The Bridge They Jump Off Every October

The New River Gorge Bridge carries United States Route Nineteen across a chasm eight hundred and seventy-six feet above the New River. When it opened on October twenty-second, nineteen seventy-seven, it was the longest single-arch steel bridge in the world, a title it held for twenty-six years, and at the time of completion it was also the highest vehicular bridge in the Western Hemisphere.

The bridge cut the drive around the gorge from forty-five minutes to under a minute. For the communities on either rim, this was transformative. For the towns at the bottom of the gorge, many of them already declining from the collapse of the coal economy, the new route meant that the traffic that once passed through them now passed over them at highway speed, invisible and inaccessible. The bridge's convenience for some was another form of bypass for others.

Bridge Day began in nineteen eighty, three years after the bridge's official dedication, and turned the span over for a single Saturday each October to pedestrian traffic and, uniquely among fixed objects in the United States, to legal base jumping. The parachutists descend to a landing zone in the riverbed eight hundred feet below. They have been doing it for more than forty years. The event draws seventy-five thousand to one hundred thousand visitors to the gorge for a single day, making it the largest extreme-sports event in the United States by attendance.

The bridge was designated as a National Recreation Area landmark and is now at the center of the national park designated in December twenty-twenty, the first new national park established in the continental United States in decades. The gorge it spans was formed by a river that geologists consider among the oldest on the continent, a waterway whose name, New River, is one of the more persistent ironies in American geography.