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Publisher, Editor-in-Chief Dylan Jones Senior Editor, Designer Nikki Forrester Copy Editor, Rad Dad Randy Jones Pretty Much Everything Else Dylan Jones, Nikki Forrester

CONTRIBUTORS

This burning question has stuck with me throughout my years, working its way into the ethos of my outdoor adventures. It has driven me to the tops of glaciated mountains, to the tops of big granite walls, and to exotic foreign lands. I always want to know what it’s like atop the next high point. What’s the view? What’s on the other side? In my younger days, I imagined bottomless pits, undiscovered ancient ruins, or futuristic alien bases. Now that I’ve grown somewhat jaded to the imaginative innocence of youth, I don’t expect anything out of the ordinary to be on the other side. Most times, the answer is—at least here in the Mountain State—another valley in which to descend and another hill to be climbed, the next summit once again pulling me forth like the event horizon of a black hole. Fortunately, the ordinary on planet Earth is extraordinary enough to fuel the quest for the next climb. I think it’s safe to say that 2020 was one massive hill climb. At times, it was a slog; at others, it felt as if the

HIGHLAND OUTDOORS

human race was a collective Sisyphus, pushing the weight of its own errors up an exponentially increasing slope. Yet here we are, already well into 2021: a new year with new hopes and renewed dreams. I think we’ve all seen that, with the same pandemic raging on and the same cultural challenges still bubbling, the climb ain’t over yet. But the top of the hill is in sight, and that familiar feeling is back, coursing through my veins. What’s it like on top? My sense of childhood imagination has come roaring back. Instead of more of the same, the other side of the hill is once again filled with exciting possibilities. Hugging our friends. Outdoor festivals. Shared beers on bike rides. Road trips to far-flung places in packed cars, everyone’s joyous smile visible throughout the journey. None of these things are new, but they will feel new when they inevitably happen again. So now that we’re near the top of the hill, I invite you to join me in imagining our new reality, hopefully with thoughts of love, compassion, and the understanding that we’re all climbing it together. And, as my many adventures have proven time after time, it’s always worth getting there. I can promise you this: we’ll love what’s on the other side. w Dylan Jones

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COVER

Everett Mulkeen and Kate Heath take in the sights after a timeless float trip through the Smokehole Canyon. Photo by Dylan Jones. Copyright © 2021 by Highland Outdoors. All rights reserved. Highland Outdoors is published by DJones Media, LLC and printed at HG Roebuck & Son in Baltimore, Maryland.

Nikki Forrester

As a child, I was constantly daydreaming. Riding in the back of my parents’ car, I would gaze out the window at the seemingly endless hills of the passing West Virginia landscape, my mind swirling around one central thought: what’s it like on top?

Mark Anderson, Madison Ball, Jordan Charbonneau, Meghan Fisher, Randy Fisher, Nikki Forrester, Rachael Galipo, John Garder, Rosalie Haizlett, Jack Hoblitzell, Laura Johnston, Dylan Jones, Ryan Kelly, Chad Landress, Karen Lane, Bob Lilly, Birch Malotky, Cam Moore, Richard Orr, Martin Radigan, Octavia Spriggs, Chad Umbel, Jay Young

CONTENTS 12

TO BUILD A BOARD

REACHING NEW HEIGHTS

INTO THE SMOKEHOLE

HOMEGROWN ART

A river surfer’s handmade journey

The NRG now houses the East’s hardest rock climbing route

A rugged canyon offers robust history and high adventure

Two leading nature artists share their stories and art

By Dylan Jones

By John Garder

By Laura Johnston

EVERY ISSUE

SMALL WONDERS

CLOSE TO HOME

The exquisite mosses of West Virginia

Local trails offer overlooked adventures

By Nikki Forrester

By Jordan Charbonneau

By Meghan Fisher

Mark Anderson

Haircap mosses, pg. 36.

BRIEFS

PROFILE

GALLERY

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BRIEFS

BEAR ROCKS DESIGNATED NATIONAL NATURAL LANDMARK By Dylan Jones Bear Rocks, however, remained unprotected. In 2000, TNC stepped in and acquired the parcel for the Bear Rocks Preserve via donation from Dominion Energy. Recognizing the high conservation value of the plateau to the north of the Bear Rocks overlook, TNC purchased the additional acreage of the Allegheny Front Preserve in April 2018 with funding from private donors and the Outdoor Heritage Conservation Fund.

While this magnificent plateau in the clouds is physically shrinking, it was recently elevated in prestige. Bear Rocks, candidate for West Virginia’s most photographed spot, was joined with the corresponding Allegheny Front to become America’s 600th National Natural Landmark. The National Natural Landmarks (NNL) program, administered by the National Park Service, “recognizes and encourages the conservation of sites that contain outstanding biological and geological resources.” Sites are designated by the Secretary of the Interior for their rarity, diversity, and status as a premier example of a biological community or geological feature. Owned and managed by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the Bear Rocks and Allegheny Front preserves earned the coveted designation in an official 8

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announcement on January 27, 2021. “Bear Rocks is such a unique feature in a unique position along the Allegheny Front,” said TNC Director of Lands Mike Powell. “From my perspective, it was a no-brainer to be evaluated for designation.” Bear Rocks, along with other sections of the Allegheny Front, has a storied history dating back hundreds of years to when Native Americans practiced prescribed burning to encourage the growth of food-producing shrubs. A 1746 survey party searching for the limits of Lord Fairfax’s land grant recorded the existence of heathlands, bogs, and open balds at the site of Bear Rocks—features likely capitalized on and maintained by those original inhabitants to increase food and game productivity. In in the late 1700s, the Dahle family emigrated from Germany to settle the high plateau now known as the Dolly Sods. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the region was clear cut down to the last sapling; the remaining slash was burned in massive fires that smoldered so long the soil burned down to bedrock. In the 1940s, the U.S. Army used the barren landscape as a training grounds for launching mortars and other bombs—a few of those shells remain scattered across the landscape. In 1975, 17,371 acres just west of the Allegheny Front was designated as the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area, protecting the Red Creek watershed in perpetuity.

According to Powell, the unique plant and animal communities that characterize Dolly Sods also helped elevate Bear Rocks for designation. Those flora include the iconic stands of flagged red spruce and balsam fir trees, big-tooth aspen groves, peat bogs, and heathlands filled with berry-producing shrubs and rare mosses. Visitors flock to Bear Rocks in fall to see the vast fields of blueberry and huckleberry bushes aflame with bright-red foliage. While the NNL designation doesn’t change TNC’s ownership or management practices of the 1,024-acre parcel, it does provide additional opportunities to elevate the ecological and geological importance of the region to the national audience. In simpler terms, the designation, as Powell says, “adds a feather in the cap” to one of West Virginia’s most iconic landscapes. “It draws national and continental significance to an area that [West Virginians] know is special because we get to recreate and see the different seasons there, and this brings another lens of importance to the area.” w

Dylan Jones

Standing on the escarpment known as Bear Rocks exudes a feeling of being atop the eroding spine of an ancient world. To the west, a vast plain dotted with windswept spruce trees stretches to the horizon. To the east, the hulking landmass plunges several thousand feet to a picturesque valley floor, only to rise again in successive mountain ridges superimposed against the backdrop of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. To the north and south, the exposed sandstone bones of the Allegheny Front run for some 165 miles, creating the Eastern Continental Divide.

You might be wondering why a landscape that was logged, burned, and bombed has been the centerpiece of such massive conservation efforts. The answer, at least for the NNL designation, lies in the geologic importance of the land formation. “It’s considered the best example of a plateau in the Appalachian Mountain Range,” Powell said. “It’s a combination of the plate-tectonic uplift and exposed sedimentary rocks right there along the escarpment.”

EASTERN HELLBENDERS FOUND IN THE CHEAT RIVER By Madison Ball River lovers, rejoice! Evidence of the eastern hellbender, everyone’s favorite giant salamander, was found in the Cheat River down to the Albright Power Dam. Growing up to two feet in length, the eastern hellbender is the largest salamander in North America. Also called the Allegheny alligator, these ecologically sensitive creatures thrive in cool, free-f lowing mountain streams and rivers. Nationwide, hellbender populations are in decline due to habitat loss, dam construction, and pollution, such as acid mine drainage and sedimentation.

Chad Landress

The distribution of eastern hellbenders in the Cheat River remained unknown throughout most of the 20th century. Heavy sediment loads and acidic water chemistry cast doubts about the ability for hellbenders to exist in the mainstem of the Cheat, but Friends of the Cheat (FOC) and its partners documented great improvements in the Cheat’s water quality over the last 25 years. Members of FOC were curious to find out if one of the region’s most iconic aquatic species was on a comeback.

In fall 2020, FOC conducted its first environmental DNA (eDNA) monitoring effort to search for genetic evidence of eastern hellbenders throughout the 78.3-mile Cheat River system. Hellbenders are elusive creatures that live under large rocks to avoid predators. To avoid impacting the river by moving rocks, FOC employed eDNA monitoring, which involves collecting microscopic genetic material through filters at sampling sites. The filters are then sent to a laboratory for DNA analysis. Much to the surprise of FOC staff, eastern hellbenders were detected at seven locations in the Cheat River mainstem from Parsons to Albright—a distance of nearly 45 miles. No hellbenders were detected from locations below the Albright Power Dam, including the rugged Cheat River Canyon, with the exception of one detection immediately downstream of the dam. These results suggest that this obsolete dam might prevent hellbenders from recolonizing the Cheat River Canyon.

The Albright Power Dam is a known barrier to recreation and fish passage, including reestablished walleye populations. Dams also slow the flow of water, causing sediment to drop out and cover once-rocky river beds, eliminating suitable habitat for hellbenders. Nationwide, dams are significant impediments to healthy hellbender populations. FOC is pursuing removal of the Albright Power Dam. So far, funds are allocated for design work, dam removal, and adjacent stream restoration. FOC will continue eDNA monitoring over the next three years to further understand hellbender distribution throughout the Cheat River and the effects of the Albright Dam on their populations. To learn more about FOC’s eDNA monitoring and Albright Dam Removal efforts, stay tuned to FOC’s Facebook page for the release of a dam removal educational video and booklet in spring 2021. w Madison Ball is restoration program manager for FOC. Contact her: madison@cheat.org.

