Geology of Bluestone National Scenic River, West Virginia

The Bluestone gorge. NPS.

The NPS Geodiversity Atlas, a product of the Geologic Resources Inventory, summarizes each park's rocks, landforms and soils to support education, geoconservation and management. This is its page for Bluestone National Scenic River.

The park

• Where: a 17 km (11 mi) stretch of the Bluestone River in Mercer and Summers Counties, southwestern West Virginia.
• Size and date: 1,744 hectares (4,310 acres) of the southern Appalachians, authorized as an NPS unit on October 26, 1988, for its scenery, geology, recreation, fish and wildlife.
• History: its cultural resources span thousands of years — American Indians, early pioneers, and the industrial transformation brought by coal mining.

Geologic setting

• The rocks: Mississippian (about 360–325 million years old) and Pennsylvanian (about 325–300 million years old) formations — among them the Bluefield, Hinton, Princeton, Bluestone and Pocahontas — laid down in river-to-nearshore settings of the Appalachian basin.
• The basin: it began forming in the Taconic Orogeny, the first of the mountain-building events that raised the Appalachian Mountains.
• The name: the river is named for the deep-blue limestone streambed visible upstream of Bluestone Dam, where it meets the New River.
• The gorge: the river has carved a rugged gorge up to 300 m (1,000 ft) deep, with waterfalls, rapids, forested slopes and sweeping views.

Bluestone belongs to the Appalachian Plateaus Physiographic Province, sharing its geologic history and some formations with a far larger region.

The Geologic Resources Inventory's bedrock geologic map of the park. NPS.

Maps and reports

The Geologic Resources Inventory has produced digital geologic maps and reports for more than 270 natural resource parks:

Find Bluestone's on the NPS DataStore. An NPS Soil Resources Inventory has also been completed (DataStore).

The Bluestone River. NPS.

More

Natural features and ecosystems · photo gallery · park home · NPS geologic time · regional geology · West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey

Sources

Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Bluestone National Scenic River, West Virginia," National Park Service, citing Anderson (2017) and Thornberry-Ehrlich (2017); a work of the United States government in the public domain.