With the addition of the New River Gorge region, the Ascend West Virginia program now has five destinations that are welcoming new remote working residents to the Mountain State.
With the addition of the New River Gorge region, the Ascend West Virginia program now has five destinations that are welcoming new remote working residents to the Mountain State. By offering incentives of cash and free outdoor adventures, the program hopes to offset the state’s population decline.
Ascend West Virginia began with a $25 million gift to West Virginia University’s (WVU) Brad and Alys Smith Outdoor Economic Development Collaborative. Teaming up with the state Department of Tourism, Ascend selects applicants (more than 20,000 since its launch), who are willing to move to the state. The people selected get $12,000 in cash and another $8,000 in outdoor activity vouchers.
Tourism Secretary Chelsea Ruby called Ascend a progressive success.
“We have nearly 300 new West Virginia residents that have come over the last two years,” Ruby said. “They are spread across the state in various host communities. And the retention rate is at about 98 percent, so things are going well.”
Ruby said adding the New River Gorge region to the Ascend community roster offers options.
“They can live anywhere in the New River Gorge region.” she said. “It’s not just Fayetteville, it’s not just Oak Hill. They can basically live anywhere in the area from Summersville down to Beckley and all around. We’re looking for them to put down roots in those communities.”
Ascend executive team member Danny Twilley, a WVU assistant vice president of Economic Community and Asset Development, said the other four Ascend community regions continue to take applicants.
“So if you want a college town, you’ve got Morgantown,” Twilley said. “If you want the kind of access to the major metropolitan area in D.C. and in the growth of the Eastern Panhandle, you’ve got that area. If you want that cool art and food culture with some really unique outdoor assets, you’ve got Greenbrier Valley and Lewisburg. And then Elkins is a western gateway to the Monongahela National Forest.”
“Ascenders,” as they are called, hail from 34 states and two countries. Ruby said they are a diverse lot.
”We’ve got some that are singles, we’ve got some couples, we’ve got some families,” Ruby said. “I think we even have a couple of new babies that have been born into Ascend families since they’ve moved here.”
Ruby said the Ascend remote workers come from a variety of businesses and industries, highlighted by health care, advertising and educational services.
“Just skimming the list, you know, we’ve got folks from Deloitte Consulting, KPMG, Ocean Spray, UnitedHealthcare, Vivid Seats, Walgreens,” she said. “They really are a very broad spectrum. They come from nearly every industry.”
Twilley said a majority of Ascenders have advanced education.
“Whether it’s a four year degree, a master’s or beyond, 25 percent of them have a very direct connection to the state and 75 percent don’t have a family member or have lived here before,” Twilley said. “It’s a relatively broad swath. We’ve had applications from over 80 different countries and all 50 states.”
The goal is to have 1,000 Ascend families come to West Virginia in the next six years. Twilley said one new group target will be military veterans.
“West Virginia produces more military veterans per capita than any other state in the country and we have the least amount to return home, right?” Twilley said. “They learn tremendous skills, they have lived a life of service, they have built a sense of community and what it means to be a military veteran. We had the highest population in 1950. Over the next 71 years, we lost over 200,000 people – about 12 percent. I think we can replenish it back to that era of a population. That’s really a long-term goal that we’re focused on.”
Ruby said what Ascend is selling is the kind of outdoor lifestyle a remote worker can have in West Virginia.
“I firmly believe it is the nation’s premier remote worker program,” she said. “I’m really excited about the results that we’ve seen over the first two years and am really excited about the future.”
On Adventure Travel Day at the West Virginia Legislature, on and off road enthusiasts touted some mean machines on two wheels and four – and some, not so mean.
On Adventure Travel Day at the West Virginia Legislature, on and off road enthusiasts touted some mean machines on two wheels and four – and some, not so mean.
West Virginia adventure travel displays were not limited to inside the capitol rotunda. Outside the governor’s office, a row of high end road warrior vehicles formed a formidable, impromptu parking lot. A few came complete with attachable camping gear.
