Emergency Campaign to Save Wild Rock Canyon

The Arc of Appalachia is announcing a Special Emergency Land Campaign to save the 1200-acre forest wilderness of Wild Rock Canyon in West Virginia!

Please watch the film — as it explains everything — then make a pledge or donation as soon as you can so we have enough financial support by August 15th to stay in contract. We will need to raise $1.5 million by Sept 9, 2024, to make it to the closing table. You can buy one acre of Wild Rock Canyon for only $1200! Please take action and pass this on!

For more information and how you can help visit arcofappalachia.org/wild.

The discovery of Wild Rock Canyon
– at $1200/acre, it is 1/3 the price of rural Ohio lands –

For the last 30 years, here at the Arc of Appalachia, we have been focused on buying and preserving forests in southern Appalachian Ohio, where we have assembled 28 preserves and manage 11,000 acres of natural areas. We always assumed that some day they would cross over the Ohio River into Kentucky and expand our work there — across from many of our established preserves — but the Ohio canvas offered so many worthy projects that we were kept too busy to look further afield. But then, 2024 arrived, and with it came a wave of changes. For the previous three years, we had been experiencing a real estate market heavily impacted by COVID, with spiraling prices, soaring sales, and a bounty of worthy projects. But suddenly, there was very little land on the market to even look at. What land there was, was marginal in quality, and, in our humble opinion, overpriced.

Although we are still managing to work on a dozen new land projects this year, they are relatively small in size, and this gave us just enough leisure time to follow our long-held plan to look beyond our state borders in our quest to save the most intact forests remaining in the heartland of Appalachia. And meanwhile, our eastward drift across southern Ohio and up the Ohio River took us to the shoreline of West Virginia for the very first time. This led us to look at West Virginia’s real estate listings, and here we discovered that Wild Rock Canyon was for sale.

We had to see the property for ourselves, and when we did, we were deeply impressed. Never have we ever seen a forest for sale that was so large, so affordable in price, so intact (with few invasive plants), and so drenched with wildlife. Did we mention bears? Wild Rock Canyon has a stunning number of bears!!!

United by water

Wild Rock Canyon lies in the very same greater watershed as all of our Ohio preserves — the Ohio River. If you sat on top of the ridge at our Ohio River Bluffs Preserve outside Manchester, Ohio, you could watch the waters of Wild Rock Canyon drift by. Wild Rock Canyon’s two tributaries, Pigeon Hollow and Renick Creek are contained almost entirely within the boundaries of the property. If we succeed in buying Wild Rock Canyon, we will have preserved nearly the entirety of a major topographical feature, as you can see in the map of the property below. The canyon’s steep sides are 1,000 feet from ridge to canyon floor, and the property is so big it boasts 12 miles of boundaries.

Appalachian diversity at its best

A month ago we hosted a bioblitz at Wild Rock Canyon — attended by 16 Ohio research biologists and naturalists — to discern if the site was worthy enough to be saved. They seined creeks, set up mothing sheets, launched drones, inventoried birds and plants, looked for salamanders, set up mist nets for bats, and installed 18 game cams.

We saw multiple mother bears with cubs, heard several species of deep-forest warblers, found an endemic crayfish species, discovered synchronous fireflies, netted four species of bats, and found 15 species of amphibians, most of them salamanders. There were so many salamanders in this forest!! There is no better indicator that we were standing in an intact Appalachian forest.

In just one day and two nights of inventorying, we counted 640 species of plants and animals. That’s only a small fraction of what is there, but it is the highest species count of any one-day bioblitz we’ve ever hosted. These results confirmed Wild Rock Canyon as a high-quality preservation project.

West Virginia is the third most forested state in the entire nation

West Virginia has a forest cover density of just under 80%, compared to Ohio’s 31%. West Virginia ranks 39th in the nation in population — with only 1.7 million people in residence. For effective forest preservation and healthy intact forests, these two facts bode very good things.

West Virginia, hands down, offers the most splendid wildlands preservation opportunities in the heartland of the Eastern United States, and at the most affordable prices. It has been forecasted by our conservation colleagues in West Virginia that many of its largest parcels of forests — those owned by timber investors and coal companies — may be coming up for sale in the near future at affordable prices as a consequence of changing market conditions. We hope to be positioned and ready.

Expanding our capacity for wildlands protection

We can think of no better way to preserve beauty, balance, and biodiversity in the Appalachian heartland than to include West Virginia on the Arc of Appalachia’s work canvas, a canvas that would begin at the Appalachian Front and end at the Appalachian Mountains. We haven’t found a better “first footprint” for the Arc in West Virginia than the property of Wild Rock Canyon.

What is our highest vision? It is to one day steward a suite of preserves that stretch across the Appalachian heartland of Ohio AND West Virginia, representing the rich native forest community we share in common here in the Appalachian heartland.

One great Forest-State. If the boundaries of the states in our nation had been drawn on the basis of physiography instead of political history, southern Appalachian Ohio and West Virginia would have been one great forest-state all along, with the Ohio River running through the middle of it. We are eager to turn the Ohio River from a perceived boundary to a stepping stone and re-unite lands that are so naturally connected.

We believe this is the right time to cross the Ohio River and Wild Rock Canyon is the right reason to do it.

We need to raise $1.5 million before Sept 9, 2024, which will cover the sale price, closing costs, and survey.

Please, make a pledge or donation now — to help save this magnificent Appalachian forest.