CORRECTION: In “Once in a Blue Moon” in our winter 2020 issue, the photograph on page 33 was incorrectly attributed to Davis Dailey. The photograph of a slackliner walking a highline across the Gunsight Notch was taken by slacklining photographer Bronson Lockwood. highland-outdoors.com

BRIEFS

NEW RIVER GORGE: AMERICA’S NEWEST NATIONAL PARK By Birch Malotky

The cliffs are home to thousands of rock climbing routes. Below the crags, rafters challenge themselves in world-class whitewater. A burgeoning trail system draws hikers and mountain bikers, while the river’s warm waters attract anglers. The vast, If the secret wasn’t out about the New River Gorge (NRG) before, it certainly is now. The NRG joined the fold of America’s treasured national parks in December 2020, protecting more than 77,000 acres in Central Appalachia. Proponents say the designation was long overdue, citing the park’s incredible recreation opportunities, rich history, and exceptional biodiversity. While management will stay largely the same, the bump in status is projected to boost the state’s economy by increasing tourism dollars. The NRG was originally designated as a national river by President Jimmy Carter in 1978. Recognizing the potential of the gorge’s scenic and recreational value in driving tourism, West Virginia senators Joe Manchin and Shelley Moore Capito introduced legislation in October 2019 for the NRG to receive full national park status. The bill passed as part of the massive coronavirus relief package signed into law on December 27, 2020. Typically, national parks are honored for some combination of scenic, recreational, natural, and historical value; the NRG has all four in spades. “We’ve always known this place was special,” said Eve West, chief of interpretation, visitor services, and cultural resources for the NRG National Park and Preserve. Whether rim-top, cliffside, or riverbound, the views speak for themselves. Over 50 miles of ancient river tumble 10 HIGHLAND OUTDOORS

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protected forests provide well-loved and long-visited territory for hunters. “Birders come from all over to get a glimpse at some of the species we have here, and I geek out over all the salamanders and mushrooms all the time,” said Tabitha Stover, director of the Fayetteville Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. In addition to astounding animal diversity, the NRG “is the most botanically diverse river system in Central and Southern Appalachia, with 1,500 species of plants” said West. These plants and animals are thriving despite a long history of human use in the area, which is on display in the ruins of coal mining boomtowns like Thurmond, Nuttalburg, and Kaymoor. According to West, frequent visitors to the NRG won’t notice much change beyond new signs at the park’s entrances. Biking, hiking, rafting, and other paddlesports will be administered as before the redesignation, according to information in the bill. Bridge Day, the state’s largest one-day festival and home to the only sanctioned BASE-jumping event on National Park Service (NPS) property, will also live on. The rock climbing management plan will be changing, West said, but those revisions began prior to redesignation. Most land within the boundaries of the NRG as a national river were open to hunting, but national parks are tradition-

ally closed to that user group. In compromise, the redesignation sets up the rather unique arrangement of a protected area that is 10 per cent national park and 90 per cent preserve. The 65,165-acre preserve will allow hunting and fishing as before. The 7,021-acre park parcel will now be closed to hunting, except for 301 acres in the Lower Gorge and 368 acres in the Grandview area. Currently, there are no plans to implement admission fees. But the park may be getting bigger, as NPS is authorized to bid on up to 3,711 acres of adjacent land and acquire 100 acres specifically for parking. If predictions about the bump in tourism are correct, the additional parking may be needed. Fayetteville has much to gain as the gateway city for park visitors. “It’s huge for us,” said Stover. “We are already seeing more visitors come into town to visit the new national park. Businesses are growing and new businesses are popping up.” But as a town of 3,000 people already supporting an average of 1.3 million visitors annually, there will certainly be novel challenges. Stover mentioned parking issues and the difficulty of balancing the need for affordable houses for locals with a hot market of vacation rentals and second homes. But, she said, the town has already learned some lessons from the past year’s surge in visitation, which was largely driven by the ongoing pandemic. “We will be looking for ways to keep our spark as we grow,” said Stover. West expressed similar confidence in the ability of NPS to adapt to future needs. And yet, in a canyon carved over millions of years, the redesignation’s impact will likely take shape slowly and iteratively, as the park and the communities around it change to accommodate all who come to experience the new New River Gorge. w Birch Malotky is a freelance journalist and editor working at the intersection of science, conservation, and recreation.

Dylan Jones

down a canyon nearly 1,000 feet deep, revealing millions of years of geologic history.

WVU LAUNCHES OUTDOOR ECONOMY COLLABORATIVE By Nikki Forrester In October 2020, West Virginia University (WVU) announced the receipt of a $25 million gift to support the Brad and Alys Smith Outdoor Economic Development Collaborative (OEDC). The OEDC aims to leverage the state’s outdoor recreation resources to enhance the economy and improve the quality of life for those that live and play here. “People who know West Virginia know the potential,” said Danny Twilley, assistant dean of the OEDC. “We need to stop our talent and people from leaving. Then we need to bring others here who understand and value West Virginia.” While the idea of using a state’s outdoor assets to stimulate the economy is relatively new, there are a few places the OEDC is looking to for guidance, including Colorado, Utah, Arkansas, and North Carolina. The question then becomes, how does the OEDC grow the outdoor economy while staying authentic to West Virginia? To do this, it is focusing on four initiatives: education, research, asset development, and community engagement. Greg Corio, assistant vice president of the OEDC, is heading up the educational component, which includes Science Adventure School, a four-day program for 6th grade students in West Virginia, and Science Behind the Sport, a program that teaches K-12 youth scientific concepts through adventure sports. Along with these programs, the OEDC is mapping the state’s outdoor recreation assets and developing initiatives for WVU, such as a trail building curriculum for landscape architecture students. Beyond the university, the OEDC plans on working with local communities to develop their

recreation assets and opportunities. “That’s where we start,” said Twilley. “We have to show them what is possible and help them understand the potential benefits and detractors.” For example, increased visitation due to outdoor recreation can enhance support for small, local businesses, like coffee shops, breweries, and music venues. But increased visitation can also lead to jumps in housing prices and overcrowded destinations. To spread visitation across locations, the OEDC plans on helping communities develop more outdoor recreation resources. This includes making trails easier to access, improving parking and signage, as well as developing new areas for recreation. Twilley noted that West Virginia also has fragile areas that need to be protected. Because the pros and cons of developing an outdoor recreation economy vary for each community, the OEDC is hiring an outdoor development coordinator who will communicate with communities about what they want, the benefits of developing outdoor resources, and how to prepare for any challenges. Another major initiative of the OEDC is the remote worker program, which provides financial incentives to encourage fully employed people to move to West Virginia. According to Twilley, the younger generation is less focused on where they can get jobs and more on where they want to live. Twilley, who moved to Morgantown from southeast Ohio, described how, on a given afternoon, he can paddle the Cheat Canyon or Upper Youghiogheny. “I can go for a mountain bike ride just a quarter-mile from my house. That’s the idea and that’s why we’re here. It’s unlike anywhere else.” w

EAST OF THE MISSISSIPPI By Cam Moore West Virginia is home to many superlatives: tastiest moonshine, best pepperoni rolls, and the most mountainous state in the U.S. (seriously). This last stat defines our heavenly slice of the country. Along with seemingly endless vistas, the hills and hollows of the Mountain State are dotted with a long list of factoids that end with the coveted phrase ‘East of the Mississippi.’ This new column will explore them in an unapologetically Appalachian way, replete with enough dorky details to quell any naysayers. The first East of the Mississippi award goes to (drumroll, please) the Shavers Fork River, the highest large river East of the Mississippi! Shavers Fork paints a winding ribbon of whitewater and quiet trout pools for 88.5 miles before its confluence with the Black Fork River, forming the mainstem of the Cheat River in Parsons. Its headwaters stem from ephemeral rivulets on West Virginia’s second-highest peak of Thorny Flat, on Cheat Mountain, at a cool elevation of 4,848 feet. Shavers Fork stays above 3,500 feet for its first 32 miles, providing a high-elevation mountain river experience you won’t find without driving 25 hours to your nearest Colorado. As you float down those tannic, tea-colored waters, you can contemplate the long-gone lumber boomtown of Spruce. At just under 4,000 feet elevation, Spruce was the coldest town East of the Mississippi during its heyday a century ago. Time flows on like a river, and these days at the town of Spruce you will find little more than, well, spruce trees and the now-pristine waters of Shavers Fork running through them. w Cam Moore is a resident of Canaan Valley, the highest large valley East of the Mississippi, and a lover of all things West Virginia.

TO BUILD A BOARD By Meghan Fisher

My other desire is to surf. In 2008, I moved to Hong Kong and lived on an outlying island where I had my first taste of surfing. I wasn’t good, but I loved it. In 2010, I moved to the New River Gorge to be a whitewater rafting guide. I never dreamt that, a decade later, I would not only still be here, but that surfing would be my primary activity. Over the last six years, a small community of river surfers and I have been dialing in waves along the New and Gauley rivers. My love of surfing found a new outlet during the pandemic, when, like many others throughout the world, I lost my job. I needed a pursuit to occupy my time until I could start working again, so I decided to dive into a project that had piqued my interest for many years but remained unexplored— building my own surfboard. I spent a month obsessively watching YouTube videos on surfboard shaping and design. The first step was deciding what kind 12 HIGHLAND OUTDOORS

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of surfboard I wanted to shape. One day, I stumbled upon the Mini Simmons design and fell in love with the retro look. Named after Bob Simmons, the shape was the first to bring hydrodynamic design into surfing. While a cool-looking surfboard is great, it has to be the right shape for the waves you are surfing. As Derek Dodds wrote in the book Keel Nation, “The waves aren’t always perfect bowls, and with a Mini Simmons you can turn an imperfect wave into a very fun adventure.” With that, my decision was made. I purchased a book about the design and ordered epoxy, fiberglass, and fins. The more I learned, the more I became aware of how much I didn’t know or didn’t understand. Like many crafts, surfboard shaping is just as much of a science as an art. I dove into a world of planing hulls versus displacement hulls. Then onto rails (or the edges of the board): did I want 50/50, 60/40, round, down, rolled, or egg? There were so many choices for each minute detail, but they all affect the way your board will surf. At least the book gave me a chuckle and some confidence when, in the middle of rail design, Derek Dodds writes, “Dude, I know it’s confusing.” After all my research, I finally made up my mind. I would make a 62-inch by 21.5-inch Mini Simmons with a planing hull, 60/40 rails, and a flat tail. I felt apprehensive when it was time to start building the board, but I told myself that it’s a learning experience. My board doesn’t have to be perfect, and even if I finish it without completely messing it up, the board might not even surf well, and that’s OK. Once I started the process, it moved swiftly. In one

Meghan Fisher

he desire to build, learn new skills, and work hands-on is not a new craving for me. I loved shop class in middle school, and since then, became EPA-certified in HVAC, took welding classes, and built several benches and signs for my house and friends. A snowboard bench I crafted still sits in Water Stone Outdoors in Fayetteville. Three years ago, my grandfather passed away. He was skilled at building furniture. In his basement sat beautiful cuts of stacked lumber: cherry, walnut, mahogany, oak, and chestnut. I asked my family if I could have the lumber and brought it back to my friend Andrew’s woodshop in West Virginia. This sparked a new endeavor for me; soon I began creating pieces from wood.

day, I turned a four-foot by eight-foot plank of foam insulation into a rough surfboard blank, which is the foam block before a surfboard is shaped. I did this by ripping the board into three-inch pieces and tracing a rocker design onto the side of each piece. I then cut out the rocker design on each piece and glued them all together. Once secured, I traced the outline of the Mini Simmons board and cut it out.

was, or if anyone else wanted to come with me. It was 38 degrees and raining, the Perfect Wave, a prime surfing spot on the Gauley River, was at an iffy level, and no one wanted to go surfing with me in the cold rain—especially at a ho-hum level. I selected a fresh block of wax and started, for the first time, waxing a board that I created. I carefully and meticulously drew diagonal lines down the deck of my surfboard, then repeated the process in the opposite direction. Once the base coat was down, I rubbed wax in a circular motion over the surface of the board. The slow and deliberate process built up my anticipation as I began to accept that, very soon, I would find out how— or if—my board surfs.

