View from Wild Rock Canyon
Wild Rock Canyon, WV Campaign
The Back Story - especially for Arc Donors
For those of you who have been supporting the Arc for any portion of our 30-year history, and for anyone who is curious, we want to share with you the deeper story of why - just this year - we were emboldened to look across the Ohio River into West Virginia. It’s not as sudden as it might first appear. Here’s the tale.
Even in our nonprofit’s earliest years, we were dedicated to interpreting and preserving the Great Eastern Forest of North America. Our official mission statement, written over a decade or so, goes like this:
Mission: The Arc of Appalachia protects the rich diversity of life within North America’s Great Eastern Forest.
Work:
We acquire and steward wildlands in the heartland of Appalachia.
We create sanctuaries where people can connect with the natural world.
We teach about our forest heritage to inspire a global conservation ethic.
We honor, in our work and our teachings, our Native American legacies.
Our Appalachian Forest Museum, established 20 years ago, was also dedicated to interpreting this immense forest, one of the finest remaining representatives of forest in the planet’s temperate forest biome. From the beginning, our focus was regional.
The Mother Forest. Since our origin, we have been committed to preserving the beauty, balance, and biodiversity of the Eastern Heartland Forest (sometimes called the Mother Forest), where the Eastern Forest’s highest diversity is expressed. In the map at left, the Mother Forest region is illustrated in lime green. It extends south from western PA, through southern Ohio and West Virginia, and terminates in central Tennessee and northern Alabama. The legendary epicenter of this Forest Heartland is the Great Smoky Mountains, the location of the largest old-growth forest still standing in the East.
The Arc’s Corner of the Mother Forest. The Arc began in southern Appalachian Ohio because, first of all, that’s where our nonprofit founders resided, and secondly, where they already had established conservation networks that are so essential to a fledging land trust.
Southern Ohio was a splendid place to work, in any case, because not only is it a part of the Mother Forest, but Ohio offers an unusual wealth of funding opportunities for land preservation, including Clean Ohio and the Ohio EPA’s WRRSP. These grants, plus generous private donations, helped the Arc of Appalachia grow from zero acres to 11,000, In recent times. our growth has been exponential. We’ve doubled the acreage of our preserves, for example, in just the last five years.
Scioto County is the home of two of our largest preserves: Tremper Mound (photo left) and Simon Farm. Here the Arc has established a particularly productive and fulfilling partnership with commissioners and trustees.
It looked like nothing was going to stand in the way of the Arc’s explosive growth. That is, until the spring of 2024 when after three years of a dizzyingly paced real estate market and spiraling prices, we went into a temporary but serious post-COVID slump. Suddenly, there were few rural lands on the market to even look at. Those we DID investigate were not only marginal in health (VERY marginal), but their asking prices still reflected peak COVID values. Clearly, other than a dozen relatively small projects we took on, we had to wait this season out for larger projects. We had no choice but to wait for better properties to reveal themselves.
At the same time, as luck would have it, grant funding became much more elusive. Because the Arc needs local political endorsements to be eligible to apply for our primary grant, Clean Ohio, and because, by the nature of being a nonprofit, any land we buy gets taken out of the tax base, it was getting increasingly challenging to get endorsements from some of our commissioners and townships.
And that is why we looked across the river. For the first time in our history, we had enough leisure time to follow our national inclination to look outside our state boundaries. Our initial instincts would have led us into Kentucky, a state that is right across the river from several of our established preserves, and that is what would have happened had there not been the occurrence of an unexpected event.
In that very same spring of 2024, our land-buying efforts happened to expand eastward and reached Gallia County for the first time. There, when we looked across the Ohio River from Gallipolis, instead of seeing the familiar hills of Kentucky, we found ourselves confronting the shoreline of West Virginia. West Virginia!
West Virginia boasts the most outstanding forests in the Eastern Forest Heartland. With its low population, large-acreage listings, and AMAZING real estate prices, our attention was riveted. Turns out West Virginia is the third most forested state in the nation! Its forest density is just under `80%! Nowhere else in the Eastern Forest Heartland could our donor dollars go farther. And, West Virginia’s forests were more intact, healthier, and more affordable than anything we had ever seen.
Not only did we find several 500-acre tracts for sale in West Virginia, but our eyes soon fell on the 1200-acre Wild Rock Canyon real estate listing, a parcel size that was large even by West Virginia’s standards.
New River Gorge National Park
lies just 12 miles east of Wild Rock Canyon
What followed next was weeks of due diligence and cautionary assessment. When we visited Wild Rock Canyon, we had two major concerns - was the forest of high quality, and could we manage the property from afar?
In Ohio, most of our preserves require a lot of stewardship. We typically install public trails and parking lots that need to be maintained weekly, and we inevitably assume the decades-long task of invasive plant removal, We usually inherit large refuse piles from earlier homesteads that need to be cleaned up. ATV intrusions are common and it takes a lot of community building and installations of gates and signs to stop this traffic (usually repeatedly because the gates and signs, at least at first, keep getting torn down). All of these activities take an immense amount of our staff's time and represent a considerable budgetary expense. If Wild Rock Canyon didn’t prove to be a stellar property, it would not be prudent for us to invest in property so far from our headquarters. The preserve would have to be easily secured, show no signs of ATV or other incursions, and have low levels of invasive plants.
Remarkably, our visit to Wild Rock Canyon ticked off every point. Indeed, we established to our satisfaction that Wild Rock Canyon WAS a superior, highly intact forest community. It lay in a fairly affluent conservation-minded county and showed no signs of trespassing or vandalism. We knew it could easily be maintained at a distance and very little cost.
Map of Wild Rock Canyon showing the deep ravine of Renick Creek running through the middle of it.
Lastly, we needed to check in with our West Virginia colleagues. If we were going to consider expanding our work into West Virginia, we wanted to first receive the blessings from our West Virginia conservation colleagues, folks like West Virginia Land Trust, the Nature Conservancy, New River Conservancy, and The Conservation Fund.
This task has to be one of the most enjoyable parts of our jobs - meeting others in the conservation field and making new friends. The professionals we spoke to in West Virginia were incredibly friendly and welcoming. They shared their angst that so many stellar properties keep coming up for sale each year that they had insufficient funds to buy and protect. They encouraged us to cross over the Ohio River, work in collaboration alongside them, and bring our Ohio (and beyond) dollars with us. They said, “Join us. There is much good work that here needs to be done.”
It was then that our negotiations for Wild Rock Canyon began in earnest. First, we had to determine the market value of the property so that we didn’t offer above appraised value, We also had to perform a title search. After a few back-and-forths in our negotiation, we made what had to be our final offer. Days later, after we gave up any hope that it would be accepted, we received a brief text message from our West Virginia realtor. He wrote just four simple words, “Welcome to West Virginia.”
We knew immediately that our offer had been accepted.