Only Footprints, was — probably on the second page — you were talking about your West Virginia roots and comparing that to some of the adventures you were setting out on? How did that play into your excursion out to visit all of the national parks in the country?
Knighton: It’s so easy to trace my love of nature back to West Virginia. I grew up with so many different hiking opportunities right out my front door, whether that was Kanawha State Forest or a trip to Watoga, we spent a lot of weekends camping. It’s just a beautiful state. And it continues to be a type of landscape that I appreciate — maybe even more now that I’ve seen so many other places.
Douglas: So tell me why you wanted to take this journey, why it was important for you to see all the national parks in the country.
Knighton: I saw a news article at the end of 2015 about the upcoming centennial of the National Park Service. This journey took place over the course of 2016. At the time, I was freelancing for CBS Sunday Morning, and I thought, ‘Well, hey, that’s something we might do a story on.” Before I sent that email, I ended up completely revising my pitch to a whole series of stories on all of the parks. We could find the same types of stories about food and family and art and architecture that would be at home on any episode of Sunday Morning, and just happened to take place in the parks. So I outlined this, looking back, very outlandish pitch that my boss said yes to. But he rightfully decided that we should only do some of the parks for the show.
At the time, there were 59 national parks. We decided to do 20 or so for the broadcast. But then I just got really excited about the idea of trying to tackle them all. And so it was at that point that I decided to give up my place in LA, put my stuff into storage, sell most of the rest, and then hit the road and spend the entire year living full time on the road.
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Conor Knighton’s love of nature started young. Here he is as a child in Kanawha State Forest.
Douglas: One of the stories in the book that stands out for me is the Hot Springs story.
Knighton: When you hear ‘national park,’ you think of a place like Yellowstone or Yosemite. And so when you roll up to Hot Springs National Park in Hot Springs, Arkansas, it’s in the middle of a city. There’s a few trails out in the hills that you can hike, but that is a park that was protected for its history — for these historic bath houses. And those all exist because of the water. There was this belief back when that area was protected, that the healing powers of that spring water could cure everything from syphilis to polio. We have since learned that penicillin is maybe better medicine than water.
Douglas: What was the process for pulling the book project together? Did you take notes along the way?
Knighton: I wish I had taken better notes. I did take some because and in the back of my mind, I thought that maybe it’s a book one day, but I was just too embarrassed to admit that to anyone else. I didn’t know how I was gonna finish this journey. For all I knew I was gonna break my legs in Glacier National Park and that would have been the end of it.
At the conclusion of the journey, I finally sat down and started looking at all that together and almost felt like I was solving a crime where I would have threads and note cards all up on the walls. The potential downside is you’ve set up an expectation that you’re gonna hear about all of the parks. So I wanted to make sure I at least featured every park with some getting more attention than others.
Douglas: Were there any of the parks that were a surprise to you?
Knighton: So many of them. And actually what convinced me to take on this project was when I looked down the list of the parks, I was surprised how many I’d never even heard of. I mean, everyone knows the Everglades and Yosemite and Yellowstone. But Great Sand Dunes in Colorado? I had never heard of that park before. Most of the Alaskan ones, there were at least half that didn’t even register.
For the broadcast for the Sunday Morning side of things, those were the ones I tended to focus on. Just mentioning the fact that there is a national park in American Samoa, that’s news to a lot of people. It was news to me. And so that was unbelievably memorable.
Douglas: Can you name one of those? One that stood out?
Knighton: I think Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado is, from a scenery perspective, very memorable. It is an unexpected park where it looks like the Sahara Desert has been transposed on to the Rocky Mountains. It is an incongruous mashup that just doesn’t compute when you see it for the first time, because it’s just a massive dune field in the midst of the Rocky Mountains. It’s also one of the quietest places on earth. That ended up becoming a story that I tell in the book all about the importance of quiet.
Douglas: What was it like when you pitched this project to CBS?
Knighton: I was untested. I’d worked in TV for a decade at that point, and in some form or another for Sunday Morning for four years. But this really was a commitment on their part to believing in me. I produced all these segments on my own while I was traveling, and working remotely before that was a thing that everybody was doing. At the time, I would make a segment, send back the footage via FedEx, interact with the editor through Vimeo links. That was new for our show. So that was a bit of a leap of faith on their part that, I think, worked out.
Douglas: You got what 20 or so broadcasts out of it, you got a book out of it.
Knighton: If no one read it and no one watched it, it was a life-changing experience for me. What I got the most out of it was a shift in my own perspective.
The Isle Royale National Park, off the coast of Michigan, is so remote, that it has some of the highest durations of visitation. If you’re going there, you’re there for days because it’s just hard to get to and hard to get back from.