The next and most challenging step was shaping the board. Trying to get the board symmetrical, the rails just right, and the nose shaped perfectly was not achieved with perfection. Like trimming one’s own hair, I found myself taking more and more off the nose of the board to make it symmetrical. I ended up with a board that was an inch shorter than planned and a nose that was just a tad wonky, and that’s just fine. At the end of this step, my creation looked like a real surfboard. Seeing the project I dreamt about for years finally coming to fruition, filled me with excitement and motivation to move on to the final step: glassing the board and installing the fin box and leash plug.

I quickly shoved layers of neoprene into my gear bag and double checked that I had everything I needed for temperatures in the 30s. The last thing I wanted was to get to the wave and have to turn around because I forgot booties. I piled the surfboard and gear into my car, cranked some punk rock, and began my trek to the Gauley. I had to consciously tell myself to slow down. Singing along with Operation Ivy, combined with my eagerness to get to the wave, made my foot heavy on the gas pedal. Once parked, I hopped out into the frigid rain and quickly changed into my 5mm hooded wetsuit. I grabbed my board and made my way down the steep, muddy path to the river’s edge.

First, I laid out the fiberglass and poured the epoxy on the bottom. Once dry, I sanded the edges and repeated the process on the top. Then I poured a topcoat on each side of the board to make a nice, even coat of epoxy and fill in any little gaps. Once the board was dry, I installed the fin boxes and leash plug by drilling holes and gluing the pieces in. On December 4, 2020, I woke up to find that the leash plug epoxy was completely set. My board was finished. I went from staring at a board of foam insulation to holding a custom surfboard in just two weeks. I moved my hand along the board, feeling the finished product, turning it over in my arms and inspecting every bump, groove and imperfection. These imperfections were mine, each one attached to a memory of the process. I needed to get it on the water immediately. I didn’t care what the weather was like, how good the wave

Top: The pattern prior to cutting out the board. Middle: A stoked Meghan Fisher. Bottom left: Sanding the rails. Bottom right: Adding fins to the fin boxes. All photos by Meghan and Randy Fisher.

When I got to the bank of the Gauley, I took a moment to take in the sound of the rushing water and the pitter-patter of rain as I watched the wave in the middle of the river. I took quick steps to get to the water’s edge, knelt, and placed my surfboard in the river for the first time. I pressed down, putting pressure onto the board to get a feel for how well it floated. I felt resistance as the board bounded back to the surface of the water; the board seemed to highland-outdoors.com 13

“Surfboard shaping is just as much of a science as it is an art.” I hopped into the water, grabbed the board and slid it underneath my chest. I reached my arms out in front of the board, paddling for the middle of the river. I felt the current catch me as I started flowing downstream faster and faster, steadily approaching the wave. I turned around to face upstream and paddled harder as I began dropping into the trough of the wave. I felt the foam pile of the wave crash against the tail of my board, momentarily pausing my downstream descent before icy water splashed up over my hood. My board slipped through the back of the wave and washed out downstream. I didn’t catch the wave. I straightened the board under my body and paddled hard toward the eddy on the river-right bank. I wasn’t upset; that split second of a pause as the board collided with the foam pile was hope. I believed this board could catch this wave. I swam back to the bank and made my way back upstream to try again. Once again, I dropped back into the trough and began ferociously paddling. I looked back and aimed for the center of the foam pile. This time, I struck the foam pile, went up toward the crest of the wave, and felt my momentum shift and rock back down into 14 HIGHLAND OUTDOORS

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the trough. I was locked in place, laying on my board in the wave. My Mini Simmons had succeeded in catching the Perfect Wave. Beaming with excitement, I laid my hands flat on the deck of the board, pushed down, straightened my arms, arched my back, and slung my feet under my hips like I had done so many times before. I felt the soles of my feet press onto the deck of the board as I stood up. I took a moment to get settled into the wave and then, with an overwhelming sense of accomplishment, I threw my arms up in the air to scream “Woo-hoo” at the top of my lungs for only myself to hear. Riding a board I designed and crafted has rekindled an excitement for surfing that I haven’t felt since my first time river surfing on the Gauley. The board, to my surprise, not only surfed, but it surfed well. I’ve had it out several times since that first outing, and it quickly became my favorite surfboard to ride. That is, of course, until the next board I create. w Meghan Fisher lives in Fayetteville, WV, where she owns and operates Mountain Surf Paddle Sports. When she’s not river surfing and pa d dleboarding in W V, she’s guiding paddleboard expeditions in Antarctica for Quark Expeditions.

Meghan Fisher

have a lot of buoyancy.

highland-outdoors.com 15

REACHING NEW HEIGHTS By Dylan Jones On November 29, 2020, professional climber Jonathan Siegrist made three seemingly impossible moves on a blank shield of rock along the rugged cliffline surrounding Summersville Lake. He pulled through, clipped his rope into an anchor rigged atop the overhanging crag, and made history. While countless climbers have completed thousands of climbs in the region over the decades, Siegrist earned the first ascent of Full Metal Brisket, a line that is now the hardest climbing route east of Colorado. Siegrist bestowed the route a difficulty rating of 5.15a, gifting the New River Gorge (NRG) region—and the eastern U.S.—its first 5.15 rock climb. There are currently just eight confirmed 5.15 routes in the U.S., Full Metal Brisket included. In the sport of rock climbing, there are three colloquial levels of difficulty: easy, moderate, and hard. Then comes really hard climbing. After that, perched on the top rung of the difficulty ladder, is really, really hard climbing. This is the type of athletic feat that only a handful of climbers in the world actually aspire to; even fewer ever achieve it. But just how much harder is 5.15 climbing compared to easier routes? “It’s a totally different sport than recreational climbing,” Siegrist said. “It’s like comparing jogging to an Olympic race, or a game 16 HIGHLAND OUTDOORS

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of backyard football to the Super Bowl. To achieve 5.15 climbing requires a lifetime of dedication.” A bystander can easily see how much more is involved in kayaking waterfalls on a class V creek compared to paddling some riffles in a class I river, but it’s challenging to see just how much smaller the holds are on a 5.15a than those of a moderate 5.10a climb. Full Metal Brisket was scouted as a potential line and bolted as a sport route—meaning protection points for securing a rope and anchors were drilled into the rock— in the early 2000s by Lee Robinson, Chad Umbel, and Will Dameron. The intimidating 90-foot route ascends the tallest section of a crag called the Coliseum, an overhanging amphitheater of sharp sandstone that serves as a proving ground for the region’s burliest rock warriors. Neither the bolting party nor any visiting climbers were able to climb it and, after a while, folks stopped trying. According to local route developer and NRG climbing guidebook author Mike Williams, the region’s handful of elite climbers were unable to complete the route without falling, the benchmark required for the first ascent. “I hopped on it once or twice and tried some of the moves, but never gave it a real attempt,” Williams said.

Jonathan Siegrist making history on Full Metal Brisket, the NRG’s first 5.15a rock climb. Photo by Rachael Galipo.

“I TRAVEL AND CLIMB PROFESSIONALLY, AND I CAN SAY WITH CERTAINTY THAT THE NEW IS ONE OF THE BEST CLIMBING AREAS IN THE WORLD. THE QUALITY OF THE ROCK CLIMBING AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE PLACE ARE WORLD-CLASS.” Jonathan Siegrist

When Siegrist first visited the NRG in 2013, Williams showed him the project— the term for an unclimbed route. Siegrist eyed the line but passed on it like many before him, filing it away in his memory for a future attempt. In 2015, German pro climber Alex Megos made the first ascent of Super Pod (5.14d) in the Coliseum, establishing the hardest route in the NRG at the time. During his visit, he too passed on Full Metal Brisket, electing instead to sample the region’s other 5.14 testpieces. When Siegrist and his girlfriend traveled to the NRG last fall for a month of traditional climbing, Full Metal Brisket was not on his mind. But a spell of warm weather sent their crew to the cool, shaded routes of the Coliseum, and Siegrist decided to give the NRG’s hardest sport routes a try. He quickly dispatched Super Pod, climbing the route clean—meaning no falls or hangs on the rope—in just four tries over two days before attempting Full Metal Brisket. “I could tell right away that Full Metal Brisket was harder than Super Pod, and that it would be possible,” he said. “When you’re in an area that’s as classic as the New River Gorge with the chance to do the hardest route as a first ascent, you tend to drop everything else to pursue that.” He worked the route for two weeks, spending hours in his harness trying to unlock the complex sequence of moves, using handholds as small as the edge of a credit card and footholds as minute as the dimple of a thimble. “You have to do a lot of bizarre movement to get your body in just the right position to make use of the bad holds,” he said. “You need to be really close to the wall with a lot of body tension. Routes like this can take days, weeks, or

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even years of effort. In order to do it well, you can’t make a single mistake.” Climbing grades are based on the crux, or the hardest set of moves, on a route. Sometimes, the crux comes right at the start, but more often it appears in the middle of the climb. Full Metal Brisket’s crux comes as a crescendo of the final three moves needed to reach the anchors. “So much of that route boils down to those final moves,” Siegrist said. “The reason why the route got the difficulty rating is because you have to do those moves after climbing the entire length of the route.” After nearly 25 attempts, on a cold day where he and his climbing crew used handwarmers between attempts, Siegrist pulled through the crux without error. With his ascent of Full Metal Brisket, Siegrist, now 35, has climbed 14 routes in the 5.15 range. Four of them, including Full Metal Brisket, were first ascents, etching him in stone as one of the world’s strongest and most prolific rock climbers. Typically, a route’s first ascentionist will name it, but in the case of Full Metal Brisket, the name had already been chosen by the bolting party. A brisket is the choice cut of meat from the lower chest of a cow. Full Metal Brisket stemmed from the idea that whoever climbed the route would need incredibly strong and tense chest muscles—a full metal brisket of power. Siegrist, however, is a vegetarian. “I was joking that I was going to rename it Full Metal Tofu or something like that. Once I learned about the name, I realized it was quite special.” The first ascentionist also proposes the difficulty rating, requiring a humble and honest attitude. “When you’re doing

The overhung cliffs of the Coliseum. Full Metal Brisket ascends the tallest part of the cliff, just inland from the shore, in the middle of the photo. Photo by Jay Young. Jonathan Siegrist keeping full body tension on small holds. Photo by Rachel Galipo.

