Beauty Mountain - BLInspirations

Note: This post is one of a series about our visit to New River Gorge and Bridge in late October 2018. Unfortunately, there was not a lot of color in the trees then. For details of the New River National River and links to other posts, please see New River Gorge and Bridge (Overview).

Beauty Mountain is not a mountain but an unbroken stretch of sandstone cliffs running along the rim of the New River Gorge, east of Fayetteville, West Virginia. The Beauty Mountain Trail consists of multiple paths that generally follow the cliffs’ edge. There are some extraordinary overlooks along the Beauty Mountain Trail overlooking the gorge and the best is Ram’s Head overlook, about 3/4 mile from the pull-offs on Beauty Mountain Road. Although the cliffs are located within the boundaries of the New River Gorge National River, the Beauty Mountain Trail is not maintained by the park.

Most of the directions we found for locating Beauty Mountain Trail are incomplete or incorrect (possibly because some road signs are missing or roads have been renamed). We drove around trying to find it and eventually discovered it by accident when we were backtracking our route. To help others, we’ve documented accurate directions at https://blinspirations.com/beauty-mountain-trail/. Since Beverly wasn’t up to walking to Ram’s Head overlook at that time, I did not go that far and only took a few pictures from overlooks closer to the pull-off.

In the featured image and in several of the images in the Additional Photos gallery, there is a road running parallel to the river on the left side and the railroad is on the right side. In the panorama, a power line right-of-way through the trees is visible – it starts at the bottom of the gorge, curves through the forest, and goes over the mountaintop at the center of the picture.