Hello from Parsons, West Virginia.
Since my last update I’ve tackled the steepest and toughest part of my West Virginia trip. One more day of bad hills, and I’m rolling downhill toward the Ohio River.
The story of the past few days is hills. Big hills.
After leaving Keyser Friday morning I walked uphill most of the day, until a kindly fellow named Jack Cooper gave me a cold beer and pointed me to a wonderful campsite next to a flowing rocky stream in a place called Greenland Gap.
The following day was all uphill, and I finally stopped halfway up the front range of the Allegheny Mountains on the way to the Dolly Sods Wilderness. The campsite was a rare flat spot on the way up the mountain, near a clear spring-fed stream. Perfect! Except unseen in
the woods a few hundred yards away was a guy who played country music on his truck radio at an ear-splitting volume until midnight. By the end of the evening I was silently begging the guy to change radio station to Rush Limbaugh!
The following day I climbed the rest of the way up the 4000-foot elevation to the spectacular Dolly Sods Wildnerness area, from which I could see beautiful mountains in all directions. Decended to about 2,500 feet by the end of the day and camped next to a fast-moving river and waited for a thunderstorm that never materialized.
Climbed all the next day, back up to 3,700+ feet, stopping at the Blackwater Falls State Park.
Yesterday walked along a high ridge top for about five hours, never seeing a soul. The valleys on either side of the ridge were so deep I could not see bottom, but heard the rush of streams plunging down the the valleys below. Walked downhill for two hours, descending to a river valley that took me to Parsons.
Today I climb over one last set of steep hills, then will encounter rolling ups and downs (more down than up) on the way to Ohio.
Am writing this from the offices of The Parsons Advocate, a thriving 3,500-circ weekly. The Advocate story is a great one. The paper was purchased about three years ago by a young couple, Chris and Kelly Stadelman. Chris is a West Virginia native who had worked his way up
to managing editor of the Charleston Daily Mail, and then a big job in the Columbus, Oh., AP bureau, but he and his wife wanted to own their own business. They got a bank loan and bought The Parsons Advocate in August of 2004. Their care and hard work has produced circulation growth and ad revenue growth of about 25 percent in the last three years, 10 percent in the last year alone.
It’s hard work. Chris and Kelly and two other employees comprise the whole staff, and Chris told me over breakfast that he has now whittled his workweek down from 80 hours to about 65. But he and Kelly still have at least some free time to play a little golf and get to Pittsburgh to see the occasional Pirates’ game. And they are paying off their bank loan ahead of schedule.
The Advocate‘s revenues come from Parsons, where there are few competitors for ad dollars, and no big box stores. Readership remains above 70 percent and ad revenues are not prey to the Internet.
The community has responded enthusiastically to the attractive young newspaper proprietors. The Chamber of Commerce just voted them “Businesspeople of the Year” and they have become fixtures in the community they have come to love.
My next stop should be Phillipi, where I’ll land in a couple of days.
