100 free New River Gorge National Park trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This New River Gorge National Park trivia quiz covers the West Virginia park that was a national river from 1978 until Congress made it America's newest national park at the end of 2020. It ranges across the New River Gorge Bridge and its once-a-year Bridge Day, the class V whitewater of the Lower Gorge, the Nuttall sandstone cliffs that make it an East Coast climbing mecca, and the strange facts about a 'New' river that is one of the oldest on Earth and flows north. There is plenty of history in the hollows too: the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway that opened the gorge in 1873, the smokeless-coal company towns like Nuttallburg (where Henry Ford once owned the mine) and Kay Moor, the near-ghost town of Thurmond with its five residents, and the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster just downstream. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one, so it works for a rafting-trip car game or a serious park-nerd challenge. Every answer was checked against a reference page and each question carries its citation. If you enjoy it, try our Great Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah and US National Parks quizzes next.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01With over 1,400 established routes, the gorge is one of the East Coast's top spots for which sport?
Rock climbing
Almost every route is a single pitch of 30 to 120 feet on the hard rock band just below the rim.
Q 02Commercial outfitters run trips down the Lower Gorge from April through October doing what?
Whitewater rafting
The upper river is gentler, with class I to III water suited to canoeing.
Q 03New River Gorge National Park and Preserve is in which U.S. state?
West Virginia
It runs 53 miles down the gorge from just below Hinton to a state park near Ansted.
Q 04Which mountain system does the gorge cut through?
Appalachians
It is billed as the longest and deepest river gorge in that entire range, with more than 1,000 feet of rock exposed from rim to river.
Q 05In what year was the area redesignated from a national river to a national park and preserve?
2020
The change rode along inside a giant year-end spending bill rather than passing as a standalone park law.
Q 06Which president signed the 1978 law that first protected the gorge as a national river?
Jimmy Carter
The grassroots coalition behind it had first come together to stop a pumped-storage dam proposed for the river far upstream on the state line.
Q 07Roughly how much of the old national river became a hunting-free national park in 2020, the rest becoming preserve?
Less than 10%
That split (7,021 acres of park against 65,165 of preserve) is why the official name carries both words.
Q 08Roughly how far along the gorge does the park stretch?
53 miles
Two visitor centres stay open all year, while two more, including the old railroad depot, are seasonal.
Q 09Which town sits closest to the famous bridge over the gorge?
Fayetteville
Before the bridge, the only crossing of the gorge itself was the one-lane Fayette Station Bridge far below.
Q 10What type of bridge is the New River Gorge Bridge?
Steel arch
Its 1,700-foot arch was the longest single-span arch in the world for 26 years and is still the longest outside China.
Q 11How far above the river is the bridge's roadway?
876 feet
When it opened in 1977 it was the world's highest bridge carrying a regular road, a title China's Liuguanghe Bridge took in 2001.
Q 12In what year was the New River Gorge Bridge completed?
1977
It cut the drive from one rim of the gorge to the other from about 45 minutes to 45 seconds.
Q 13Which U.S. highway crosses the New River Gorge Bridge?
U.S. Route 19
Corridor L was built to link the state turnpike with I-79 and to open the struggling coal country to tourists.
The bridge is built from which weathering steel that forms its own rust-coloured protective skin?
Q 21In what year did Burton Ervin, 'father of Bridge Day', make the first parachute jump from the bridge?
1979
He jumped at night with a conventional parachute and more than 200 people watching; a plaque at the bridge marks the spot.
Q 22Roughly how many BASE jumpers take part in a typical Bridge Day?
About 400
Estimates put the whole event's crowd at around 100,000 people, in a county seat of a few thousand.
Q 23Guided 'Bridge Walk' tours use what feature running the length of the bridge under the roadway?
A two-foot-wide catwalk
It was built for inspections, and tour guests clip into safety rigging for the quarter-mile walk.
COR-TEN
One headache was making sure the weld points weathered at the same rate as the rest of the steel.
Q 15Roughly how much did the bridge cost to build?
$37 million
That was about $4 million over bid, with the federal government covering 70 percent of the funding.
Q 16Which engineering firm designed the New River Gorge Bridge?
Michael Baker Company
U.S. Steel's American Bridge Division did the building, the same outfit behind the Golden Gate's steelwork.
Q 17The bridge appears as a location in which post-apocalyptic video game?
Fallout 76
The bridge also had a real-world starring turn on the 2005 state quarter and in the 2002 film Steal.
Q 18Bridge Day, when the bridge closes to traffic and opens to BASE jumpers, falls on which day each year?
Third Saturday in October
It is one of the very few sanctioned exceptions to the general ban on BASE jumping anywhere in the National Park System.
Q 19In what year was the first Bridge Day held?
1980
It has been skipped only three times since: 2001 after the September 11 attacks, and 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic.
Q 20Which activity was banned at Bridge Day from 1994 because it took too long to reel people back up?
Bungee jumping
In 1992 New Zealander Chris Allum had bungeed 823 feet from the span, a record for a jump from a fixed structure, stopping about 40 feet above the water.
Q 24Despite its name, the New River is notable for being what?
One of the oldest rivers on Earth
It may have held roughly its present course for at least 65 million years, though the popular 'second oldest in the world' claim is disputed by the state geological survey.
Q 25Unusually for an eastern U.S. river, in which general direction does the New River flow?
North
It rises in the Blue Ridge and crosses Virginia before carving its gorge through the Appalachian Plateau.
Q 26In which state does the New River begin?
North Carolina
Its North Fork and South Fork meet near Boone, and the whole river runs about 360 miles.
Q 27The New River joins the Gauley River to form which river?
Kanawha
The Kanawha then reaches the Ohio at Point Pleasant, so New River water eventually flows down the Mississippi.
Q 28What do geologists call the far longer ancestral river the New River once belonged to, before glaciers buried it?
The Teays
When ice buried the old channel, its waters were diverted into rivers the glaciers created, including today's Ohio.
Q 29Which Virginia colonel behind the 1671 Batts and Fallam expedition gave the New River its old name?
Abraham Wood
The 1671 expedition he sent was the first recorded exploration of the river.
Q 30Which frontier woman famously traversed the gorge in 1755 while escaping Shawnee captivity?
Mary Draper Ingles
A crossing near the park's southern welcome centre still bears her name.