CLIMBING GRADES, EXPLAINED Although the alphanumerical soup of 5.15a sounds like the model number of some obscure relic from Radio Shack, it represents the upper echelon of modern rock climbing. Climbers in the U.S. use the Yosemite Decimal System to indicate the difficulty of a climbing route. The number preceding the decimal indicates the class of terrain. Class 1 terrain refers to a relatively flat hiking trail , class 3 terrain is a steep staircase or a scramble up large rock ledges, and class 5 is reserved for vertical terrain where technical climbing skills are required and ropes are recommended. The number following the decimal confers the difficulty of that terrain. Most rock climbs start in the 5.4 to 5.6 range, going up in single-digit jumps to 5.10. Before the days of modern climbing equipment, 5.10 was the ceiling of difficulty. After the advent of dynamic ropes and sticky rubber shoes, falls became safer and the realm of possibility expanded. Able to easily dispatch 5.10 routes, climbers added a new layer of difficulty to the system. Once 5.10 is reached, the lowercase letter grades a through d are added. After 5.10d, the jump to 5.11 is made, and the letters a through d are added until 5.12 is reached, and so on. This allows for seemingly endless growth as subsequent generations of athletes continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible in rock climbing. Currently, the hardest climb in the world holds the grade of 5.15d, and the climbing community is waiting with bated breath for the first 5.16a to be confirmed.

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a first ascent, it’s difficult to know what the grade is,” Siegrist said. “Every climber is different; some things can feel significantly harder for one person over another.” When the difficulty level is so extreme, how does one decide between a 5.15a or 5.15b rating? “For a route to go from 5.7 to 5.8, little additional difficulty is required,” Siegrist said. “But when you get toward the top of the scale, the difference between letters needs to be significant. The difference from 15a to 15b is dramatic.” Siegrist decided upon the coveted 5.15a grade given his relatively easy experience climbing Super Pod. “When I first tried Full Metal Brisket, it was clear immediately that it was harder.” By adding a 5.15 route, the NRG, which has a rich climbing history, touts another feather in its cap as one of the world’s premier climbing destinations. “There are tens of thousands of climbing routes in the eastern U.S., and Full Metal Brisket is the hardest one,” Williams said. “I think the general population views the epicenter of rock climbing as Colorado or Yosemite, and views the East as being little practice rocks, and that’s just not the case.” Much to the preference of locals who enjoy the lack of crowds, the NRG has been relatively underappreciated over the past few decades compared to crowded crags out west. “Part of the reason the New never got the attention it deserved, at least in the media, is because it didn’t have any super hard routes,” Siegrist said. “I think having a 5.15 galvanizes the world-class nature of the place. It reminds people that the New is really important from a climbing perspective.” Maintaining a wry sense of humor, Williams adds that, at the end of the day, the ascent of Full Metal Brisket doesn’t mean much for the average climber. “Nobody can do this route; it’s not like a great addition to the crag or anything, but for the climbing community, it’s a badge of honor,” he said. “Our stone at the New can produce everything from moderate traditional routes to the hardest sport route in the East, and that’s a cool thing.”

Dylan Jones is publisher of Highland Outdoors and, although once an obsessed climber, probably couldn’t flail his desk body up a 5.9 these days. 20 HIGHLAND OUTDOORS

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Chad Umbel

Now that the NRG—and the eastern U.S.—has its first 5.15, climbers are wondering where the next one will be established. Siegrist said it could be tucked among the steep cliffs of Summersville Lake, which still offer unexplored terrain as opposed to the fully developed cliffs along the New River. “There are probably still a handful of really incredible lines that will be fruitful in that realm of difficulty,” he said. “They’re there for sure, and they’ll be unearthed gradually.” w

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Into The Smokehole

By John Garder

here’s a certain heartbreak when the final snow of the year begins to melt in Canaan Valley. We savor the season’s remaining offerings like sweet words of affection. Searching for any kernels that nature—or retired snow guns—may have left for us, we ski every last turn we can find. Brown landscapes emerge from decaying fields of white and the sky turns a perpetual gray. Crestfallen at winter’s impending end, I’m invariably reassured that the season is approaching for a canoe trip down Smokehole Canyon, a journey through history and natural wonders that gives us space to reflect.

In the numerous high tributaries of the South Branch of the Potomac River’s watershed, thick groves of rhododendron and mountain laurel choke seasonal streams, making navigation prohibitive for all but the most technically skilled kayakers. A little further downstream,

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however, one can float through pockets of wilderness during a short but vastly fulfilling paddling season when it is wise to carefully monitor the rain gauges in the days prior to an adventure. This upper stretch of the South Branch, the eminently wild Smokehole Canyon, is generally runnable March through May, but is heavily dependent on seasonal spring rainfall. Below the meanders of the undulating limestone canyon, wilderness transitions to intermittent farmsteads. After joining with the North Fork of the South Branch, the waters roll through Petersburg, Moorefield, then into the Trough to Romney, and eventually to the confluence with the Shenandoah at Harper’s Ferry on its way to the Atlantic Ocean. With each successive confluence, the river can be floated later and later into the summer.

Sweet Appalachia

tuberculosis, and cholera.

Departing my home base of Canaan Valley, I crest the Eastern Continental Divide to a dryer, warmer climate, where the hoary frost transitions abruptly into chartreuse buds populating hardwoods that welcome the new season. Driving through verdant pastoral landscapes, I reflect on the thousands of soldiers who trained here during World War II and took advantage of the area’s many escarpments—Seneca Rocks the most notable among them. I nod to the anglers and paddlers seeking both subsistence and adventure—or some measure of both—and soon enough come upon Smoke Hole Road.

In the Smokehole region, it’s clear that numerous conflicts arose between white settlers and the increasingly displaced Shawnee, including brutal raids on Fort Upper Tract and Fort Seybert. These fortifications were commissioned by George Washington to shield settlers as lands were gradually, but systematically, stolen and white families scratched out a homesteading life. The more readily available historical sources, however, are incomplete at best and problematic at worst. For example, one cites, without necessary context, “Indian depredations, crimes and murders.” We can—and must—do better at interpreting our often-brutal history more objectively.

Crossing the North Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac River, I snake my way along the inspiring North Fork Mountain. From further up the mountain, there are soaring views to the north of the Allegheny Front and the valley below. To the south, there are occasional glimpses into the upper stretches of the South Branch, where the storied canyon between Cave and North Fork mountains begins. Blue Rock, a 1,000-foot limestone escarpment, beckons far below. It’s rare to find lengthy, roadless stretches of wild navigable rivers in the eastern U.S. West Virginia offers a handful, Smokehole Canyon among them. The gorge is, as Del McCoury put it, sweet Appalachia. To know it is to know the heart of the Mountain State.

A SMOKEY PAST Though no one is entirely certain of the origin of the canyon’s name, there are several theories. One argues it comes from the fog that regularly hovers on the river, while another posits it’s because of the fires from moonshining stills that frequented the area during Prohibition. The most common hypothesis is that the epithet comes from Native Americans who used one or more of the gorge’s many caves for smoking meat.

Above: A succulent, one of many plants unique to Smokehole Canyon. Left: An old homestead along the South Branch of the Potomac. Photos by Dylan Jones.

It’s disappointingly difficult to find any authentic documentation of the canyon’s indigenous residents. Though today there are no federally recognized tribes in West Virginia and less than one percent of the state’s population identifies as Native American, numerous peoples lived in and moved to the area —Delaware, Cherokee, Saponi and Shawnee among them. For thousands of years, native families resided in the area of Smokehole Canyon, until they were forcibly relocated or succumbed to lethal settler maladies, including smallpox,

Far more capably documented is the chronicle of the canyon’s settlement by European American families, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. For them, it was a hard subsistence life of farming, foraging, hunting, and fishing. Paddling down the river, one can still see remnants of the road that facilitated commerce with Petersburg, the terminus of the traditional Smokehole float. Confederates reportedly mined upstream for saltpeter before being driven out by Union forces. In 1927, much of the area was incorporated into the Monongahela National Forest. That period witnessed numerous conservation projects undertaken by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Moonshine stills are said to have populated the area at that time. The Great Depression hit hard, leading to a homesteader exodus and lasting population decline. Though sparse, resilient communities remain scattered throughout the region.

UPSTREAM WITHOUT A CANOE The first time I paddled the Upper Smokehole Canyon was a haphazard misadventure involving a janky, overloaded flatwater canoe, a panicked (though otherwise delightful) dog unaccustomed to whitewater, and more eagerness than wit. Chasing after an errant kayak lodged against a submerged log, we wrapped our canoe around a large boulder in the swift water. The local rescue team was unable to recover the canoe but had great success with the kayak, using an impressive z-drag rope technique that pulled with so much force it shot the kayak into the woods like a missile. This is not how one generally experiences the Smokehole, so be reassured it’s as approachable a canyon as it is glorious. My virgin trip was an anomaly, but it’s prudent to have a practiced

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“The gorge is, as Del McCoury put it, sweet Appalachia. To know it is to know the heart of the Mountain State.”” crew with a basic sense of coordinating a craft through mild whitewater. Alternatively, be prepared for a frigid swim. Regardless, be sure to bring a few backup layers as the canyon can be disarmingly cold. Where exactly the canyon begins is a matter of some conversation, but the more commonly run sections start roughly around Eagle Rock. The crag is among the more prominent of the many limestone outcrops that attract raptors and is reportedly named after a Revolutionary War soldier who lived and was buried in the area. Below that is a series of class II/II+ rapids interspersed with gentle pools that invite trout, many intermittently released from upstream to the delight of anglers and their families that await their smoky dinner fodder with excitedly clinking cutlery. I usually run the upper section before breakfast, putting in at the low-water bridge not far from Shreve’s Store, long a center of local chatter and a cultural hub in its own right. The Upper Canyon section ends where the road does, at Big Bend Campground, nestled in a dramatic meander that betrays the river’s age. We bivy there for the night before entering the gorge. With two days of provisions

and a crew of grinning adventurers, nature-seekers, and all-around mountain freaks, we go forth seeking solace, camaraderie, hijinks, and adventure.

