Five years ago, if you had told Wheelbilly Bikes mechanic Hannah Ellison that she’d be working at a bike shop in Hurricane, West Virginia, she likely would have said, “Where’s Hurricane?”

Situated in the far southwestern corner of West Virginia, nearly equidistant between the capital of Charleston and the city of Huntington, Hurricane (pronounced “hurr-i-kinn”) has a long history of being a place you pass through but never linger long.

That’s not to say that Hurricane was a desolate place. Throughout the state’s history of European settlement, Hurricane always mattered. In the early 1800s, when farming fueled Putnam County, it mattered that the settlement—then called Hurricane Bridge— was located in a fertile valley on a creek. Later, it mattered that a railroad connecting the Chesapeake and Ohio rivers passed right through Hurricane Bridge, which changed its name to Hurricane Station and, finally, just to Hurricane. In the 1960s, it mattered that the newly-built Interstate 64 trucked through Hurricane and helped the town become a city. Still, lest you needed gas or a hotel room, there wasn’t much reason to visit Hurricane.

“I didn’t even know Hurricane existed,” says Ellison, who was born and raised just 30 miles up the road in Sissonville. “There was nothing to do [there].”

In the fall of 2018, the city of Hurricane decided to do something about its obscurity. City leaders wanted to build something that would positively impact not just the health and wellness of their community but also their economy. To achieve that, they had to get creative. Hurricane is less than four square miles in size. It doesn’t have a lot of room to grow. It does, however, have a modest city park that backs up to a 500-acre swath of privately-owned land. Today, that land is home to a 32-mile system of volunteer-built, hand-cut mountain biking trails. And today, Hurricane matters to its community because it’s the gateway to the Meeks Mountain trail system.