Inside, adventure travel outfits included a variety of Hatfield-McCoy and other ATV trail runs, rides and accessories. The New River Jet Boats drew interest, as did the Court Roads Jeep Club and the 132-mile Hellbender Motorsports roadway run.
McDowell County’s “Head of the Dragon” motorcycle and sports car ride was organized to help bring economic development to the coalfields.
And the veteran driven Mission 22 display offered a road or trail ride to any former or current serviceman or woman who wants to hit the hills.
But the wheels getting the most traction running through state legislation right now come with the smallest engine here, and it’s not even gas powered. We’re talking about electric bikes, or e-bikes.
Joseph Overbaugh is the chief operating officer of Fission Cycles just outside Parkersburg. He is also the author of House Bill 2062, which just passed the House and is now in the Senate. It’s meant to align state e-bike laws with federal laws. The measure allows the most popular e-bikes made to be ridden in all of West Virginia’s state parks.
Overbaugh said over the past five years, electric-bike popularity has skyrocketed.
“One of the main drivers was actually COVID-19,” Overbaugh said. “After the lockdown and everyone got stuck at home, people started to look for ways to get out and do outdoor activities and social distance. The e-bike market just exploded as an opportunity for people to get out to exercise and social distance.”
State parks representatives who were set up at Adventure Travel Day said they were all in favor of opening up the parks to e-bikes.
Tourism success in the coalfields seems to begin and end with a network of ATV trails, but it’s what’s in the middle that creates the challenges.
Tourism is a major component in southern West Virginia’s transition away from a coal based economy.
Tourism success in the coalfields seems to begin and end with a network of ATV trails, but it’s what’s in the middle that creates the challenges.
For $60 a head, Keith Gibson offers tourists visiting Matewan, West Virginia an airboat ride on the Tug River, a designated West Virginia flatwater trail.
“I worked at the coal mines,” Gibson said. “So I’ve had to relearn myself. Everything that I’m doing now is so different. Nothing like a coal mine.”
With headsets and microphones on to drown out the noise, Gibson tells his passengers tales of coal mine wars and the forbidden, feud-sparking love of Johnse Hatfield and Rosanna McCoy that began just over the Kentucky riverbank.
Randy Yohe
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Hatfield Hideaway is among a growing number of new coalfield resorts.
Gibson said many come to his airboat tour for a respite from the choking dust of the region’s popular ATV trails. But he said getting to the remote border town may call for a feud with the state legislature.
“We have to work extra hard to attract people to drive that extra 100 miles on curvy roads to get here,” Gibson said. “Then, we have to work hard to accommodate them when they are here.”
Gibson said the legislature needs to consider the challenges border counties face, with prices often lower just a bridge ride away in neighboring Kentucky. He said he was getting close to economically recovering from the pandemic, when inflation hit.
“They have to have somewhere to stay, they have to have something to eat, but they don’t have to have an airboat ride,” Gibson said. “They don’t have to have a t-shirt.”
Jamie Cantrell knows about border battles. Her Matewan Trailhead Bar and Grill is just a half mile from the Hatfield Hideout Cabin and RV Camp in McCarr, Kentucky that she also has an interest in. She said the growing tourism industry here needs much more help from the state.
“Do some stuff with the roads to help people get here,” Cantrell said. “Finish the King Coal Highway. We always need more lodging. There’s people buying up homes and putting them on AirBnB left and right. We could use more food places. Politicians need to come into Matewan and see what we have to offer and try to get us some grant money to help restore a lot of these old buildings.”
With ATV’s whizzing through the middle of downtown Matewan, an old coal mining bank building has been converted into the Mine Wars Museum. Co-founder and museum board member Wilma Steele said the organization remains dedicated to correcting revisionist history.
“When I found out the United Mine Workers, in 1920, offered equal pay for blacks and whites and their members were not discriminating against their brothers because of culture or speech or any of that, that blew me away,” Steele said. “We don’t have that history. It’s not in the textbooks.”
