By Rick Steelhammer
Charleston Gazette-Mail
Twenty years ago, when Jeffrey Lusk became the first executive director of the Hatfield McCoy Regional Recreation Authority, the Hatfield-McCoy Trails network consisted of five trail systems offering motorizedtrail riders a total of 400 miles of trail in four Southern West Virginia counties.
By the time Lusk, 56, of South Charleston, retired from the authority on Dec. 1, the Hatfield-McCoy Trails had grown to more than 1,000 miles of trail in 13 trail systems stretched across nine counties, including one that links directly to Virginia’s Spearhead Trails system. The Hatfield-McCoy Trails now annually draw tens of thousands of ATV-, UTV-, ORV- and off-road motorcycle enthusiasts — more than 90% of them from outside West Virginia — to the state’s southern coalfields, where they pump millions of dollars into the regional economy.
“The ‘build it, they will come’ concept has worked here,” Lusk said. When people sink thousands of dollars into motorized trail-riding equipment, “they need places to ride,” he said, as witnessed by the sale of 95,000 Hatfield-McCoy trail passes this year.
It was 2005 when he was named executive director of the Hatfield-McCoy Regional Recreation Authority, a quasi-state organization created by the Legislature to manage the trail system, but Lusk’s association with the Hatfield-McCoy Trails dates back to the 1980s.
I spent 12 years with the Wyoming County Economic Development Authority, which was a great experience and set the groundwork for me becoming involved with the new trail system,” Lusk said.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the new trail system was being shepherded from the conceptual stage
to reality by the late Leff Moore, a former Putnam County commissioner and director of the West Virginia
Recreational Vehicle Association.
Read the rest of the story at the Charleston Gazette-Mail