Back of the Dragon breaths new life into Southwest Virginia community
The Roanoke Times | July 27, 2019
By Amy Friedenberger
TAZEWELL — Marcus Suikki veered his motorcycle off the road, climbed off the bike and lifted up his helmet.
“That’s some intense riding! Whew!” Suikki told Phil Woods, who pulled up beside him. “I wish we had roads like this back home, I tell you.”
Not too far behind, Wayne Lake slowed down his heavyweight Harley-Davidson on a curve crawling with a kudzu wall.
“He goes a little slower, but he rides that Harley like he stole it,” Suikki, 46, said.
The three friends traveled from Canada just to ride this winding road in far Southwest Virginia. They took out their cameras and photographed the view from the overlook: mountain ranges and rolling hills dotted with barns and hay bales.
They enjoyed the views and the challenging curves of scenic Virginia 16 so much that they’d ridden it three times that day in June. For Woods, it was his third time making the trip, bringing a new person with him each time.
“The roads are fantastic, and the people are so nice down here,” said Woods, who just turned 50 and was celebrating with a road trip.
The serpentine road between Marion and the town of Tazewell has been popular among a small number of motorcycle enthusiasts long before it received the name “Back of the Dragon” a few years ago. Now it’s gaining attention as a tourism attraction, drawing thousands of motorcyclists and sports cars enthusiasts to the region each year. For the economically struggling county of Tazewell, the road has accelerated an enthusiasm among the community to revitalize.
32 miles
The road that twists and turns between Smyth and Tazewell counties has been there for nearly a century.
During the Great Depression, the federally funded Civilian Conservation Corps put hundreds of thousands of young people to work in the countryside to make sites like Civil War battlefields accessible and to clear the way for the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway. CCC workers also built Virginia 16.
It’s a 32-mile stretch of the byway that hugs the contours of three mountains. Four hundred sharp curves zigzag up and down, making drivers feel like they’re on a roller coaster.
Back of the Dragon begins at Hungry Mother State Park north of Marion. Its terminus is in Tazewell, a town that once thrived from coal mining.
“You could come up Main Street, and there were all these retail stores, different places, furniture stores,” said Pam Warden, the economic development director for Tazewell. “It was the same as every coal mining community. You would go to town and it was wall-to-wall people on the streets.”
When coal declined, those stores closed and buildings became vacant. The people left, too. Tazewell County has about 42,500 residents, which is down 16% from 1980. About 4,200 people live in the town of Tazewell, which has lost 10% of its population over the last decade. Families fractured. A parent who loses a job finds work elsewhere while the other parent and children stay at home in Tazewell County. With too many young people leaving and an aging population, the area’s birth rate is low and its death rate is high.
Larry Davidson developed a fondness for Tazewell from frequent visits as a child to see his grandmother. He grew up 20 miles away in Canebrake, West Virginia, where he came from a coal mining family. He enjoyed the thrill of being in the car on Virginia 16 on the way to Hungry Mother State Park in Smyth County, even if it made him carsick.
He left the area in 1967 to join the Air Force. He returned in 1977 to be a miner, but soon enlisted in the Army. He came back for good in 1999 and started teaching at a high school. In his free time, he rode motorcycles on Virginia 16.
“When I came back, I saw how devastated the area had been because of coal going out,” Davidson said. “I thought, well, why can’t we do something with the road?”
New idea for old road
Davidson, now 70, set out on his motorcycle several years ago with a dozen T-shirts in his backpack.
He talked to motorcyclists about what appealed to them about the road, and he quickly sold the T-shirts featuring a drawing of a vicious dragon.
“That gave me an idea that maybe we’re onto something,” Davidson said.
Davidson had been riding motorcycles for years, and he knew people who came to the area just for the road. But what if Tazewell marketed the road? Tazewell isn’t on the way to a lot of places, so there really has to be a reason for people to visit this small town.
“I saw a community in dire straits from the decline in coal, and I wanted to see something lift it up,” Davidson said.
In another mountainous area on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, local entrepreneurs came up with the same idea. In the 1990s, they branded a similarly sinuous road “Tail of the Dragon.” It features 318 turns in 11 miles, and it’s become a tourist attraction.
Yet Virginia 16 has more miles and turns.