A GEOLOGIC WONDERLAND It’s theorized that the river here was once subterranean before the ground collapsed, a logical hypothesis given the numerous karst features and caves that populate the area. Not far away, the Lost River disappears at Lost River State Park and then reappears some ways off as the Cacapon River. The Cave Mountain anticline, with its many visible thrust faults, offers a profusion of cliffs that delight the eye, sometimes soaring up abruptly from the river for a thousand feet. Erosion is a powerful force. We just happen to be in this place at this moment in time, following eons of corrosion of a once primordial landscape. To contemplate it is to feel small. By reminding us of our insignificance, the river liberates us. To be present here is a gift. In 1965, a significant portion of the gorge was protected through inclusion in the Spruce Knob–Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area, the first national recre-

Previous: The top of Blue Rock, a thousand-foot limestone escarpment, offers stunning views of the canyon. Left: Owen Mulkeen, Michelle Paquette, and their fearless pup Gulliver navigate a rapid. Photos by Dylan Jones.

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ation area designated by Congress to be managed by the U.S. Forest Service. The Nature Conservancy and the WV Division of Forestry played important roles in conserving the area. Together, they’ve ensured the protection of unique flora and contiguous habitat for bears, deer, birds, bats, amphibians, insects, and a diversity of other critters. The landscape cultivates unparalleled opportunities for paddling, climbing, fishing, hiking, camping, and other activities that allow us to unwind and connect with nature and our humanity. The canyon is home to sensitive, rare, and threatened species, so should you decide to visit, it’s incumbent you do so with a light touch and minimal impact.

MAJESTY & MORELS Our crew pilots a variety of craft, from canoes to rafts, duckies, and kayaks, navigating a series of riffles interspersed with serene pools in between. The calm periods allow us to gaze in wonderment at the many crags, waterfalls, caves, deer, and waterfowl that populate the canyon. Though our vessels are diverse, our commonality is our desire to connect with the natural world.

offerings furnish a headlamp-illuminated dinner table almost as comforting as my company and the vast landscape that surrounds us. Far from sizable towns and their corresponding lights, the gorge offers stunning, robust views of the night sky. Slowly drifting away from the campfire, I rediscover my insignificance under a Milky Way so vigorous it drips down on me like a mist. Maya Angelou once asked, “Why do we journey, muttering like rumors among the stars?” Her query centered on love; mine is more focused on gratitude. That sentiment is reaffirmed in the morning with my merry company, who generously share their trout, morels, eggs scrambled with ramps, and other local fare. The sense of community is palpable.

We fulfill it on an afternoon break, exploring the sandy shore foraging for morels. I excitedly identify and harvest a handful, and sauté them that evening with butter, salt, and ramps foraged the prior month in the dense firs of Canaan Valley. My modest umami

Top: The author happily paddling through Smokehole Canyon. Bottom: Everett Mulkeen and Kate Heath exploring a limestone waterfall. Photos by Dylan Jones.

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Arm in arm, we gaze up in wonderment. Motivated for a side adventure, we scramble up the canyon walls to a notably dryer environment that reminds me of my years in Colorado. We ascend to an overlook where, breathing heavily, we find perspective by gazing down on riffling meanders and across to prominent ridgelines. A red-tailed hawk rises above us, floating with ease on the thermals, its throaty call echoing across the abyss. Our conversation ceases naturally to take it all in. “KEE-AAH…KEE-AAH.”

SWELLING ADVENTURE The next day’s adventures allow for abundant rock gardens and wildlife complimented by a couple of modestly technical class II+ rapids, gradually descending to the confluence with the North Fork of the South Branch of the Potomac. That fork flows down from Seneca Rocks through the spectacular Hopeville Canyon before swelling the South Branch’s volume at one of the canyon’s last crags. Soon thereafter is the most intimidating river feature, the decommissioned Royal Glen Dam. Paddling it is relatively straightforward, with the line always run at riverleft to avoid any remaining rebar. In this region, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers once planned the misguided Royal Glen Reservoir. It would have inundated more than a thousand acres, ostensibly to reduce flooding risks in Petersburg and improve opportunities for flat water recreation. The project would have obliterated the Smokehole Canyon as we know it. The remainder of the float after the dam and prior to the takeout in Petersburg involves higher water and a series of shelves that, at the right levels, offer fun rooster-tail waves that may swamp a novice canoeist. Legends of the canyon abound, some apocryphal. “Clean is the Smokehole,” wrote a paddler in a 1964 essay expounding on the river’s countless attributes. Miles from civilization and lightly trammeled, the gorge is a journey back in time, a sojourn to a place where we are reminded that we are but specks of dust in the cosmos. I long to return. w

Blue Rock by night, lit by the full moon. Photo by Dylan Jones.

John Garder is a resident of Canaan Valley. When he’s not doing his job of protecting the places that inspire us, he’s likely off on some hairbrained adventure.

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Homegrown Art By Laura Johnston

est Virginia’s mountains and valleys have bir thed ar tists for centuries. There’s just something about this often-forgotten land and its tumultuous stories that move humans to create. Whether it be written words, soothing string music, photographs, or paintings, Appalachia has been an undeniable force throughout art history. For Rosalie Haizlett and Octavia Spriggs, two native daughters of West Virginia, the state’s wildlands continue to represent a source of endless artistic inspiration. If you’ve visited shops and galleries throughout the Mountain State in the past few years, there’s a good chance you’ve noticed their work. Each featuring a distinct style, their vivid watercolor paintings showcase West Virginia’s iconic landscapes, unique flora and fauna, and even some of her lesser-known natural wonders. Haizlett’s work highlights the small, delicate details of the natural world—red berries on an ash tree, wispy green stems and lavender blooms, clustered fascicles of sphagnum moss. Her popular watercolor maps and illustrations make you pause and consider the thousands of critters, flowering

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buds, and microscopic organisms that make up our Appalachian ecosystem. Spriggs’s paintings spotlight the dramatic feel of a grand landscape—the multilayered ridges of the Allegheny Mountains, a gravelly entrance leading into the colorful canopy of Dolly Sods, or a peaceful view of a Canaan Valley meadow. With their matching red hair, fair skin, and charming personalities, Haizlett, 26, and Spriggs, 32, could be mistaken for sisters. While they resemble each other, their life stories are as unique as their watercolor styles.

Artistic Beginnings

Haizlett grew up on a farm outside of Wheeling, near the Ohio River in the Appalachian foothills. Her parents’ rugged resourcefulness and deep connection to nature influence her art. “My mom gardens and cans what she grows. My dad chops firewood to heat the house all winter,” she says. Haizlett’s six siblings are all creatives, but she is the sole painter in the family. “I was a quiet kid who liked to hang out in a corner and paint all day,” she says. Her dad, a design and sculpture professor at

West Liberty University, was her first mentor. “He was the best possible parent that a little artist could have,” she says, “He would say, ‘If you want this, you can totally make a career out of it.’” She spent a summer painting in France while in college, where she discovered her love of painting outdoors. After graduating from West Liberty University with a degree in graphic design, she felt pressure to follow the path she imagined for “an art kid,” which, in her mind, was to become a designer, live in a big city, and work a desk job. But that path didn’t feel quite right. She began her career with artist residencies in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, New River Gorge National River, the Bloom gallery in Thomas, and the National Audubon Society. In each of these residencies, she was paid to live in and create art at the host location for a designated period of time. Haizlett took her budding career a step further, creating commissioned illustrations for various clients, including KEEN footwear, the Smithsonian, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service, and the “She Explores” podcast. Turkey tail mushroom, photo courtesy Rosalie Haizlett.

In 2019, Haizlett organized a watercolor retreat, called “Earthtones,” at her uncle’s idyllic farm in Wellsburg, where she, Spriggs, and another artist taught watercolor techniques. She also teaches classes online, including her “Watercolor in the Woods’’ course on Skillshare.com, which currently has over 20,000 students.

A Love of Landscapes

Spriggs grew up on the West Fork River in Clarksburg. Her dad took photos of the river that hung on the walls of her childhood home, which planted a seed of inspiration. “I felt very connected to living on the river,” she says.

Spriggs developed her love of West Virginia’s landscapes in fifth grade. “I carried around one of my dad’s pictures of the West Fork for the entire year and painted it in art class,” she says. “The painting was terrible,” but the memory remains symbolic. “I was attached to painting landscapes then and still am.” In 2010, Spriggs graduated from West Virginia University (WVU) with a degree in graphic design. “I was always interested in the texture, flowiness, and brush strokes of painting,” she says. Her first foray into painting started with oils, but she transitioned to watercolor in 2016 after completing a year-long hiking challenge with her husband, during which they drove to a new place every weekend and explored West Virginia like never before. “When I was ready to practice watercolor more seriously, I used photographs of flowers along the trails on all those hikes to start the first paintings I made,” Spriggs says. One of the first paintings she attempted was “Dolly Sods Bog in Autumn,” featuring windblown spruce trees and a field of white cotton grass atop a mossy wetland. Out of frustration, she gave up on it for a while and focused on flowers. She thought, “If I can paint the flowers, I can work up to the landscapes.” Along with her watercolor painting, Spriggs is director of communications and marketing for WVU’s College of Creative Arts. Before the pandemic, she did an artist residency at Seneca Rocks, which she recalls as one of the most memorable landscapes from her childhood. She also does commissioned paintings, including a 32 HIGHLAND OUTDOORS

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piece for Cacapon State Park, and teaches landscape watercolor classes.

The Window or the Magnification?

