West Virginia has the highest average elevation of any state east of the Mississippi. That’s not due tothe mountains—itstallest peak is still lower than Denver—but thehills that roll out like endless moguls.
More than a centuryago,towns rose up in the valleys, built from coal fortunes. In the late 1800s, the city of Bramwell used to. Itsbank was once so flush with cash that its janitor would . Nearby, the city of Bluefield was built next to the world’s richest coal deposit, which becamea mini metropolis andearnedit the nickname Little New York.
But things have changed. Most of those townsareempty and crumbling now. In Bluefield, the population has dropped by half, to , and a quarter of its residents live in poverty. In Bramwell, a few rehabbed mansions share the streets with a largely barren business district and derelict homes that stand as a reminder of what was. In the 1980s, , a number that has since, despite.
But for the first time in a generation,after many have acceptedthe fact that coal money isn’t going to come back, optimism has returned tothese valley towns. Even with the nation’seconomy imploding from the pandemic, some West Virginians finally see a way they could turn things around: ATV tourism.
It’s possible thanksto more than 700 miles of doubletrack trails cut through those endless hills. In the past 20 years, motorcycle and riders have arrived in increasing numbers, and last year the state sold more than56,000 permits forthe ,a professionally managed networkamidbeautiful old-growth forests. This enterprisehelped fuel a West Virginia tourism industry that has experienceda. Today—more than the coal industry employed a generation ago.
It’s perhapsa bit ironic that the Hatfield-McCoy Trails got their start in large partfroma manwho had no interest in using them.
In 1989, John English didn’t ride ATVs, even thoughhe was director of state government affairs for the national . He met up for lunch one day with Leff Moore, now deceased, who was executive director of the West Virginia Recreational Vehicle Association. Moore started talking about the former coal-mine roads. English, now 75, recalled, “A little light came on, and we both started thinking, Gee, how could we maybe take advantage of that?”
, especially in the southern part of the state, where . The two menrealized that ifthey could convince the companies of those trails’tourism potential, they could conceivably develop a network unlike any other in the world.
The companies had slicedtrails throughvirgin hemlockforests more than a century ago to get workers to the mines, often using school buses with jacked-up suspensions and off-road tires.Dave Preston, 63, still recalls bouncing along on gravel roads on his way to work. He’s a third-generation coal miner from Matewan, the West Virginian town memorialized in by the same name that documented bloody conflicts between miners and the companies that mistreated them. In 1974, at just 18, Preston went to work in the mines.
“Well, you’re from coal country. It was in your blood. It’s dangerous work. It’s hard work. But it paid good,” Preston said. “The money in the mine was so good, you had school teachers quitting to go work in them.”
Miners would make upwardof six figures a year, Preston remembered. But he was laid off in 1983, with the local coal mines nearly exhausted, and he picked upa job at an auto-rebuild shop. “It wasn’t a real good time,”he said.“Nobody likes being unemployed. I kept a job, but it was like a quarter of the money.”
In his downtime, Preston and other formerminers began takingtheir ATVs out to explore thetrails they used to ride to work. The affinity for the machines, he said,is something West Virginians have in their blood. You’ll often see people shuttling their kids to school or pulling up to a McDonald’s drive-through on one.
But the problem with the former coal roads becoming recreational trails, English realized back in 1989, was that none of them connected. Mostly, they ended at the mines and offeredfew scenic destinations.
So in the 1990s, English and the other trail founders set out to change things. They convinced the state legislature to allocate $1.5 million to create an authority that wouldoversee trail maintenance, sell permits, and take on liability in case anybody got injured. Then they brought in a team from the Bureau of Land Management to suss out how to connect everything into what would become a thousandcontiguous miles of trailsand draw up the first maps of the network.
Named afterthe families who once attracted international attention for a blood feud that started over a stolen hog, the Hatfield-McCoy Trails opened in 2000. Nobody had any idea what to expect next, said Jeffrey T. Lusk, executive director of the . “We were so concerned,” Lusk said. “We were thinking, Oh my goodness, when we turn this on, is anybody going to come use them?”
That first year, the state sold 5,000 permits (which cost $26.50 for residents and$50 for out-of-state visitors), far more than anyoneexpected. “In those first few months, we knew we had something. We had something people wanted to do,” Lusk said.
It wouldn’t take long forinterest in the trails to turn into a business opportunity for a state that needed it badly.
Cameron Ellis grew up on top of a cleared hillside near the town of Gilbert, West Virginia. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had all mined coal in the hill. It dried upbefore Ellis came along. As a little kid, he knew the family’s land only for what it had once been.
