Norton Virginia Is Reshaping How Appalachian Cities Build an Outdoor Economy
I’ve made the early morning trip from Johnson City, up route 23 to Norton, Virginia many times in the past few years.
Once you pass through Big Stone Gap, VA, the road gets steeper and the view suddenly opens up, displaying an ancient-looking valley below with jagged limestone cliffs towering hundreds of feet above.
There is an overlook beside the interstate there, and if you are lucky enough, you can catch the morning fog slowly moving out of the valley below. It’s an almost spiritual experience that I hope everyone gets to see at least once in their lifetime.
I like to think that Norton is welcoming visitors before they even get into town.
Norton is settled just underneath the nose of High Knob, the tallest mountain in the Cumberland range and the inspiration for the High Knob Outdoor Festival, one of the most unique festivals in Appalachia that I’ve had the chance of attending.
The Mountain Above Town
In the past few years, Norton has bloomed into an outdoor town, with High Knob and the surrounding Jefferson National Forest serving as huge draws for visitors. High Knob itself is hard to overstate. At 4,223 feet, it’s the tallest point in the Cumberland Mountains and one of the widest single mountains anywhere in the southern Appalachians, spanning more than 13 miles across at its base. It sits inside roughly 90,000 acres of public land in the Jefferson National Forest’s Clinch Ranger District, and between High Knob and Norton’s own Flag Rock Recreation Area, the region now offers more than 100 miles of hiking trail, a mountain bike system that’s already past 10 miles and aiming for 30, a 15.6-mile backcountry route in the Chief Benge Scout Trail, a stocked mountain lake, bouldering and climbing routes, and paddling access to some of the last undammed headwaters left in the state. It’s also one of the most biodiverse patches of ground in Appalachia, with more than 20 species of salamander, neotropical songbirds that normally nest much farther north, and underneath it all, the Omega Cave System, the deepest known cave system east of the Mississippi.
High Knob Outdoor Fest
Every August, downtown Norton hosts the High Knob Outdoor Fest, and this year marks its ninth run, with the main week stretching from August 8th through the 15th and closing out with a full evening downtown from 4 to 9 p.m. on that final Saturday. I’ve made the trip up for it more than once now, and each time it’s felt different from the other regional festivals I’ve been to.
Across the week, the schedule covers a genuine range of ground. There’s the Flag Rock 5K Trail Run and the Mountain Bike Poker Ride, both run on the same trails locals ride on a normal weekend. There are guided group hikes up High Knob, a storytelling workshop and performance, a fireside evening billed as Appalachian Haunts, a stargazing program out at Natural Tunnel, a barn quilt workshop, a bouldering clinic, and an outdoor yoga class. And downtown itself fills in with outdoor and artisan vendors, food trucks, a beer garden, and live music on the last day of the festival. You can find the full festival lineup here if you want to see everything on offer.
Rebuilding Main Street
The vibe of Norton matches the energy of the festival too. In 2020, the city wrapped up a three-year, $2.3 million revitalization project (new building facades, sidewalks, trees, and streetlights styled after the ones Norton had back in the 1940s), all aimed at pulling businesses back to Main Street and welcoming visitors downtown. Former City Manager Fred Ramey has talked openly about why the city took this on. As the coal economy slowly moved away, he said, it was “a gut punch. We all had to step back and re-evaluate where we were going to go.” I believe Norton found its answer on the mountain that had been sitting above downtown the entire time.
A former auto dealership downtown was redeveloped into a farmers market as part of that same push. Businesses have kept filling in since. Lincoln Road Coffee Lounge now anchors part of downtown with house roasted coffee and baked goods, and several restaurants, shops, a comics and games store, and a boutique have all landed on Main Street recently as well. Norton also routes a 10K, a half marathon, and a 100-mile ultramarathon between downtown and Flag Rock Park each year, and it’s the clearest sign of how tightly the trail system and the storefronts are meant to work together. The city’s High Knob Destination Center, built with support from the Appalachian Regional Commission, exists specifically to keep tying it all together. One of the people behind that effort, Idalina Walker, put it this way: “We are truly embracing a concept where, as a resident, your garage or back door is also your trail head.”
The Woodbooger
Downtown has turned into a destination for visitors, with a genuinely outdoorsy feel that plenty of towns “claim” without having the infrastructure to back it up. The most unique part of its downtown atmosphere is the Woodbooger. After several sightings in the area, it caught the attention of Animal Planet, which filmed an episode of its show Finding Bigfoot there a few years later. Instead of dismissing it, Norton decided to embrace the attention in the best way possible. The city built a steel Bigfoot statue at Flag Rock Overlook (one of my favorites to visit), and in 2014 the city council passed an actual resolution declaring Norton a “Sasquatch/Bigfoot/Woodbooger Sanctuary.” The first time I heard about it, I laughed. However, it has since become a quirky part of Norton, and the community has adopted it too, including a restaurant named the “Woodbooger Grill” and an annual Woodbooger-themed festival that attracts people from all over the region.
What Comes Next
Norton spent years fixing up downtown, cutting trail through Flag Rock and High Knob, and building a festival that pulls both of those efforts into the same week, and the result is a town where you can walk from a mountain bike trail to a coffee shop to a downtown stage without feeling like you’ve crossed into a different place.
Plenty of towns across Appalachia are working through what comes after coal right now, and I believe that Norton is a shining example of what happens when you embrace the outdoor rec economy and continue to build community around it.