For Haizlett and Spriggs, outdoor pursuits refresh them, inspire their paintings, and teach them to pay closer attention to their surroundings. “The more you stare intently where you are, you’ll wonder what

lives and grows there,” says Spriggs. Haizlett’s self-proclaimed “artistic superpower” is noticing and recreating small details and textures. Her 30”x34” painting of turkey tail mushrooms depicts a troop of the fan-shaped fungi with dozens of overlapping shelves and ribbons of color. Haizlett is perhaps best known for her intricately detailed map paintings. Her rendition of the Monongahela National

Forest includes yellow birch trees, brook trout, Spruce Knob, and the Cranberry Glades Botanical Area. “I loved the different kinds of moss, how green it was, and navigating the unmarked trails,” she says. “I talk to the locals and the park or forest rangers; I love that part of my research.” For Spriggs, painting landscapes teaches her to be observant when hiking or backpacking. “The more you observe, the more you see how things truly look, and that translates into your art,” she says. “You can say a flower is red but it has many other colors in it;

you can say the sky is blue, but there is variation and nuance. The more you notice, the more colors you bring out.” Her paintings of Canaan Valley, Lindy Point, Blackwater Falls State Park, and Dolly Sods are magical, delicate depictions of those landscapes. Warm, pastel colors illustrate their serene panoramas, views that are often missed without stopping for a long look. Her paintings, she says, reflect the “wow” moments she experienced when first visiting a place. Light is one of Spriggs’ secrets to getting a painting

Left: Dolly Sods Forest Shadow, 18x13 watercolor by Octavia Spriggs. Right from top to bottom: Octavia Spriggs, sketches, and Dolly Sods Bog in Autumn, 18x13 watercolor by Octavia Spriggs. Photos courtesy Octavia Spriggs.

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Left from top to bottom: Rosalie Haizlett, sketches, teaching kids to paint, photos courtesy photos courtesy Rosalie Haizlett. Right: Monongahela National Forest Illustrated Map, 11x14 watercolor by Rosalie Haizlett.

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right. “Someone could say, ‘It’s just a couple trees’, but if you have special light coming through, it can make a place extraordinary,” she says. Another is learning to depict the flora or fauna of the places she paints, which she does by referencing field guides. Aside from paints, paintbrush, and paper, both women use their “old” iPhones to take pictures for reference images from which to paint. For the tiny details, Haizlett zooms in on her photos to abstract what she sees.

Onward and Outward

Both Haizlett and Spriggs believe art created from nature can help people appreciate the outdoors from new perspectives and inspire them to care about the wild places in their home state.

“I hope that my landscapes inspire people who haven’t been there to visit and appreciate them on a deeper level,” says Spriggs. “The more someone connects with the wilderness in West Virginia and beyond, the more they are likely to protect it for generations to come.” Haizlett also strives to spark creativity in others and help people care about the Earth through her work. “We are living on a gem of a planet,” she says. She recently completed 20 paintings of endangered species in West Virginia, including mussels and crayfish, species not typically thought of as cute or charismatic. “They are in West Virginia and dying out because we aren’t paying attention,” she says. Through sharing their art and stories of West Virginia, Spriggs and Haizlett interact with thousands of people around the world, many of whom had no previous connection to the state’s natural wonders. They frequently hear from people who want to see the species and spaces in their paintings. “I try to communicate that the forests, parks, and wilderness areas are places to treasure and protect,” says Haizlett. “I hope to encourage folks to get outside and explore these locations mindfully and reverently, making sure to leave them the way they found them so others can enjoy them long into the future.” w Laura Johnston is a conservation and creative professional. She thru-hiked the AT and PCT, and is now exploring West Virginias’s trails. highland-outdoors.com 35

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WONDERS By Nikki Forrester

he outdoors is often associated with immensity. From towering mountain peaks to expansive, raging rivers, the natural world showcases life on a prodigious scale. While spending time immersed in these landscapes imbues a sense of feeling small, rarely do we set our sights on smaller scenes. Peering closely into an environment reveals an array of biodiversity as overlooked as that which lies beneath the ocean. From the densest rainforests to the sparsest deserts, one group of organisms encompasses an infinitesimal bounty of intricate wonders – the mosses. Mosses are found in nearly every terrestrial environment on Earth, often thriving in harsh habitats where no other plants or animals can survive. They sprawl over barren rocks, dangle from moist tree branches, wedge into sidewalk cracks,

and carpet acidic bogs. Mosses evolved about 400 million years ago and are some of the earliest lineages of land plants. However, their age shouldn’t suggest they are primitive beings or a first iteration of flowering plants. Mosses are defined by a unique lifestyle that has allowed them to persist through ice ages, outlast four mass extinction events, and even live for up to 19 years without a drop of water.

A WONDEROUS WORLD IN MINIATURE Over millions of years, the mosses diversified into about 13,000 species, roughly 400 of which are found in West Virginia. “Moss is all around us, but for the most part, people are unaware of the tremendous biodiversity that exists,” says John Boback, an Appalachian environmental historian and field operations manager for Friends

of Blackwater. In dense, drippy rainforests, mosses take the form of wefts and pendants, loose structures with individual shoots that stretch out to capture every droplet of water. In moderately moist environments, mosses form into multi-layered mats, turfs, and plump cushions to optimize the balance between acquiring and retaining water. In arid habitats, mosses grow in small, tightly woven cushions or thin mats plastered against the environment to maximize water storage between rains. Mosses also adjust their growth forms, expanding when water is abundant and contracting when it is not. Mosses are so well-suited to absorb and store water that their forms are mimicked by many flowering plants. The iconic pendant form of Spanish moss that delicately drapes over tree branches in the

Pacific Northwest is actually part of the bromeliad family. In alpine environments, the small cushion shape is adopted by numerous plant species, such as a flowering phlox called moss pink. Rivaling the complexity in moss forms is their vast array of colors. The color palette of mosses features nearly every shade of green, from pale mint to chartreuse to deep forest green. And it encompasses hues of gold, teal, taupe, silver, white, and black. Crimson sphagnum shines among the deep greens of West Virginia’s wetlands. While stunning, the red pigments also serve as sunscreens protecting the plants from UV damage. Along with adjusting their shape, mosses change color when rain revives them from their dessicated states. “It’s a transformed environment if you look down or look on a tree trunk during a rain,” says Susan Studlar, a bryologist and retired professor from West Virginia University. Although mosses can be found in almost every type of terrestrial environment, species vary extensively in their habitat preferences. For instance, some prefer to grow on sandstone boulders, while others seek out limestone, which is more alkaline. Copper moss thrives in environments with high levels of copper, even though heavy metals are toxic to nearly all forms of life. While most mosses have it made in the shade, some like it hot. Take the silvergreen bryum moss, which can be found smushed into inhospitable sidewalk cracks across the state. Forest floors carpeted in dense green mats may appear as just one colossal species upon a cursory glance, but trees provide exceptional microhabitats for a rich variety of mosses. For instance,

some moss species only grow at the bases of trees, while others grow further up the trunk. There’s also the knothole moss that, as the name suggests, only grows in tree knotholes. “There’s a tremendous amount of diversity out there,” says Robert Klips, associate professor emeritus at The Ohio State University. “All I have to do is look closely.”

MOSS IS THE BOSS The biodiversity of mosses reflects their adaptions to three fundamental needs of plant life: water, sunlight, and nutrients. “They’re superbly adapted for living close to the ground,” says Studlar. One of the most notable features of mosses is their remarkable ability to rapidly uptake and hold water. For example, sphagnum moss can absorb 20-30 times its dry weight in water. Let’s say there was a lady named Sphagnum. If she weighed 150 pounds, she could absorb 360-540 gallons of water. The spongey nature of mosses is a product of their extremely thin tissues, which are directly exposed to the environment. As part of the bryophyte taxa along with liverworts and hornworts, mosses typically have leaves only one-cell thick. Most bryophytes don’t have internal plumbing systems or roots to distribute water throughout the plant or absorb nutrients. Instead, they primarily acquire water and nutrients from the air. Thin tissues allow mosses to begin taking up water within seconds or minutes during a rainstorm, but they also lose water and minerals just as quickly when it dries out. In all but the wettest of environments, a single shoot of a moss doesn’t have a high chance of survival because the opportunity to store water inside leaves is minimal. To hold water, moss shoots

Previous: Common haircap moss, likely Polytrichum commune. Photo by Mark Anderson. Left: A mossy outcrop shows the different growth forms of mosses, including mats and cushions. Photo by Mark Anderson.

IDENTIFYING MOSSES The multitude of moss characteristics are captured by their peculiar common names. Among the 260 moss species in Studlar’s Annotated Checklist of the Hornworts, Liverworts, and Mosses of West Virginia are the elfin hat moss, heartleaf apron moss, prickly beard moss, Siberian mousetail moss, and common bug-ona-stick moss. “They must have the kids make up the common names because they’re kind of goofy,” says Klips. Unlike mammals and birds, the common names of mosses aren’t standardized, making it challenging to identify them along with their small stature. “There’s this mystery about mosses,” says Klips, “A lot of botanists say they don’t know how to identify mosses, but it’s just because they’re small.” Botanists often compare leaves or bark characteristics of trees to identify them, but telling moss species apart often requires a look through a hand lens or under a microscope. To identify bryophytes, botanists look at traits like the shape of a leaf or whether the leaf has tiny teeth, rolled edges, or a midrib. Earlier this year, Boback purchased a compound microscope and a two-volume set of books on the mosses of eastern North America, which contains diagrams of cells in moss leaves. By looking at moss leaves at 100x magnification, Boback can tell whether the cells are square, circular, or squiggly. “That can really help ID those moss species,” he says. Mosses also preserve their characteristics much longer than flowering plants, which usually wither and turn brown once they’re collected. Klips, noting how moss identification is good for procrastinators, showed me a moss specimen that was collected in 1936. “You spritz it with a little water and it’s as good as new,” he says, “They still have that charm.” The close inspection and attentive detail required to identify mosses opens a new world of shapes, textures, colors, and interactions on a microscopic scale. As Boback says, “when you get a hand lens or a dissecting microscope and start looking at all the little leaves, you see the tremendous beauty there.”

“THIS TINY PLANT HAS THE ABILITY, GIVEN ENOUGH TIME, TO SHAPE ENTIRE ECOSYSTEMS.”

group together in colonies. “Their secret to retaining water for a few hours or a few days after a rain is that they can store water between plants, between leaves, and between the leaf and the stem,” says Studlar. A few highly specialized mosses can store water within large, dead cells in their leaves, such as sphagnum and the white cushion moss. As with any living being, there are trade-offs resulting from their biology. Mosses can survive for long periods of time in between rains by shutting down metabolically, but rapidly rehydrating wreaks havoc on their cells, forcing them to make quick repairs. Because mosses can only grow for a few hours or days after a rain, their growth is quite limited. Most

mosses are less than four inches tall, and even the tallest moss, Dawsonia superba, reaches just 20 inches in height.

