Before October 22, 1977, getting from one rim of the New River Gorge to the other meant driving down Fayette Station Road: a narrow, switchbacked descent to a low one-lane bridge at the bottom, then back up the far wall, the better part of forty-five minutes to cover a gap you could see clearly the entire time. After that date, the same crossing took less than a minute. Nothing about the gorge changed. A single arch of steel, hung 876 feet above the water, did all the work.
The bridge didn't just save commuters time. It turned the deepest, hardest-to-cross river gorge in the East into a place where, one Saturday a year, people jump off it on purpose.
Fayette Station Road
Fayette Station Road drops off Route 19 near the new bridge's south end and switchbacks down the gorge wall in a series of tight turns, crosses the New River on a low steel-truss bridge built in 1889, then climbs back out the other side to reconnect near the north end. It's about seven miles of narrow, twisting pavement. Before 1977, it was not a scenic detour. It was the only way across for anyone not willing to drive miles out of the way to a different crossing entirely.
The National Park Service kept the road open after the new bridge went in, and it's worth driving once for exactly the reason it was once dreaded: it's the only vantage point that puts a person underneath the new bridge, looking straight up at the thing that made the old road optional.
Building the Arch
Construction started in 1974 and finished in 1977, a three-year job to close a gap nearly a third of a mile wide with nothing underneath but the gorge itself. The arch went up in sections, cantilevered out from each rim on cables anchored into the rock, gaining length a piece at a time with no support from below, until the two halves met at the center and locked together. It's the same basic method used on the world's other great steel arches, just applied to one of the deepest gorges east of the Mississippi.
The bridge is built from COR-TEN weathering steel, the same self-protecting alloy used on many long-span bridges, which forms its own dull rust-colored oxide layer instead of needing paint. That's the color visible from the New River Gorge Bridge overlook today, and it looks exactly the way its engineers intended it to look on the day it opened.
- Construction 1974 TO 1977
- Opened OCTOBER 22, 1977
- Total cost ABOUT $37 MILLION
See the Bridge From Both Sides
The overlook at the visitor center and the view from Fayette Station Road below are two different bridges. The trip planner routes both into one day.
Open the Trip PlannerThe Longest Single-Span Arch in the World, Once
At 3,030 feet end to end, with a main arch spanning 1,700 feet, the New River Gorge Bridge held the world record for longest single-span steel arch bridge from the day it opened in 1977 until 2003, when China's Lupu Bridge in Shanghai surpassed it. It has since dropped further down the list as other countries built longer ones. It remains, by most current rankings, among the ten longest steel arch spans on the planet and the longest in the Western Hemisphere.
Numbers alone undersell the height. Stand at the visitor center overlook and the river below looks less like water than like a thin bright wire. It's 876 feet down, which is tall enough that the bridge briefly held a second, less official title: for years, the highest place in the United States a person could legally jump from with a parachute or a rope, one day a year, with a permit.
- Total length 3,030 FEET
- Main arch span 1,700 FEET
- Height above river 876 FEET
- World's longest single-span arch 1977–2003
Bridge Day
Every other day of the year, jumping off the New River Gorge Bridge is exactly what it sounds like: not allowed. On Bridge Day, the National Park Service and the state close the road across the bridge to traffic and open it to rappellers, rope-ascenders, and BASE jumpers under a permit system, drawing tens of thousands of spectators to watch people step off a highway bridge on purpose. It has run annually since 1980, with a small handful of exceptions.
Bungee jumping was part of Bridge Day too, once. It was banned in 1993 after safety incidents, and it has not come back. The parachutes and the rope teams have.
What's left of Fayette Station Road's old forty-five minutes, on Bridge Day, is nothing. Cars don't cross at all. For one Saturday, the bridge stops being the fast way across and becomes the whole point of coming.
Facts and figures checked against NPS.gov and public West Virginia Department of Transportation records on the bridge's construction and dimensions. Global bridge-length rankings shift as new spans are built elsewhere; this piece states the bridge's undisputed 1977–2003 world-record run and its current standing as the longest steel arch span in the Western Hemisphere rather than a single fixed global rank, since published rankings vary by source and year.
Fayette Station Road is still down there, seven miles of switchbacks leading to a low bridge from 1889. Almost nobody has to drive it anymore. Most people who do, drive it on purpose, just to look up.