Thrillseekers from across the globe are converging on Fayetteville for the annual Bridge Day festival.
Saturday’s event is the one day a year that it’s legal to jump off the 876-foot high span across the New River Gorge.
Hundreds of BASE jumpers are registered to do just that. The acronym BASE stands for the places from which jumpers usually leap: buildings, antennae, spans and earth.
More than 80,000 people are expected to walk across the bridge. Rappellers also will make their way from a catwalk under the bridge to the water below, and some participants will make a controlled descent on a tethered cable from the catwalk.
The New River Gorge Bridge, the third-highest bridge in the United States, opened in 1977. Bridge Day started three years later.