A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FENS Although small in size, mosses play powerful roles in natural ecosystems. They help prevent flash floods and soil erosion because of their ability to store immense amounts of water. Mosses are also used as ecological indicators due to thin tissues rendering them vulnerable to soil and air pollution. Scientists recently discovered the leaves of a wild moss species shrink, curl, and turn yellow within ten seconds of exposure to sulfur dioxide in the air. In the wet forests of Appalachia and the Pacific Northwest, moss-covered

logs create ideal habitats for hemlock and spruce seedlings to establish. On the forest floor, a tree seedling might be shaded out or buried beneath the leaf litter, “but if it’s elevated on a moss mat of just the right thickness, then it can raise the next generation of trees,” says Studlar. On an even smaller scale, mosses provide a home for a vast array of microorganisms, including rotifers, tardigrades, nematodes, and microbes. For instance, blue-green bacteria living inside mosses that grow on limestone convert nitrogen from the air into a plant-usable form, enriching the soil for other species to establish and grow. Some scientists think the antibiotic compound sphagnol in sphagnum is produced by a microbe living inside the moss. Sphagnum has been used

Top: Knothole moss, photo by Richard Orr. Bottom from left to right: Haircap moss capsules, Surprise! It’s a moss-like flowering plant, Windswept broom moss, photos by Mark Anderson.

for thousands of years to treat wounds due to its antibiotic and absorbent properties, including during World War I. But perhaps the most drastic ecological impact of mosses can be found among the peat—partially decayed vegetation or organic matter mainly comprised of sphagnum moss. Peatlands, a type of wetland, are one of the most valuable ecosystems on Earth. They cover just three per cent of the global land surface, but hold 25 per cent of the world’s carbon, which is more than all other vegetation types combined. “Sphagnum moss has the ability to completely transform wetlands,” says Sarah Deacon, a biologist at American Public University. When sphagnum moss moves into a wetland, it slowly acidifies the soil and water, changing the wetland from a rich fen, which has a neutral pH and is fed by groundwater and precipitation, to a poor fen, which is more toxic. Because plants are sensitive to pH, rich and poor fens host different compositions of plant species. As the sphagnum continues to decay, it creates a thick mat that eventually isolates the plants from groundwater, marking the transition from a poor fen to a bog. This slow transition is a form of ecological succession,

where the composition of a plant community naturally changes over time. “It’s amazing that this tiny plant has the ability, given enough time, to shape entire ecosystems,” says Deacon. In West Virginia’s wetlands, hummocks of mounded sphagnum undulate atop peat layers, isolated from the groundwater. Blueberry shrubs and other mosses grow atop these hummocks, where conditions are a bit drier than down below. In autumn, these wetlands glow with the white of cottongrass and deep-red cranberries, an alluring contrast to the lime and kelly greens. Even in winter, when it seems as though all forms of life are dormant, the lively mosses relish in the moisture of snow. In spring, they shoot up stalks of spores that give rise to the next generation, continuing their ubiquitous presence throughout wetlands, forests, and deserts. Whether we notice or not, across every season and in every terrestrial environment on Earth, the mosses are always quietly and beautifully shaping everything around them. w

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OUTDOOR EDUCATION

Davis, West Virginia

It is, by common consent, a good thing for people to get back to nature. -Aldo Leopold

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Nikki Forrester is senior editor and designer of Highland Outdoors. She loves hanging out with her fens!

Interested in learning more about mosses? Check out Common Mosses of the Northeast and Appalachians published by Princeton Field Guides and Mosses, Liverworts, and Hornworts: A Field Guide to the Common Bryophytes by Ralph Pope. For a deeper dive, dig into Introduction to Bryophytes by Alain Vanderpoorten and Bernard Goffinet.

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CLOSE TO HOME By Jordan Charbonneau

y husband and I fell in love while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. Immediately after returning home, we planned more outdoor excursions. We signed up for nighttime scuba diving classes, traveled to see coral reefs in the Bahamas, and trekked through Mayan ruins in Mexico. We canoed and camped our way through several northern New England lakes and went on backpacking trips whenever we could get away. But during the last few years, things changed for us. We built a home, started businesses, and filled our lives with work, pets, and family obligations. The running list of trips we planned to do “someday” steadily grew while the adventures we ticked off the list dwindled.

But our desire to get outside remained strong, urging us to focus our sights on adventures closer to home. In the spring of 2020, my husband and I wound our way through a few backroads in Charleston to find the start of the Mary Ingles Draper Trail, a 14.2-mile path that traverses

Kanawha State Forest. The trail is named after a woman who followed a similar path after escaping Native American capture during the French and Indian War. Our hike started with a walk up a sunny hollow crisscrossing a bubbling stream. We walked under a grove of silver-barked beech trees as the trail climbed toward the ridge. Gazing up at the neon-green leaves fluttering in the sun, we were struck with awe. This area was once logged and mined extensively, but now trees towered over our heads. It felt like untouched wilderness. I wondered why we hadn’t visited this treasure before, especially because it was close to our home and doable as a long day-hike or a few short section hikes. I realized that, in my pursuit of longer, glamorous backpacking trips to places like the Cranberry or Dolly Sods wilderness areas, I missed many opportunities to enjoy our idyllic local trails. As we lounged in the sun and ate lunch, we committed to hiking closer to home more often. We wanted to check out local trails

even if we could only get away for a few hours at a time. After that hike, I searched for trails close to our home outside of Charleston. For the first time, I selected hikes knowing we’d be skipping epic summits and awe-inspiring vistas. Most of our local trails feature what thru-hikers not so affectionately call the ‘green tunnel’: walking through miles of trees and plants with scenic vistas far and few between. The first trail we ticked off our local list was the Overlook Rock Trail in Kanawha State Forest. At just 1.6 miles, we were able to squeeze this hike in after running some errands. The trail quickly ascends a narrow draw in the hillside to its namesake overlook rock before cresting and following a ridge around to the descent. Despite having no grand vista, this trip was a breath of fresh air in what was an otherwise unadventurous day. We were alone with just the sound of our feet crunching through the leaves. As the trail circled the ridge through clumps of bright green moss, towering oak trees, and a tunnel of holly, I found myself smiling and commenting on how this trail was such a pleasant surprise. Finding a little peace in nature made a big difference in my day; finding it so close to home was incredible. Instead of chasing the rush of longer adventures, we could fit these serene experiences into our schedule more often. Hitting the trail regularly, even if it’s just for a mile or two, can make a big difference in your life. It’s wonderful for reducing stress and can even boost your immune system. It’s also helpful for staying in shape. Frequently getting out for shorter hikes makes the longer trips easier and more enjoyable. Our next trip was a bit of an accident. We intended to hike the Fisherman’s Trail at Hawks Nest State Park, located within the ancient New River Gorge, after I heard it featured some incredible waterfalls. Fortuitously, I went to the wrong parking lot. Rather than getting back in the car,

Left, bottom right: Photos by Jack Hoblitzell / Kanawha Valley Trail Alliance. Top right: Photo by Jordan Charbonneau.

we decided to try the 1.8-mile Cliffside Trail. The trail briefly plunged toward the New River Gorge before flattening out and circling under the Hawks Nest cliffs. As the landscape feature’s name suggests, the hike was gorgeous. We completed the hike in early June when flowing water was abundant. Little waterfalls cascaded over the clifftops, spraying us with mist. The cliffs themselves were swirling layers of sandstone, marked with nooks and crannies formed from eons of erosion. I was sure we’d stumbled upon another underrated gem as we made our way through stands of hemlock and rhododendron, and past several waterfalls on Turkey Creek. I wondered if other folks missed places like this in their searches for high summits and true wilderness. The more I searched, the more places I found right out my backdoor. I followed Facebook groups and pages that focused on outdoor recreation near our home. I stumbled upon a trail review for the Alice Knight Memorial Trail that led to a waterfall in Charleston’s Coonskin Park. The trail follows the Coonskin Branch and leads to small but unique waterfall that runs over a rock overhang. It was well worth the short 1.1-mile hike. Looking for quick overnight backpacking options, I found the Kanawha Trace Trail’s website. The Kanawha Trace is a 31.6-mile trail that runs from Barboursville to Frazier’s Bottom, winding through hardwood forests, across streams, and through a bit of farmland. Complete with three camping areas, it’s an excellent trail for a quick weekend trip or if you’re new to backpacking. While hiking, I imagined what this part of

West Virginia looked like a couple hundred years ago. Each time we checked one of these local trails off our list, I experienced a bit of the feeling I had when we walked the entirety of the Appalachian Trail. It didn’t matter that we were often just carrying daypacks or that we weren’t on the kind of adventure people write about in books. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy dreaming, planning, and going on grand adventures. I always will, but it’s also easy to get too caught up in these dreams. In the age of social media, we tend to fall prey to comparison. We’re bombarded with images of folks constantly on life-changing trips. If there’s anything this year has taught me, it’s that the little trips can make all the difference.

AMY BARB, BROKER

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There’s beauty to be had and nature to be experienced on local trails. You might miss some of the big views, but you’ll likely miss some of the crowds, too. On our quest to hike local trails, we created great memories and found our own special views. I loved the incredible geology, history, flora, and fauna we saw in our regional backyard. Don’t wait until you get enough time off to do a thruhike or save up enough money to go on that epic backpacking trip in Peru you have in mind. These days, there are many ways to find local trails, from hiking groups on social media to guidebooks and trail apps. Get out and enjoy the beauty near you. Your future self will thank you. w Jordan Charbonneau is a writer, backpacker, and kayaking fanatic. She lives in an off-grid cabin in Poca, WV, with her husband and a bunch of pets.

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PROFILE My entire family lived in what’s called Crow Holler. It borders Beaver Creek State Park, and there’s a lot of old trails there that my dad claims he made with his dirt bikes. I have an older brother and an older sister; we grew up fishing, and riding horses, bikes, and ATVs. My dad’s a descendant of generations of coal miners, and my great-great-grandfather owned the Lillybrook Coal mines. My family worked in the coal mines until my dad decided that he was going to start working for UPS. He was the one that told me, “You don’t need to go into coal mining because it’s a really hard life.” He is one who kept me in school and pushed me in another direction.

When did you get into outdoor recreation and adventure sports?

