LANSING - Adventures on the Gorge, a well-known outdoor resort in Fayette County, is looking to capture more business by catering to groups looking for a place to host business meetings and corporate retreats.
The company, which offers lodging, dining, rafting, biking, rappelling, rock climbing and zip-lining, held a luncheon Tuesday to announce the groundbreaking of the newest addition to its resort on the edge of the New River Gorge, just off of W.Va. 19
Local officials, state leaders and regional economic development staff were in attendance as the company's leaders announced their plans to build a new 2,000-square-foot conference center and outdoor meeting space, which will be one of its biggest investments to date.
Dave Arnold, one of the company's founders, said the conference center is meant to attract large and small business gatherings to the resort year round, expanding on their already successful tourism business.
As he stood on a wooden deck overlooking the gorge in flip flops and a Hawaiian-print shirt, Arnold said he hopes the new addition will increase outside exposure to their adventure destination and the region as a whole.
"This is all about business and bringing in more business," Arnold said.
The new conference center is a big move for the company, but Arnold thinks their outdoor activities and prime location will make Adventures very competitive in the world of corporate getaways.
Arnold said many of the other businesses seeking to attract conferences don't have a lot of additional amenities and the ones that do are usually based around a golf course, not white water rafting and world-class rock climbing.
"It's a work hard, play hard environment," Arnold said.
The construction of the conference center, which will include large event rooms, in-house catering services and a veranda overlooking the New River Gorge Bridge, is only the latest expansion for the company.
Arnold and the other founders of Adventures on the Gorge got their start in the 1970s as the Class VI River Runners, a rafting company that operated on the New River and Gauley River. As Arnold said, they were just a "bunch of hippies" at that point.
But when the rafting market diminished around 2000, Arnold and other rafting guides from Rivermen and Mountain River Tours teamed up to create Adventures on the Gorge.
"It was a perfect time to bring the competitors together to offer more adventures in-house," Jeff Proctor, another one of the company's founders.
Since then, the rafting guides turned resort managers have built an expansive business that served 150,000 guests in 2015.
The company now has about 109 cabins to serve its customers, enough, Proctor said, to begin diversifying and eying an expansion into the corporate event market.
Adventure's managers say they don't need to steal business tourism events from other venues in the state. They just need to "get a few crumbs of an already successful corporate market in the state," Proctor said.
The new event center, Proctor said, will also better serve the company's existing wedding services and allow the company to expand its business during the winter months, which is somewhat of an offseason for the outdoor company.
Proctor also believes hosting more corporate getaways at the resort will feed back into the company's business. He hopes business officials visiting the gorge for the first time on business will bring their families back to the region for an outdoor summer vacation, where they can take advantage of rafting, climbing and mountain biking.
The new structure will be built next to the resort's existing gift shop, restaurant and pub and will be built in a style that Arnold referred to as "parkitecture," which resembles buildings owned by the U.S. National Park Service.
The construction project is going to be managed by Charleston-based Agsten Construction, the company that recently built a new wedding chapel and tennis facility at The Greenbrier resort.
Dave Hartvigsen, the company's CEO who took over in 2013, said the company's intention is to expand without overwhelming or impacting the rim of the New River Gorge.
Many of the trees on site will not be affected, he said. The outdoor lighting at the conference center will be positioned so it doesn't shine out over the gorge and the building will largely be made out of natural materials, like wood and stone.
"We think there's a nice connection between what we're doing and what the Park Service has done," Hartvigsen said.
Hartvigsen said Adventure's resort is positioned on the edge of one of the best locations in the eastern United States, and he believes development work being done by his company and others can make the New River Gorge a premier destination moving forward.
With all of West Virginia's current economic problems, he thinks the tourism development being undertaken in Fayette County is an opportunity for the Mountain State.
"We are investing in what we think is a bright future," he said.
Reach Andrew Brown at andrew.brown@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-4814 or follow @Andy_Ed_Brown on Twitter.