Randy Yohe
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
About 1,500 African American men from McDowell County enlisted in World War I.
Steele said Matewan’s growing tourism industry stems from freshly voted in city leadership and a united community effort.
“The more that you work as a team and a town to do something, the stronger you get,” Steele said. ”The Mine Wars Museum, from the very first, has been that group that has been right here working and caring about development.”
A museum not too far from Matewan, the Kimball World War I Memorial in McDowell County, sits isolated and somewhat neglected. Curator Clara Thompson said this was the first and now the only remaining memorial to African American veterans of the Great War.
“Believe it or not, we had over 1,500 soldiers to go to World War I from McDowell County,” Thompson said. “When the soldiers came back from the war, they approached the county about constructing a memorial, because the white soldiers had also asked for a memorial and so they got it. They looked to place it in the county seat at Welch but there was none to be found. So that’s how we ended up here in Kimball.”
Replete with outstanding displays, open part time and struggling to maintain board members and infrastructure, the privately-funded museum works to make ends meet with a community center downstairs offering hall and kitchen rentals. Thompson said she gets national, even global visitors, yet the local population seems unaware of its own history.
Randy Yohe
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
Mine Wars Museum; the term “redneck” came from the red bandanas striking coal miners wore in solidarity.
“Why don’t the schools have the kids come here and visit this museum? That’s a part of their history,” Thompson said. “We could use funding so that we could advertise more, put out more brochures and things like that. But we don’t have funding and most grants, they ask for matching funds. Where are we going to get it from? It would be so nice if the legislature had that money already allotted to building these historic sites, so that they can do their job.”
The local representative in the legislature, Del. Ed Evans, D-McDowell, agreed the state needs to do more.
“You’re right, it is not open all the time. I don’t think there’s a full time employee,” Evans said. “We still have a large African American population here in Kimball on the hill behind us. Up the road here toward the North Fork and Keystone, you’ll find large African American populations.”
Evans said help with matching grant funds to enhance history-related tourism was an impetus for the legislature creating the Coalfield Communities Grant Facilitation Commission. Evans said the commission should be helping bolster declining coal communities like Kimball’s infrastructure and helping their memorial become a desired destination. But it hasn’t received the funding it needs to get started.
“It should have been underway immediately. The governor said he has to fund that off the back side of the budget,” Evans said. “We have plenty of backside but we haven’t funded it. I was always told it could be as much as $250 million put in there. That would be money that anybody that wants to write a grant could pull down from us for matching funds.”
Randy Yohe
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West Virginia Public Broadcasting
The Kimball World War I Memorial is the last of its kind in America.
Secretary of Economic Development Mitch Carmichael is the chair of the Coalfield Grant Commission. He said with much of his efforts lately going to bring major corporations to West Virginia, he hasn’t formed a commission, hasn’t found out about funding and doesn’t have a timetable. But he said he’s committed to the process.
“We will be very active and make sure that we’re getting input from the local groups and facilitating growth in those areas,” Carmichael said.
In developing southern West Virginia tourism, the ‘haves and have nots’ seem separated right now by varying degrees of private business investment, community teamwork, infrastructure development, government assistance – and the continuing transition from a coal based economy.
Fayetteville is among 25 communities nationwide selected for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Recreation Economy for Rural Communities program.
Fayetteville has been selected as a participant in a federal partnership to promote outdoor recreation.
National Park Service numbers show an increase in visitors since the New River Gorge became a national park in December 2020.
Participating communities will build new trail systems, improve access to main streets, increase access to outdoor activities and clean up and repurpose vacant buildings.
Other selected communities in the region include South Point and Coshocton, Ohio; Brunswick, Maryland; Buchanan and Buena Vista, Virginia; and Jenkins and McKee, Kentucky.
On a recent sunny weekday, Bill Currey proudly walks among 30 neatly stacked, brightly colored plastic kayaks. Birds chirp merrily, and the soothing sounds of the meandering Coal River permeate the background — nature’s version of a white noise machine.