You really have to go far into nature to experience that. I came to treasure that. to have those times with myself, to really unplug and plug more into that natural world.
Knighton’s book “Leave Only Footprints,” is now available in paperback.
This story is part of aseries of interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.
Last year, West Virginia’s New River Gorge became the state’s first national park and preserve and the 63rd national park in the nation.
It’s just a one word change — but those who fought for the new designation say it could make all the difference for the local tourism economy.
Two other national parks — one of the youngest, and one of the oldest — have lessons for the future of the New River Gorge.
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Indiana Dunes National Park
Three years ago, the Indiana Dunes Lakeshore was in the exact same position as West Virginia’s New River Gorge. Congress had just approved a national park designation for its fifteen miles of ecologically diverse beaches along Lake Michigan.
The new name brought a lot of popularity that surprised the park staff.
“It was really amazing how much the name change meant to so many people out there, said Bruce Rowe, chief interpretive ranger.
Jeff Manuszak/NPS
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Bruce Rowe
In the first summer as a national park, visitation increased by 28 percent.
Pat Majka, a longtime park volunteer, said it wasn’t just more visitors, there was also a new type of visitor. In addition to locals or daytrippers from nearby Chicago, she saw more first-time visitors from farther away.
“I’ve met people that will just travel the whole country stopping at every park,” Majka said.
At the visitors center, almost twice as many people walked through the doors that summer and the COVID-19 pandemic only added to the park’s popularity.
Its beaches stayed open while those nearby shut down. At one point it was so busy, the police were brought in for crowd control.
The national park impact is felt on the beaches, as well as nearby towns like Chesterton. Businesses there have seen more visitors in a place that used to be just a highway stop for travelers.
“With this being a destination, our customers are not just stopping here because they’re getting gas and coffee,” said restaurant owner Lisa Wodrich, “They’re stopping here because they’re staying here because of the national park.”
She’s lived in the area for 30 years and said there are some inconveniences to suddenly having a national park in your backyard.
“We got our RV, and I tried to book a camping spot,” she said. “And we couldn’t get a spot for three months. Like it was there was nothing. There was nothing.”
But overall, she said the positives of the name change far outweigh the negatives.
I think it’s always nice to be part of someone’s vacation,” Wodrich said. “But now we’re part of people’s bucket lists.”
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Great Smoky Mountains National Park
While Indiana Dunes is still a young national park, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been a vacation destination for over 80 years.
Summit Real Estate
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Vickie King
Dedicated in 1940, it’s been the most visited national park every year since the end of World War II. A third of the nation’s population is within a day’s drive, and several nearby towns form a tourist mecca — home to Dollywood and many other attractions.
“The town’s very full, very busy, and we have become a year-round destination,” said Vickie King, a lifelong Pigeon Forge, Tennessee resident.
She got her first job in grade school as an usherette at Hee Haw Village — a roadside tourist attraction with a comedy show. Since then, she’s worked almost every kind of tourism job you can think of — retail, a wedding chapel and now vacation rentals.
She remembers when the tourism economy wasn’t enough to sustain her family year-round.
“When I was growing up, and my mom worked in hospitality, you know, she was laid off for three to four months during the winter, and then brought back to work,” King said. “You don’t really see layoffs anymore. It’s almost a thing of the past. Which is amazing.”
Park visitors pump over a billion dollars into the area’s economy each year.
Tennessee Tourism Commitee
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Leon Downey, Pigeon Forge tourism director.
Leon Downey, tourism director in Pigeon Forge, said these tourism dollars are such a big deal that even his eye doctor has a stake in it.
“First question he asked me is not ‘how are your eyes? Are you having any problems with your eyes?’ He said, ‘Leon, what kind of a tourism season are we going to have this year?’”
Downey said his eye doctor knows a successful season means more money for locals to spend on glasses in a town that is holistically dependent on the tourism economy.
Right now, Downey said the relationship between the town and the national park is strong, but it took time to get there. Over the last 20 years, the park and nearby towns have worked together to promote the whole region and ensure economic success.
“Our guests don’t see us individually as Pigeon Forge, or Gatlinburg, or Seville,” Downey said. “When we asked them where they went on vacation, they went to the Smoky Mountains.”
Now, what does all this mean for West Virginia’s new national park and preserve?
The New River Gorge is likely to see more visitors, this summer and beyond. Many of them will be first-timers and curious about the new park. The crowds will more than likely mean extra wear and tear on the roads and trails.
But if park infrastructure meets the demand and money is invested to promote the park, economists and tourism experts say new visitors will become repeat visitors and spark a robust tourism economy like the Smokies.