Davidson talked to local government officials and state lawmakers about the idea. He whipped up another T-shirt and went to Richmond to give it to then-Gov. Bob McDonnell.
In 2012, the state designated the road as Back of the Dragon. It’s the only designated motorcycle route in Virginia.
“Initially, I was a little skeptical of the concept,” said Del. Will Morefield, R-Tazewell, who patroned legislation for the designation.
There are more than 4 million miles of roads in the United States. Was this stretch of 32 really that special?
Tourism driver
Jamie Cartwright waves in 178 BMW sports cars — valued at about $10 million — to park in a gravel lot at the welcome center for Back of the Dragon in Tazewell.
“Mama driving! Love it! Love it!” Cartwright cheers at an older woman driving while her husband sat in the passenger seat. Cartwright came from working at the Pocahontas Exhibition Mine and Museum in that Virginia coalfields town to do marketing for Back of the Dragon.
Each year, the BMW Z-Series Car Club of America group picks a destination for its annual gathering with a thrilling road, and this June, it chose Back of the Dragon.
“This is just a remarkable area,” said Kathy Desruisseau, who drove from Oklahoma with her husband.
Attendees crawled out of their cars and crammed into a trailer to buy T-shirts, hats and patches. They took pictures with a massive red and black dragon. Mostly middle-aged to recent retirees, they ate lunch catered by a local business inside an empty building that will soon serve as the new, spacious welcome center for Back of the Dragon.
In just a few years, the road’s souvenirs trailer has outgrown the number of people passing through, an estimated 60,000 motorcyclists in 2017, according to data. That doesn’t include sports car drivers.
“The thing that thrills me is, the biggest thing this shows is, we have an opportunity here that is phenomenal, because they’re here looking at what God has given us,” Davidson said. “The road is exciting, the road being named by the state, the road is technical, and they just love to come and love to enjoy that camaraderie and ride the road.”
The Tazewell County Industrial Development Authority is receiving a $450,000 loan from the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission to go toward the new $1.6 million, 5,000-square foot welcome center. The commission, which doles out money from Virginia’s portion of the national tobacco settlement, focuses its funding on projects to benefit economically depressed parts of the state.
The local goal is for a soft opening of the new Back of the Dragon Welcome Center in October and a grand opening in the spring.
“The success of Back of the Dragon is important, because our success as a community continues based on its success,” Cartwright said.
While it’s rare to have a large gathering such as the BMW group in Tazewell, it’s normal to have motorcycles, Mustangs, Camaros and Corvettes cruising along Main Street. They don’t just come from Virginia or the East Coast. They’ve had visitors from all over the country. Canadians come often. People put cars on ships from Europe so they can drive on roads like Back of the Dragon.
“Back of the Dragon has been a driver for people to be able to come in and have a tourist attraction,” Davidson said.
Bard Scott and Al Roberts drove their motorcycles from Michigan to experience both Tail of the Dragon and Back of the Dragon.
“Michigan is pretty flat, so you’ve got to come down here for this kind of stuff,” Scott said.
They paused at a rest stop along Back of the Dragon to look over a valley in Tazewell County.
“It’s like a picture from Norman Rockwell,” Scott said.
While a challenging road, Back of the Dragon has a safe reputation. In the past several years, no one driving the road for fun has died. The Virginia Department of Transportation sweeps the road weekly to remove gravel that’s potentially hazardous for motorcyclists.
Rick Wood, who serves on Richlands Town Council, helped usher the BMWs into the parking lot. He later asked Davidson if he ever thought some T-shirts stuffed in a backpack would lead to this.
Davidson said no.
“I always had the thought if God opened the door, do I have the stamina and patience to step through it? The door has been opened, now what do we do. This is the key,” Davidson said. “This is why it’s so important that it takes all of us. This is not about me. This is about us as a community, us as Southwest Virginia, us as the state of Virginia.”
Community transformation
Claudine Blankenship ran through that symbolic newly opened door. People were coming to Tazewell, and they needed things to do and food to eat.
She bought an old car dealership near the Back of the Dragon Welcome Center and turned it into a brewery, which her son owns and operates.
“The community is actually taking hold of being progressive and thinking beyond where we have been with the coal industry,” Blankenship said.
Painted Peak Brewing is among several businesses that have opened or expanded during the past few years. Tazewell County Administrator Eric Young credits Back of the Dragon with the revival along Main Street.
