Big Walker has a 50 year history as a flying site. The first launch, in the mid 70's, was where Route 52 crosses Big Walker Mountain, at the Big Walker Lookout tourist attraction. Today there is still a store and observation tower, but in the mid 70's there was also a chair lift. Launching gliders had to fly between the chairs, as described in The Boo Waa Call
By the late 70's a launch had been cut about 5 miles to the East of Route 52, accessed by a fire road on the ridgetop. This became a hugely popular site. On good NW days pilots came from WV, Ohio, Tennessee, North Carolina, even as far away as Michigan - because of both the Skywacker community that had arisen there, and the great potential of the mountain. Even pilots from the Roanoke Valley Hang Gliding Club, which had half-a-dozen active sites right around Roanoke, would come to Big Walker on good days - and the drive was about 45 minutes longer then.
Somewhere around 1990, +/- a year or so, the mountain was clear cut above Mechanicsburg, where Rt 738 crosses the mountain (the only two roads that go over the mountain, from roughly New Castle to Marion, are 52 and 738). This allowed the third launch to be opened, which was just a few yards from where 738 crosses the mountain. This is where Jim and Erma Bogle came into the picture, as their field was used for the LZ.
Big Walker was a very active site all through the 90's, with pilots regularly coming from West Virginia, North Carolina, and even further. On a good day you would have to get in line and wait for others to launch to get space to set up a glider. It got even busier in the late 90's when Chris and Tammy Bowles were cranking out paragliding pilots from Southern Skies, and many of these new fangled contraptions were sharing the air with the hang gliders. Once you got past the crowded launch there was no crowding in the air, with 30 miles of ridge to play on.
And Jim and Erma loved their pilots! Always the welcoming hosts - Jim would sometimes crank up his ice cream maker if there happened to be a big group of pilots on any particular day. All was well until the 90-something year old owner of the launch died. Randy Newberry tried to buy that piece of property, lease it, exchange permission for labor on the daughter's property, etc. All to no avail. We went through a year or so of on and off permission to fly, when she just finally closed it permanently. This was early in 2002.
That was a major loss to flying in the area. Jim and Erma really missed their pilots, so Jim hatched a plan. They owned land all the way to the top of the mountain, but none adjacent to the road, and the daughter would not grant permission to cross her land. However, the back side of the mountain was National Forest, and Jim was able to get a permit to build a road on their side of the mountain to harvest timber from his property on top of the mountain (wink, wink).
Those wheels turn slow, and it was 2003 before permission was granted. Once he had permission, the pilot community came together and contributed cash and labor. Over 30 pilots contributed about $10,000, and many put in weeks of labor.
And no one put in more time or effort than Jim Bogle himself. But it was late 2003 by the time the new site was flyable, and a number of things happened in the year and a half between the closing of one launch and the opening of the new one.
A number of older hangs, with their main site gone, gave up flying. This seems to have included the NC Sauraton Club, which had been very active on their local site and often came to BW on good days to try to fly XC back home. New owners of their launch closed the site and they also seemed to have given up flying altogether. Perhaps a quarter or third of those who had contributed generously to the new site either gave up flying or moved away before it opened. But perhaps an even more key factor was the opening of Eagle Rock, which happened during the period that Big Walker was closed. Suddenly all the Roanoke pilots who had been driving to BW to fly now had a site very close to home. And somewhere around this time Southern Skies gave up teaching, so there were no more new paragliding pilots entering the sport.
This was part of an overall decline in the number of active pilots everywhere, and there were few people to maintain several sites. Jim became frustrated with seeing brush grow in the launch slot, with yearly work parties not enough to keep it beat back.
In 2012 Jim took over all maintainence and turned it in his "private club", Soar Big Walker. You now have to join Jim's club and pay an annual fee to fly there. In turn, he hired the local Amish to keep the site maintained and he has provided new services. The flying conditions at Big Walker were already world class, but now the flying site itself grew to match. The launch and LZ are manicured, and Jim has porta potties and camping facilities. It is seeing regular use now (2024), considering how few pilots are active. Hopefully it will remain so for many more years to come.