COREY LILLY By Dylan Jones Discussions of West Virginia often focus on brain drain—the phenomenon of the state’s young denizens fleeing downtrodden coal towns for greener socioeconomic pastures elsewhere. But some of the Mountain State’s native children make a conscientious decision to stay—and thrive—among her hills and hollows. Corey Lilly, an energetic tenth-generation West Virginian, is one of them. At just 29 years old, Lilly has walked many paths and accomplished more than some do in a lifetime. From professional skiing in his teenage years to dropping waterfalls around the world as a sponsored kayaker, from adventure sports media entrepreneur to executive director of an environmental organization, Lilly excels at whatever he sets his sights upon. Last year, Lilly spearheaded the Midnight Miracle, the instantly famous midnight rescue of a solo kayaker who was trapped behind a waterfall on the Kanawha River for over six hours. I caught up with Lilly to discuss his various career paths, his role in the legendary rescue, and what drives him to make West Virginia a better place. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 44 HIGHLAND OUTDOORS

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Growing up on a big farm, being outside was just a way of life. Neither of my parents nor any of my family, except for my brother and one of my cousins, were into outdoor recreation. My parents put me in the Ski Wee program at Winterplace Ski Resort; that was my avenue into the outdoor recreation scene that exposed me to ski culture. One of my earliest memories is my dad and mom pushing me with skis on at three years old.

So skiing was the genesis of your passion for adventure sports. How did that blossom? I say skiing saved my life because I grew up in a fairly impoverished area, and my parents were going through a divorce, so there wasn’t a whole lot of direction in my life. When the opioid epidemic was hitting southern West Virginia, many of my friends were getting on drugs, even back in middle school. I never wanted to do that stuff because I had skiing and it felt like it would hold me back. I got hooked on skiing instead.

How did you get into professional skiing? My brother and I were notorious

at Winterplace for run-ins with ski patrol. We were always ducking ropes, skiing closed terrain, running from snowmobiles, and just causing trouble. I was constantly breaking my skis and taking them to the rental shop to get fixed. One day, I went in and they told me to stay in the shop and radioed the mountain managers to come down. I was like, “Oh shit, I must have done something bad.” They all circled around me and brought out this brand-new pair of skis and bindings. Turns out they had reached out to Atomic Skis and told them about me, and at the age of 13, I earned my first sponsorship. While freestyle skiers out west were focusing on big mountain terrain, we were progressing rail skiing here in the southeast. I became known as a rail skier and that’s how I started getting all my sponsors.

Tell me about your professional skiing career. My sponsors sent letters to our local Board of Education so I could graduate high school a year early. My dad gave me a minivan that I outfitted to live in. In the 2009-2010 ski season, I moved out to Colorado and my sponsors gave me a traveling budget to become a full-time skier. I was getting paid $50 an hour to work trade shows and do demos. My job was to make ski films and butter up big-time clients so they’d make big purchases. Those folks would host me on big ski trips and take me out to fancy dinners. I’m just this West Virginia kid who had never experienced anything like this before. My illiterate grandfather, who watched me growing up, had holes in the walls at his home. This new life was such a contrast. I qualified for nationals twice, was top-ten in the nation for under-16 freestyle skiing, and landed a spot on the Elan U.S. Freestyle Team. I stuck some really unique rail tricks during those years. When I switched sponsors to Elan Skis, I also picked up a suite of others that, by chance, happen to be the same as Glen Plake, a world-renowned freeskier. Touring with Plake was the highlight of my skiing career.

Karen Lane

You’re a native of Grandview, West Virginia. What was your upbringing like?

Clockwise from top left: Photos by Bob Lilly, Gabe DeWitt, Ryan Kelly, Gabe DeWitt.

Your skiing career ended early—what happened? In spring 2010, I was attempting to flip off a rail, crashed, and hit the left side of my face really hard on the snow. I had been concussed a lot of times in my skiing career, but this one was different. I was really dizzy, saw changing colors, and had a filter on my vision, like looking through a screen door. Everything totally changed that day. I drove back east after the ski season and started going through a bunch of tests at the West Virginia University [WVU] eye clinic. They never arrived at a concrete diagnosis, but the doctors said if I hit my head that hard again, I could lose my vision. I moved back home and my whole lifestyle started slipping away. I moved to Canaan Valley for the 2010-

2011 ski season. The park scene at Timberline was great that season, but my head injury persisted. My sponsors started noticing that I wasn’t doing the caliber of stuff I was doing before the injury. I held on for one more year, but moved on from professional skiing at the end of the 20112012 season. My vision is still affected, but I’ve gotten used to it now.

What was life like when you came back home? Peyton Love taught me how to kayak on the New River and John Cornwell taught me how to film in summer 2012. I found work as a video boater, which is kayaking ahead of groups on rafting trips and filming them going through the rapids. I didn’t want to live with my parents, so I lived in a tent at raft guide camps. I went from this total

rock star life of skiing to living in a tent in West Virginia. I felt like I lost it all. My whole identity, everything I’d invested in, was being a skier. But I wasn’t a skier anymore, I was just this terrible kayaker who was trying to get people to teach me how to paddle. I didn’t want to invest my identity in it as I did with skiing, I wasn’t going to have any expectations and was going to remain humble. I had to redefine who I was and what I was going to do with my life. Some close friends convinced me to go to college because I had nowhere else to live and no future plans.

How was the transition from pro skiing to college? I wasn’t a good student growing up because

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I was skipping school to go skiing, so the idea of college was daunting. I got accepted into WVU and was like, “Alright, I’m gonna take this seriously.” I love mountains, so I studied geology. I did well my first year and discovered hydrogeology, which fit with my kayaking passion. I went to my first Cheat River Festival and found out about watershed associations. I started volunteering with Friends of the Cheat, discovered all these awesome people doing this work, and realized watershed work is what I wanted to do with my life.

As executive director of the Piney Creek Watershed Association (PCWA) in the lower New River Gorge, what do you focus on now? I found out about the job as I was just finishing college. I told them, “I’m young, I’m trying to make it in southern West Virginia, and I’ll work really hard to improve this organization.” It’s fitting because Beaver Creek, where I grew up, is the headwaters of Piney Creek, which makes it even more special that I get to work there. Piney Creek is the largest impaired tributary to the lower New River. It basically drains all of Beckley, which is one of West Virginia’s largest population centers. PCWA was formed 16 years ago. It’s an awesome group of dedicated West Virginians who are concerned about the environment, which is such a breath of fresh air in the southern part of the state.

What issues does the Piney Creek watershed face? The main issues are fecal coliform and sedimentation from all the runoff in Beckley. Our approach has been to focus on three components: outdoor recreation, stream restoration, and environmental education. The Piney Creek Gorge feels so hidden, but it’s just ten minutes from downtown Beckley. It’s a wild creek with 12 miles of class III and IV whitewater, 15 miles of mountain bike trails, and tons of rock climbing waiting to be developed. It’s the only city in West Virginia that has resources like this so close to the city. We’re really pushing to develop Piney Creek into an outdoor recreation hub.

Throughout your adventure sports career, you’ve started several brands and companies. What are they? 46 HIGHLAND OUTDOORS

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The first company was Skier Trash, started by myself, my brother, and our friend Ryan Kelly, with large support from pro skier Glen Plake. We’ve made everything from beanies and jackets to Zippo lighters. Then I started Boof and Destroy Entertainment Feed, which is a production company where paddling companies advertise through our kayaking videos. When I was in college, I took advantage of the WVU Launch Lab to start a film production company called Content C, LLC. I also started the Kanawha Falls Festival, which won best paddling festival in Blue Ridge Outdoors. I’m currently working on a new project called the Recreation Asset Discovery, or RAD, which will be a database for whitewater guides in West Virginia and will branch into other outdoor activities. If you’re gonna make it in West Virginia, you need to be creative, whether that means starting your own company or getting creative within a certain niche or industry.

Speaking of Kanawha Falls, let’s shift gears to the now-famous rescue last year. Can you briefly describe what happened? Charlie Walbridge, one of the founding fathers of swiftwater rescue, said it was the most miraculous whitewater rescue in the past 50 years. It happened in September 2020 at Kanawha Falls, which is a river-wide waterfall just downstream of the confluence of the New and Gauley rivers. The victim was paddling solo and got caught behind the falls after running the drop. The night of the accident, I saw a social media post about a found kayak floating at the bottom of the big drop, then someone in the thread posted a drone video of that boater kayaking there earlier that day. I knew the paddler was by himself and was still out there. Someone called the [WV DNR], and they sent out a local search and rescue team, they did a quick sweep, and then called off the search. I called up some paddling buddies to go look for him once the first responders gave up. We got there and identified the paddler as Sam Davis from Tennessee. We asked the DNR officers if we could paddle out to look for him. We heard him yelling, and sure enough, he was where I thought he’d be. We had to vertically extract Sam up and out of the waterfall, which was really hard. To get a rope to him, we had to know exactly where he was. I paddled the water-

fall at high flows with a headlamp to try and get a visual on him. We were able to put a headlamp and carabiner on the end of a rope and lower it through the waterfall. Sam was able to grab it and clip it to himself; it took about ten of us to pull him up out of the waterfall. It was past midnight when we finally got him out.

What was so significant about this rescue? There have been more technical rescues, but this was miraculous because of Sam’s fight to stay alive. He was able to get to a ledge where he was crouched, foot over foot, just huddling there with the waterfall over his head for hours. In most whitewater accidents where a death occurs, it occurs within the first five minutes. Sam walked away after six and a half hours in the water, even after search and rescue called off the initial search. It’s also significant because I knew where he was trapped based on the photos and was able to find him. Otherwise, he would have died due to hypothermia.

What kind of precedent did this rescue set for future scenarios? We were working with local politicians to change how they would respond because Kanawha Falls is becoming more popular. We were trying to make something happen, but it’s fallen on deaf ears. Only a few of us know of the hazards at Kanawha Falls, and they haven’t reached out to any of us yet.

What would you like to see for the future in West Virginia? I want to see the state embrace outdoor recreation while holding onto its authentic culture, and not become another outdoor gentrification center, like Vail in Colorado. West Virginia is a culture-filled place. If we lose that, we lose the reason why people created the outdoor scene that’s here to begin with. I want outdoor recreation to grow, but I want visitors to respect the local culture and realize there are different ethics here. The only people looking out for us are our neighbors, and our communities need to come together to hold our outdoor recreation culture in high value as we expand our resources. w Check out more of Corey Lilly’s recent expeditions: http://youtube.com/coreylilly

GALLERY

Big Run can be found east of Thomas; this falls marks the beginning of its steep plunge into the Blackwater Canyon. This hidden gem typically has a good flow in spring, but often reduces to a trickle in the dry summer months. Not far upstream, Big Run drains the Big Run Bog, a national natural landmark. This diverse sphagnum-red spruce bog is a relic of the Pleistocene era and is home to cottongrass, cranberries, pitcher plants, and many other unique species of flora and fauna. This waterfall isn’t photographed as often as some of the other iconic falls in the area, but its unadulterated beauty is well worth the challenging trek to reach it. Photo and caption by Martin Radigan. View more of his work: www.martinradigan.com

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