By Rick Steelhammer
For HDMedia
Beckley — For Beckley, the road to economic development starts with trails.
In the past 10 years, more than 25 miles of trail have been built — mostly by volunteers — in the Raleigh County city and along its outskirts, leading hikers, trail runners and mountain bikers through shady stands of second-growth forest, past scenic waterfalls and historic mining and milling sites, and along the rim of a 600-foot-deep canyon.
While the trail-building began primarily as a way to give area residents new places to hike, bike and run, it has been incorporated into Beckley’s plan for enhancing its role as a gateway city to the New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, as the city shifts its economic development focus from coal mining to outdoor recreation and tourism.
“Building trails is one of the cheapest, most sustainable investments a city can make to give it a competitive advantage,” said Mitch Lehman, Beckley’s director of Outdoor Economic Development.
“With the New River Gorge’s designation as a national park bringing more people into the area, we’re giving them — along with the people who already live here — something more to do,” Lehman said. “Beckley has often been overlooked as a New River Gorge gateway city. We’re trying to change that.”
A Beckley Outdoors Action Plan, adopted by the city in 2024, calls for adding more miles to the city’s trail system in coming years and connecting them to existing trails. It also calls for branding the city as “Basecamp Beckley,” a jumping-off point for outdoor adventures in the New River Gorge area.
‘A glen separated from all the world’
Beckley’s trail-building surge got underway in 2013, when Gary Morefield, a Beckley mechanic and mountain bike enthusiast, got permission from the Beckley YMCA — which operates a soccer complex on a bluff overlooking Piney Creek Gorge — and a neighboring land owner, Beaver Coal Co., to design and build a series of hiking and biking trails on their property. Morefield and a group of volunteers started with a one-mile loop trail from the soccer complex to a clifftop monolith named Ship Rock, completed in 2015.
Since then, volunteers led by Morefield have added about 15 miles of trail to what has become the Gray Flats system, including one trail that extends to the bottom of Piney Creek Gorge, to the site of the gristmill Beckley founder and namesake Alfred Beckley built in 1835. The cut-stone ruins of the mill, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, are clearly visible just downstream from an impressive waterfall on Piney Creek.
Future President Rutherford B. Hayes, then a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army, visited the site in 1862 and described Beckley’s residence adjacent to the mill as “a cabin by a roaring torrent in a glen separated from all the world. I shall long remember that quiet little home.”
“It’s wild how things worked out,” said Morefield, who signed on as the City of Beckley’s trail director in 2019. “Me and a buddy had biked out here 20 years ago and saw the potential, but I never dreamed back then that there would be miles and miles of trails out here someday.”
Morefield said he caught the mountain biking fever in the 1990s after taking his son to a mountain bike race and liking what he saw. He took up trail building soon thereafter, he said, starting at Little Beaver State Park, “when I found out there were only two trails to ride” in the area.
In 2019, just as the Gray Flats Trail System was nearing completion, the West Virginia Land Trust acquired a nearby 613-acre tract of land encompassing a 4½-mile stretch of Piney Creek Gorge that included forested slopes, tumbling streams and remnants of the Stanaford mining complex, which began producing coal in 1902, with some mining activity continuing into the early 1970s. Morefield soon got busy laying out new trails, in cooperation with the Land Trust, the City of Beckley and the Piney Creek Watershed Association.
In 2023, the Land Trust’s newly created Piney Creek Preserve opened its first trail, Waterfall Hollow Trail, a half-mile pathway leading to two waterfalls — Cranberry Creek Cascades and Little Whitestick Falls — located on a pair of Piney Creek tributaries. Both waterfalls are listed in the Division of Tourism’s West Virginia Waterfall Trail guidebook.
From the Stanaford Mine Road trailhead serving Waterfall Hollow Trail, the four-mile-long Wildwood Trail follows mine benches terraced into the west side of Piney Creek Gorge past abandoned mine works and sheer cliffs, across tumbling creeks and into cool, shaded coves. Plans call for it to eventually link with the Piney Creek Preserve’s new Stanaford Grove Trailhead, a 50-acre trail complex at the north end of the preserve, where the mile-long Common Ground/Airborne Outlaw Trail opened in April.
Airborne Outlaw, designed by Tracy Toler’s Adventure Trail Systems of Teays Valley, “is the first public jump line trail in southern West Virginia,” according to Lehman. “People can come here to warm up for some of the more trails at places like Snowshoe.
Plans call for adding five additional miles to the Stanaford Grove system, and bringing the total trail mileage in Piney Creek Preserve to 20, in coming years. Also in the works are plans to develop a system of trails leading to bouldering sites on the eastern side of Piney Creek on Raleigh County Airport land.
Four miles to go
But the biggest trail connection yet to be fulfilled for Beckley’s network of hiking and biking routes is a direct link between the Raleigh County city and New River Gorge National Park and Preserve. A 2012 National Park Service plan recommended connecting Beckley with the park via Piney Creek Gorge, entering the park near its McCreery Stream Access site off W.Va. 41. From there, a trail from Piney Creek would connect with the park’s planned Garden Grounds trail system.
But gaining access to tracts of private land encompassing the last four miles of Piney Creek before it enters the New River has stymied trail planners from fulfilling that dream for years, until the parcels came up for auction on June 30.
On that date, the Bainbridge, Ohio, based conservation organization Arc of Appalachia, with help from the West Virginia Land Trust, Piney Creek Watershed Association and more than 700 individual donors, bought five of the eight parcels that were up for sale. The five tracts added up to just over 2,000 acres and included the four-mile missing link along Piney Creek.
While Arc of Appalachia’s leadership has embraced the plan to extend a trail through Piney Creek Gorge to the national park, details of the arrangement and how the trail will be routed, will be worked out later with the Land Trust, City of Beckley and other partners.
Several of the auctioned parcels had been owned by Wilcox Industries and Stretcher Neck Properties LLC, which list James Justice III and Jillian Justice, the children of Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., as either president, manager or director, according to the West Virginia Secretary of State’s office.
“This connection will provide a seamless outdoor experience that encourages exploration over multiple days,” Lehman said. ”Hikers and mountain bikers could begin their journey in downtown Beckley, travel through protected forests on local trail systems, and ultimately connect to one of the nation’s premier outdoor destinations.”
The new trail connection, Lehman said, would make Beckley “more than a gateway community — it establishes the city as a destination in its own right, encouraging longer visitor stays, increased overnight lodging and greater spending at local restaurants, retailers, outfitters and other small businesses, while delivering a world-class recreation experience for residents and visitors alike.”
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