Things to Do Outdoors in Huntington, West Virginia

The lake park that anchors the area

Most people looking for things to do outdoors in Huntington, WV end up at Beech Fork State Park first, and with reason: 3,981 acres wrapped around a 720-acre Corps reservoir, functioning as the main outdoor base for the Huntington area. The camping is the headline. The park has 275 campsites spread across four areas, 99 of them lakefront — better than a third of the sites with water in front of them — which makes it one of the largest campgrounds in the state park system. It is a well-serviced campground rather than a primitive one, and it takes RVs. Old Orchard and Lakeview stay open year-round, so a cold-weather trip here does not hinge on a seasonal opening date the way most West Virginia campgrounds do.

The lake is capped at 10 horsepower. That one rule sets the character of the place: 31 miles of shoreline with nothing throwing a wake across it, which is why the fishing and the flatwater paddling both work. The boat launch is open April to November, and there is no launch or usage fee. Rentals run a shorter window — Memorial Day to Labor Day, noon to 8 — so anyone visiting in April, May, October or November needs to bring a boat of their own. Park hours are 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. Beyond the water, the park lists hiking, disc golf and kayak fishing among its activities, which is enough to fill a weekend without driving anywhere else.

East Lynn Lake and the public land around it

East Lynn Lake is the second reservoir in reach, a 1,005-acre Corps lake in Wayne County with a strong bass and crappie fishery and very little traffic on it. It is one of the quieter big-water options in the southwest corner of the state, which is the whole argument for driving past a busier lake to get to it. East Fork Campground is the main Corps site here. If Beech Fork's campground is full over a holiday weekend — and with 275 sites it still fills — East Lynn is the alternative that keeps you on flatwater instead of sending you inland. Boating, flatwater paddling and kayak fishing are all on the list of what it is used for.

What surrounds the lake matters as much as the lake does. East Lynn Lake WMA wraps the reservoir in more than 23,000 acres of public hunting ground, an area more than twenty times the size of the water. Walkers are welcome on it, with one condition worth taking seriously: hunting seasons overlap the best autumn walking in West Virginia, and blaze orange on a WMA is not optional dress. The other practical warning is vegetative. Rhododendron and mountain laurel make leaving a trail here slow, scratchy work, so plan around the paths and old roads rather than through the understory, and treat a map and GPS as standard equipment rather than a precaution.

Cabwaylingo State Forest

Cabwaylingo State Forest is 8,123 acres in Wayne County, named for the four counties it borders, and among the least-visited units in the entire state system. The CCC built it out in the 1930s, and the rustic CCC cabins are still the main lodging — a different proposition from a lakeside site with a hookup. There is also a campground and primitive camping, plus a fire tower. Nothing here is engineered for volume, which is the point: on most days this is a forest where you can walk for hours under second-growth hardwood without having arranged in advance to be alone.

The listed activities are hiking, camping, hunting, fishing and birding, and the fishing includes trout — WVDNR stocks tributaries of Twelvepole Creek. Two things about chasing stocked trout in West Virginia. WVDNR posts each day's stockings by the end of that business day and does not release the schedule in advance, so there is no planning around a stocking truck; you check after the fact, or you fish the water on faith. And a trout stamp is required in addition to a fishing license on stocked trout water. Small mountain tributaries also run low and warm by late summer, which makes stocked trout a cool-weather proposition here.

Fishing the two reservoirs

Both lakes are warm-water fisheries, and both fall under WVDNR licensing and regulations, which apply statewide and run year-round. Beech Fork is a bass lake with unusually easy access: the 10 horsepower cap means a canoe or a small tiller boat is not out-gunned by anything else afloat, and a kayak angler can work the shoreline structure without fighting wakes all afternoon. East Lynn adds crappie to the bass, and the thin traffic means the productive water is not crowded off by mid-morning. Between them you have a park lake with services and a Corps lake with quiet — two different days out, not two different sets of fish.

Fishing season being year-round pairs neatly with Beech Fork's year-round camping areas, and the practical limits around Huntington are on infrastructure rather than on the fish. The Beech Fork launch runs April to November. Rentals run Memorial Day to Labor Day, noon to 8. Outside those windows you bring your own boat or you fish from the bank, and on a lake with 31 miles of shoreline the bank is not a consolation prize. Reservoir fishing shifts with water temperature rather than with a calendar date anyway, so the spot that produces in May can be dead in August heat and worth walking back to in October.

In town: Ritter Park, the greenway and the Guyandotte

The shortest things to do outdoors in Huntington, WV are inside the city. Ritter Park and the Huntington greenway system are the in-town recreation, and they are what makes a rest day between lake trips work — walking, running and shade close to wherever you are staying. Plan those outings by time rather than by distance, since no published length figure for the greenway is available to plan against, and treat them as the short option rather than the day's main event. For anyone arriving late or leaving the next morning, that is the difference between an outdoor day and a wasted one.

South of the city, the Guyandotte Water Trail Alliance is developing a water trail on the Guyandotte, following the model the state's established water-trail groups set on rivers like the Cheat, the Elk and the Coal. Developing is the operative word. This is not a mapped, signed route from end to end yet, and the local watershed group is the right place to ask what is usable now. Water trail organizations are also the best source anywhere in West Virginia for hazard and cleanup information, which matters more on a river being brought back into recreational use than on a reservoir. Water-trail season in the state generally runs April through October, and levels drop through late summer.

Things to do outdoors in Huntington in cold weather

Winter thins the options in a predictable pattern. Beech Fork's boat launch closes after November and the rentals have been gone since Labor Day, but Old Orchard and Lakeview stay open year-round, so the park is still a place to sleep as well as a place to walk. Park hours remain 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., which in December is most of the usable daylight anyway. Bank fishing continues, since the season is year-round, and a 720-acre lake with 31 miles of shoreline has plenty of edge to work when nothing is launching. Cold weather also strips the leaves off the ridges and opens up sightlines that are closed in July.

The cold months are the busiest ones on the WMA land around East Lynn, so that is the season to be most deliberate about blaze orange and about which ground is open to hunting. Cabwaylingo holds up in winter too: bare hardwood opens the ridgelines, and the CCC cabins are lodging rather than a tent on frozen ground. Nature study does not shut down either. The Master Naturalist program is the structured way to learn West Virginia ecology, and the West Virginia Native Plant Society is its counterpart for plants — both useful in a season when there is nothing in bloom to distract from bark, buds and birds.

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