Outdoor Recreation and Rural Transitions in Central Appalachia: Revisiting the Economic Impact of Rock Climbing in Kentucky’s Red River Gorge

Kentucky’s Red River Gorge is a popular rock climbing destination located amid longstanding poverty in America’s Central Appalachian region. Climbing represents an important part of the outdoor recreation economy and may provide one alternative to mono-economic extractive industry dependency in this region. This study examines the economic impact of climbing in the Red utilizing an online survey of rock climbers and economic impact methodology. The survey examines expenditures in lodging, food purchases, travel, retail purchases, and services. The survey also collected visitation and demographics data. The authors estimate climbers spend $8.7 million annually (up from $3.8 million in 2015) and support over 100 jobs in some of the poorest counties in the region and nation. The study reiterates previous findings indicating climbers are well-educated with incomes higher than those typically found in this region. The study’s results help reframe the value of climbing’s economic impact in rural transitional economies throughout Central Appalachia. These findings also raise policy implications regarding public land access and reducing climber environmental impacts on public lands.

“They all have a different vibe”: A rhythmanalysis of climbing mobilities and the Red River Gorge as place

This article integrates a mobilities perspective and Lefebvre’s notion of rhythmanalysis as a means to interrogate place as an entanglement of mobilities, moorings, and rhythms. By investigating one popular rock climbing destination, this article demonstrates that mobilities invite encounters with and enactments of place such that travel rhythms, everyday rhythms, and natural rhythms coalesce, interrupt, and even emerge anew. Focusing on lifestyle rock climbers (a particular type of lifestyle mobility dedicated to the pursuit of climbing) and climbing events provides evidence for the ways informational and physical mobilities contribute to and even regiment rock climbing travel rhythms, while the everyday rhythms of place illustrate embodiment as crucial to the enfolding of rhythm and mobilities. Building from Lefebvre’s theory of rhythm and Edensor and Holloway’s re-articulation of its potential for mobilities studies, this article emphasizes the ongoing relationality of embodied mobilities and bodily rhythms, seasonal rhythms and informational mobilities, collective mobilities and institutional rhythms.

“I’m a Red River local”: Rock climbing mobilities and community hospitalities

With individuals continually on the move, mobility fosters constellations of places at which individuals collectively moor and perform community. By focusing on one climbing destination—the Red River Gorge—this article works across scales to highlight the spatial politics of mobilizing hospitality. In so doing, it summarizes the ways hosting/guesting thresholds dissolve with the growth of particular rock climbing–associated infrastructures and moves to examine the ways climbers’ performances of community result in the (semi-)privatization of public space and attempts at localization. Furthermore, this article highlights the ways mobility is employed to maintain a political voice from afar, as well as to forge “local” identities with The Red as place with distinct subcultural (in)hospitality practices. Hospitality practices affirm power relations, and they communicate who is at “home” and who has the power in a particular space to extend hospitality. The decision to extend hospitality is not simply the difference between an ethical encounter and a conditional one; it takes place in the very performance of identity. Thus, integrating a mobilities perspective into hospitality studies further illuminates the spatial politics that are at play in an ethics of hospitality.