Qualla: Hawks Nest State Park

Hawks Nest State Park: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit jpmueller99 from Shenandoah Valley of VA, USA, CC BY 2.0. Stand at the overlook at Hawks Nest State Park and you are looking down 750 feet into one of the most beautiful canyons in the eastern United States. The New River curves through the gorge below. The forest climbs the opposite ridge in waves of hardwood. The view is exactly the kind of thing the New Deal built American state parks to celebrate. But there is something else under that ridge, something the brochures handle carefully: the Hawks Nest Tunnel, a three-mile bore drilled through Gauley Mountain between 1930 and 1935 to divert the river to a hydroelectric plant. The men who dug it - most of them Black, most of them migrant - died by the hundreds from silicosis. Their graves are scattered across these hills. The view is real. So is the cost of getting to it.

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Image: jpmueller99 from Shenandoah Valley of VA, USA | CC BY 2.0

Hawks Nest State Park: The Overlook and the Lodge

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A. E. Crane, U.S. Department of Transportation, Public domain. The original visitor building at Hawks Nest, now a gift shop and museum, was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps as a New Deal project in the mid-1930s - around the same time the tunnel was being completed underneath the park. The CCC-era stonework and design have aged into ...

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Image: A. E. Crane, U.S. Department of Transportation | Public domain

Hawks Nest State Park: The Tunnel Disaster

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Between 1930 and 1935, the Rinehart and Dennis Company - contracted by Union Carbide's New Kanawha Power Company - bored a three-mile tunnel under Gauley Mountain to divert water from the New River to a downstream hydroelectric plant. The rock they drilled through was nearly pure...

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Image: Public domain

Hawks Nest State Park: The Park as It Is

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NKS22, Public domain. The state park that grew up on the rim above the tunnel offers more than the overlook. Hiking trails wind through 370 acres of hardwood forest. The Hawks Nest Rail Trail, 1.8 miles of converted rail bed, follows an old industrial track. A swimming pool and picnic area serve summe...

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Image: NKS22 | Public domain

Hawks Nest State Park: Two Stories on One Ridge

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Randomstaplers, CC BY-SA 4.0. The official park brochures focus on the view, and the view is genuinely spectacular - the New River cutting north toward the Gauley confluence, the gorge falling away beneath your feet, the dark spruce on the far ridge in October. The harder story is the one that lives under the...

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Image: Randomstaplers | CC BY-SA 4.0