Coopers Rock State Forest

The signature view at Coopers Rock looks out over the Cheat River gorge, a deep, forested canyon the river has cut through the plateau over long stretches of time. From the stone-railed ledge you can trace the river far below and follow the ridgelines rolling east toward the mountains. In autumn the whole gorge lights up in red and gold, and the overlook fills with photographers.

The rock itself is Pottsville sandstone, a hard, coarse stone laid down some 300 million years ago when this region lay near a shallow sea and vast river deltas. That same durable sandstone is what forms the ledges you stand on and the great boulders scattered through the surrounding woods, left standing as softer rock around them wore away.

Away from the overlook, Coopers Rock is a playground of stone. Enormous sandstone blocks, some the size of small houses, lie jumbled through the forest, split by cracks and crowned with ferns and moss. Trails wind among them, and the area has become one of the best-known bouldering and rock-climbing destinations in the region, drawing climbers to its steep faces and overhangs.

The forest holds many miles of hiking and mountain-biking trails, from gentle rambles near the overlook to rugged routes down toward the river and out to quieter viewpoints. Hemlock, rhododendron, and mountain laurel line the paths, and in early summer the laurel and rhododendron bloom turns the understory white and pink.

Deep in the forest stand the stone ruins of the Henry Clay Iron Furnace, built in the 1830s to smelt local iron ore using charcoal made from the surrounding timber. For a few decades furnaces like this one worked the ridges of northern West Virginia, and the woods you now hike through were cut and burned to feed them.

The furnace fell silent as richer iron regions and new technology overtook it, and the forest grew back over the scars. Today the moss-covered stack, reachable by trail, is a quiet monument to that vanished industry, and a reminder that Appalachia's mountains have long been mined and worked as well as admired.

The plateau country here was the ancestral homeland and shared hunting ground of the Shawnee, the Lenape, and other peoples, whose descendant nations continue today beyond West Virginia. Long after them, the forest recovered from its iron-furnace era into the hemlock-and-hardwood woodland you walk through now, home to white-tailed deer, black bear, wild turkey, and a chorus of songbirds and woodpeckers.

Each season brings its own character. Spring greens the understory and floods the trails with wildflowers and blooming laurel. Summer is cool and shaded on the plateau even when the valleys swelter. Fall is the marquee season, when the gorge blazes with color. Winter turns the boulders and hemlocks silent and snow-dusted, and the overlook, though cold, is at its most stark and beautiful.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.