For the tanned Currey, who also owns an industrial real estate company, being here, on the river, is as good as it gets. His goal is to share this slice of paradise with as many people as will listen.
“Outdoor adventure is where the new world is as far as new tourism opportunities,” Currey said. “And rivers are cheap. We own them. They’re available once they’re cleaned up, you know, they’re an ideal platform to bring people from all over the United States to come.”
But the idea of spending the day kayaking down the 88-mile long Coal River in southern West Virginia was not always so appealing.
Coal was first found on the banks of the Coal River in the mid-1800s, and it’s been mined in these rugged mountains ever since. In 2012, the Coal River was labeled one of the most endangered in the country by conservation group American Rivers, largely due to pollution from the industry from which the river takes its name.
Currey helped found the nonprofit Coal River Group, which has been dedicated to cleaning up the watershed for 16 years.
Credit Brittany Patterson / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Bill Currey, chairman of the nonprofit Coal River Group, stands outside their headquarters in Tornado, West Virginia.
“These beaches are going from black, they used to be covered with coal, to white, and they’re beautiful,” he said. “That’s been a big improvement.”
And now that the river is clean, Currey and others in southern West Virginia are hoping the region’s natural beauty can help revitalize an area long dependent on coal. They’re betting on a different natural resource — outdoor recreation and tourism.
It’s an idea gaining traction across the Ohio Valley, where many coal communities were diversifying their local business base. The coronavirus pandemic added to the challenge, with staggering economic fallout from closures associated with stemming the virus. But several coal-reliant communities and experts the Ohio Valley ReSource spoke to said the pandemic may unlock new opportunities to grow interest in the region and what it has to offer.
The Good
First, the good. People are eager for a safe break from quarantine life and health experts agree, while not devoid of risk, recreating outside where the virus can disperse more easily is safer than many other activities.
Credit Brittany Patterson / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
The Coal River in southern West Virginia.
Case in point, kayaking.
“You know, on a kayak you got a six-foot paddle,” Currey said. “Well, that limits who can get very close to each other.”
Boat launches on the Coal River have been swamped with visitors eager to get into the water on the weekends, he said.
In Norton, Virginia, a small, traditionally coal-reliant community of about 4,000 people that borders eastern Kentucky, traffic counters show people are flocking to the nearby Flag Rock Recreation Area. The city has invested in campgrounds and hiking and mountain biking trails on the mountain as part of its strategy to diversify its economy toward outdoor recreation.
“We’ve constantly been getting contacted by people asking, ‘When are you starting some of your classes or your outdoor activities such as outdoor yoga, or mountain bike rides, group rides and things like that,’” said Fred Ramey, Norton’s city manager. “So, I think there’s a pent-up demand.”
Credit Brittany Patterson / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Hiking trails in the Flag Rock Recreation Area in Norton, Virginia.
According to a survey from the National Recreation and Park Association released in late May, two in three park and recreation leaders report increased usage of their agency’s parks compared to this time last year, while more than 80 percent report increased usage of their trails.
Increased demand also comes with challenges, especially for group outdoor recreation activities such as whitewater rafting.
Joe Brouse, executive director of the New River Gorge Regional Development Authority, which serves Raleigh, Fayette, Nicholas and Summers counties in southern West Virginia, said rafting companies missed out on the first part of the season due to coronavirus shutdowns. To comply with social distancing guidelines, they are required to limit things like raft occupancy.
“The logistics of opening, because it’s not just reopening, are very, very challenging,” he said.
But the world’s new COVID reality — where air travel remains an unpopular way to travel — could boost interest in regional tourism, Jack Morgan with the National Association of Counties. Appalachia is located within 500 miles of about 70 percent of the country’s population.
Credit Brittany Patterson / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
“Appalachian communities are well positioned to capitalize on travelers who may be seeking recreation or that nature escape relatively nearby as opposed to a larger cross country trip or international trip,” he said.