Ellis, 29, was in elementary school when the trails opened, and his family was among the first to see the potential. They added ten primitive campsites to their property in 2002. With no facilities, the campers showeredat the town’s community center.
Those first guests were all one demographic: young men traveling in groups. That changed, however, aftera shift in the ATV industry that became a big reason for the success of the Hatfield-McCoy Trails. In the early 2000s, ATVs wereessentially four-wheel motorcycles, with controls on the handlebars andan open cab. Then the industry switched to a vehicle known as a side-by-side;largely enclosed, it hasa car-like steering wheeland pedals.The demographic of the people arriving to the Ellis’s campground soon included families, with dad and mom and the kids all piling into four-seat machines.
The family’s now features20 primitive tent sites, 43 full-hookup campsites, 11 mountaintop cabins withkitchens and baths, ATVrentals, and a barbecue restaurant. It has welcomedguests from every state in the nation and numerousforeign countries.
“It was nothing but primitive when we first started,” Ellis said,“and we’ve built up to everything we’ve had now. Even just tenyears ago, you wouldn’t have thought it would grow into something so large. It’s a lifeline into southern West Virginia now.”
Today the trails arethe number-one draw in Mercer County, saidJamie Null, executive director of the local tourism board. Her organization, , even bought its own ATVthree years ago, outfittingit in green and white andemblazoning itwith the county’s name across the door. Null grew up in Princeton, West Virginia, in a family that wasn’t very outdoorsy. But now she takes journalists and politicians on trips across the county in her Polaris General four-seater (and shebought one for her own family). She sees a lot of optimism in the ATV-rental businesses and in hotelslike outside Bluefield, which promotes itself as “designed to meet the needs of ATV riders.”
“As far as me having a crystal ball and saying this could save a town, who can do that?” Null says. “But we have to look at the bigger picture and look at how we can revitalize our towns.”
In the past five years, the trail system has added two new sections,increasingHatfield-McCoy from 550 to 730 miles andconnecting more towns that might benefit from thatsame kind of economic growth, said Lusk. Last yearthe trails saw a 12 percent uptick, with 56,258 permits sold, mostly to visitors from out of state.
“It’s a lifeline into southern West Virginia now,” said Cameron Ellis.
Like all tourism-focused industries nowadays, Lusk is undoubtedly concerned with how COVID-19 will affect things, especially considering a good deal of his business happens in early spring. On March 21, , but that didn’t last long; two months later, the state reopened them, and since then, riders have returned in numbers surpassing 2019 figures. During the closure, the state initiatedthe , and Lusk says that, so far, no trail-related businesses have been forced to close.
The biggest challenge currentlyis a lack of supporting infrastructure. If the trails are to grow, the state needs more hotels,restaurants,and shops to cater to riders. “These towns have the opportunity to reinvent themselves,” Lusksaid.
The trails have undoubtedly changed things for Dave Preston, the former coal miner. In 1991, he went back to work underground and continued in the mines until 2013, when they laid him off again. It was then that he heard about a job as an ATV guide. He grew up in a family that “knew how to eat off the land,” and taking tourists out into the woods now is something that makes him proud, able to show off the countryside where he was raised. “It’s my cup of tea,” he said. “I grew up in the outdoors.”
While some might look down onmotor-powered ATV recreation on public lands, Preston explains that the vehiclesare the only way to access terrain that few would otherwise see. The trails are officially multi-use, but they are far too muddy in the winter and spring and too dusty in the summerfor other modes of transportation. Even fat-tire bikes would get bogged down in the ruts or struggle on the inclines, and all of it would be laborious for hikers or horses.
On a trip into the woods of Mercer County earlier this year, Preston bombed through mud pits and maneuvered knobby wheels through ruts running with mud. His machine seemed unstoppable, and it easily forgedup steepinclines, charged over exposed rocks, and blasted down hillsides.
He took a couple zooms through a mud pit for photos. Then he made a precipitousdescent, followed the trail on a 90-degree turn, and stopped next to a near vertical hillside. Tucked between the roots of trees, he pointed out a cave the size of a kitchen window. A century ago, miners had drilled there to reach a small cut of coal. Preston picked up a chunk of black rock they left behind;a streak of soot remained on his fingers after he tossed it back.
On the way out, the trail passed by a graveyard miles from anything, just perched atop a bald nob. Preston explained that his ancestors used to bury their dead out here in unofficial graves found along these trails, markers to a civilization that’s moved on.