Geology of New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, West Virginia

Part of the NPS Geodiversity Atlas, which describes each park's significant geologic features and processes. Geodiversity is the full variety of a park's natural geologic resources — rocks, minerals, sediments, fossils, landforms and physical processes — and its soils. The atlas comes from the NPS Geologic Resources Inventory.

The park's Geologic Resources Inventory report. Image from the NPS's page.

The park

New River Gorge National Park and Preserve runs more than 85 km (53 mi) along the free-flowing New River, from Hawks Nest State Park near Cotton Hill upstream to the town of Hinton, across Fayette, Raleigh and Summers Counties in southern West Virginia. Made a Park Service unit on November 10, 1978, it became a national park on January 20, 2021, and covers about 29,212 hectares (72,186 acres) of natural, scenic, historic and recreational landscape.

• The river — rugged whitewater, and among the oldest rivers on the continent.
• The gorge — the deepest and longest in the Appalachian Mountains, strung with rapids: Grassy Shoals, Quinnimont, Silo, Surprise, Lower and Upper Railroad, Keeneys, Double Z, Dudleys Dip, Greyhound, Millers Folly and Fayette Station.
• The people — the land carries its human story too, from the railroads that opened the rugged, isolated country in 1872 to the coal mines, towns, settlements and bridges that followed.

The rocks

The bedrock is Mississippian and Pennsylvanian sedimentary rock — the Bluefield, Hinton, Princeton, Bluestone, Pocahontas, New River, Kanawha and Allegheny Formations — laid down by ancient rivers and along shorelines in the Appalachian basin. That basin began to form during the Taconic orogeny, the first of the mountain-building events that eventually raised the Appalachians.

As the land rose, the New River cut down through it, making a landscape of rock-rimmed gorges, waterfalls, rapids, vistas and forested slopes. The gorge exposes up to 975 m (3,200 ft) of sandstone and shale. In the lower gorge, the river slices through the hard Nuttall Sandstone Member of the New River Formation, an unusual sandstone of almost pure quartz.

Geologic map of the park, from the Geologic Resources Inventory. NPS.

Maps and reports

The park lies in the Appalachian Plateaus province, sharing its geologic history with a region well beyond its borders. Its Geologic Resources Inventory maps, reports and posters are in the NPS DataStore, and a Soil Resources Inventory project has been completed. More: the park's pages on geology, geologic formations and rivers and streams.

New River Gorge from the Main Overlook at Grandview. Image from the NPS's page.

Sources

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