However, Morgan cautioned that diversification is a long, tough process. Many communities are in the beginning stages of mapping their next chapters. The economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic comes on top of years of declining tax revenues from the coal industry.
“This could be a significant bump in the road to many communities who, excitingly, are really starting to blossom and gain some momentum,” he said.
That’s especially true for the restaurants, hotels and small businesses that tourists frequent after they come down from the trails.
The Challenges
Ramey, the city manager of Norton, Virginia, said one of his primary concerns during this pandemic has been ensuring small businesses along the town’s brick-lined downtown survive.
“One of the reasons why we really looked towards tourism as part of our economic plan is that we did have some of those resources such as hotels and restaurants and things like that,” he said. “We’ve been very concerned about the economic impact to those businesses and tried to do some things to support them through all of this and so we hopefully will all be ready to move forward at the appropriate time.”
That includes providing small “bridge loans” to businesses. Norton has given out about 50 loans, totaling nearly $250,000. The 60-month loans require no payments or interest for the first six months, Ramey said.
Providing a financial boost for businesses is something the New River Gorge Regional Development Authority is also doing with the help of a $750,000 Appalachian Regional Commission grant that will allow the group to recapitalize an existing revolving loan fund.
“So we’re trying to pump some capital back into the tourism community that way,” said Brouse, the group’s executive director.
In southeastern Ohio, nonprofit Rural Action has so far helped distribute about $35,000 in small grants. The program was started via a Facebook fundraiser to help support local businesses.
Dan Vorisek, program coordinator for the resilient communities program at Rural Action, the communities he works with in Ohio are in the early stages of reorienting their economies toward outdoor recreation and tourism. He said there is a contingent of businesses that are struggling, but others are using the pandemic as a chance to reevaluate their own models.
“So, from what I’ve seen, it’s a combination of businesses just trying to make it to the next week, and then other businesses that actually have the opportunity to plan for the future,” he said.
Credit Brittany Patterson / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
The Coal River Group has about 30 kayaks to rent to tourists.
The Optimism
In southeastern Ohio, Vorisek investors are still moving forward in developing the local bike trail network and surrounding communities.
“They see the potential,” he said.
That potential could be shaped by a broader urban reckoning. Many rural places haven’t seen the high coronavirus case numbers that cities have, although that may be changing as states continue to reopen. Telework, once a barrier for many companies, has become increasingly acceptable.
That’s how Ramey sees it.
“There could be a flight to places like ours now, and the Appalachian area,” he said. “If you can work from home, you can work from anywhere, and so that anywhere could be Norton, Virginia.”
Back on the Coal River, Bill Currey agrees.
“We’re like a national park that’s not designated,” he said. “Big city people are saying, through the pandemic, ‘I don’t want to live in this downtown where I can’t grow a garden like those people in West Virginia. I don’t want to live downtown and not go to the grocery store when those West Virginians are going out and they’ve got deer meat, they’ve got fish.’ It’s like, we’ve got so much of what the other part of the country doesn’t have.”
But he adds if you aren’t ready to move just yet, you could always start by visiting and spending a day on the river.
A new report shows that tourism in southern West Virginia’s national parks injected more than $70 million into the local economies in 2019, which was before the coronavirus pandemic impacted the business in the state.
In 2019, more than 1.3 million visitors came to the New River Gorge National River, Bluestone National Scenic River and Gauley River National Recreation Area, according to a newly released National Park Service report.
Local economies in Fayette, Nicholas, Raleigh and Summers counties benefited from a $70 million boost, supporting 846 jobs. Similar numbers were reported in the 2018 Park Service report.
However, it is unclear if the 2020 numbers will reflect those of the past couple years. Due to COVID-19, the national parks have been operating at limited capacity, said Eve West, Chief of Interpretation for the southern West Virginia national parks.
“We do have people coming into the area more now and, you know, the businesses are showing some visitors and customers now, but, you know, undoubtedly numbers are going to be down some next year,” West said.
The three national parks are open for hiking; however, West said the campgrounds are closed and special programs have been cancelled.