“If you have that national park designation, that’s already inherently a stamp of approval that says, ‘There’s a really cool spot here that you can come and visit and there’s going to be cool stuff going on,’” said John Deskins, an economics professor at West Virginia University who studies regional economic opportunities. “I think this is a core element of forming the kind of recreation economy that we should strive to build in that part of the state.”
The National Park Service will be closing the Ajax Spring located off of Fayette Station Road after recent mandatory testing indicated the water does not meet the minimum requirements for drinking water. Despite the fact that the spring is posted as a non-potable water source, there are concerns that residents in the local community use the spring water for household use.
“Because we are aware the public uses the spring we were required to test it during a recent mandatory audit. When the test results were reviewed by the National Park Service Public Health Inspector, he recommended closing the spring” said Superintendent Trish Kicklighter.
The lab results showed high levels of arsenic and mercury and the presence of coliform bacteria. Turbidity is also a major issue of concern. The water turbidity and presence of coliform indicate surface water is leaking through rock fissures and cracks contaminating the spring.
The water source for the Ajax Spring comes from drainage out of the old Ajax mine. The concrete structure and pipe to access the spring existed prior to the park’s establishment. After this site became a part of the New River Gorge National River in 1988, park staff maintained access to the spring for the local community.
“We know local residents use the spring to supply their households with drinking water; however, with the recent test results we cannot in good conscience keep the spring operational”, said Superintendent Kicklighter.
A Fayette County sanitarian stated that the water system does not meet the minimum standards of the WV 64 CSR 3, Public Water Systems.
Kathy Zerkle is a river ranger for the National Park Service who works in Fayette County in New River Park, and, you guessed it, she’s out of work these days. Furloughed. And while she’s concerned about what that means for the safety and well-being of the New River Park and the public that visit, and her personal future financially, she’s also concerned about how the government shutdown impacts the Grand Canyon—or at least her ability to experience it.
Zerkle says the National Park Service has already been operating in a limited capacity under the government sequestration, and now, what was a staff of about 100 has been cut to 9. She says she’s frustrated by policy makers’ inability to balance matters of public safety with partisan agendas, but moreover, now she’s seeing her dream of rafting down the Grand Canyon dashed as well.
“I certainly didn’t want to see the President give in to the tactics of the Republican Party, just so that I can go on the Grand Canyon, but it sure would be nice to go on the Grand Canyon! We’ve been planning this for over a year.”
Zerkle explains, in order to raft down the Colorado River that carved out the Grand Canyon, you have to pay a fee and enter a lottery a year before you hope to float.
“A year ago, February, I went ahead and put in for this year and was awarded a date, which happens to be October 25th, and I can take a maximum of 16 people for 21 days down the Grand Canyon.”
Food, gear, transportation—that’s all up to whomever gets the golden ticket—so to speak. Zerkle says she and her friends have been preparing, investing, and there’s a mountain of gear sitting in her home, ready to be driven across the country. But she’s not sure if she and her cohorts can afford to trip-it all the way to Arizona just to be denied access at the gate. She says 22 groups have tried to put-on since the shutdown and they’ve all been turned away.
So why, right? Even though the National Park Service is furloughed, rafting continues in West Virginia. It’s one of the busiest times of the year, in fact. Zerkle explains that it really comes down to access.
“A lot of the properties within our boundaries are owned by private entities, the roads are state roads, there’s private property at the end of the government roads and even at the end of the Park’s roads, so we can’t block access. Plus, I like to think that in New River, our superintendent, coolers heads prevailed and they were able to find a way to say that the New River and the Gauley River are navigable water ways and the only people who can shut down access to navigable waterways is the US Coast Guard.”
But it’s a different story out West. All the property surrounding the Grand Canyon, all the roads, all the concessions, the put-in areas, plus the permitting process, the required check-list that has to be verified, the required orientation procedures that teaches the public how to protect the resource during the three-week excursion—it’s all is under the control and management of the National Park Service.
So Zerkle’s livelihood and her dream of rafting down the Grand Canyon are on hold. While it makes her feel ill, she says her priorities are still in line, and her biggest concern remains the future of the nation. Her opinion of Washington? Her faith in leadership?
“We are really just pons in the Big Game. It bothers me that these people that are elected officials who are supposed to be here for the good of the group are really more concerned about what I feel their personal agendas are.”
In the latest developments, over the weekend, The Grand Canyon and other national parks were opened to the public, but only because states have come up with the money to support them. And while that bodes well for some tourists–and the businesses that rely on them–it’s a temporary deal. It costs in the ball park of $100,000 a day to operate a park like the Grand Canyon. States have only been able to promise about a week to the public which means, Kathy Zerkle and her friends, who are scheduled to visit the canyon October 25th, are still in limbo, hoping legislators will strike a deal, and soon.