“In the past, I wasn’t convinced tourism was a way to go, but tourism is a means to an end, not the end,” Young said. “If we want to attract employers, we need amenities, and Back of the Dragon has started to bring us restaurants and shopping.”
Main Street, once lined with vacant buildings, has indeed transformed.
“I can tell you in 2012, you couldn’t buy a soft drink on Main Street,” said Todd Day, Tazewell’s town manager. “Forget about a hard drink, you couldn’t buy a soft drink.”
The Front Porch on Main occupies a historical residence and is one of several new restaurants downtown. A former jail is now an inn. Two old banks turned into The Well Coffee Shop and Clinch Mountain Motor Works, which sells custom-built motorcycles.
As the executive director of Tazewell Today, a local initiative to revitalize Main Street, Amanda Hoops has organized festivals and events to encourage people to invest and take pride in their community. She and her husband, Tazewell’s mayor Michael Hoops, moved back after living in urban and suburban parts of Virginia with a mission to help the region to which they are connected.
“Our goal is to keep pushing the town forward,” Amanda Hoops said.
Some Tazewell residents push back when they’re told the town’s population is declining. The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia projects Tazewell County’s population will decline another 10% over the next two decades.
Still, they’re starting to see some people move back to the area. Tiffany Catron, 31, went away for college and lived in various places before coming back to Tazewell. She has a new appreciation for what the town has to offer.
“I always thought Tazewell was too small for me,” Catron said.
Tazewell is trying to build a lively community that encourages people to return home, or attracts new residents, said Dave Blankenship, Claudine’s son who owns the brewery. The roadmap for change starts with Back of the Dragon.
“The brilliance of Mr. Davidson’s approach was he understood what we have to offer,” he said. “We may not have large corporate offices, but we do have natural beauty. When we started bringing more people here, we saw that trail of commerce and new businesses.”
Surrounding areas also reap the benefits from Back of the Dragon. In nearby Burkes Garden, a high, mountain-ringed valley that’s home to an Amish community, Mattie Schlabach says sports cars and motorcycles are passing through all the time to visit her store, Mattie’s Place, for food.
The increase in economic activity has contributed to “growing pains,” Day said.
Each new business increases competition among others for tourism dollars. People have increasingly embraced the sight of motorcycles rumbling through town. There’s no hotel in Tazewell to accommodate the influx of tourists, so they travel outside town for lodging.
“We have a lot going on, so we got a lot of battle scars and bruises, a lot of growing pains,” Day said.
Other localities in the coalfields have embraced promoting tourism around natural beauty as an avenue for economic development and boosting revenue.
Towns along the Clinch River, which stretches from Tazewell County to the Virginia-Tennessee border, have been marketing the region as an outdoor recreation destination, especially for kayaking and canoeing.
The Spearhead Trail System near the town of Pocahontas in Tazewell County offers more than 400 miles of trails that attracts all-terrain vehicle, dirt bike and mountain bike riders. The hope is to one day connect the Spearhead Trails with the Hatfield McCoy Trails in West Virginia. Trailhead Adventures in Bluefield offers Polaris vehicles for off-roading on these trails as well as ones that look like Batmobiles for Back of the Dragon.
“We have all these beautiful natural resources, and so we’re taking this approach of creating ways for people to engage with the outdoors,” Young said
Renewed appreciation
Davidson drives Back of the Dragon five or six times a week, mostly to look for rocks, sticks or any obstruction that could be a hazard to motorcyclists. He flew planes in the Air Force, but riding a motorcycle is “about as close as you get to flying on a magic carpet,” he says.
He rides his Ducati around the sharp switchbacks with ease. He looks into the woods to appreciate the blooming mountain laurel and rhododendron. He stops, as he always does, at a wayside that overlooks Thompson Valley, which he said provides a “$1 million view.”
He’ll stand there a while to watch motorcyclists stop, take in the view and breathlessly gasp “Wow.”
“It renews me, through them, watching them take it all in for the first time,” Davidson said.
Jody Olinger led a group of motorcyclists on her way to Saltville to participate in a motorcycle ride for a fundraiser. She’s driven Back of the Dragon numerous times, but she still likes to pause at that overlook.
“People don’t realize what’s in their backyard,” Olinger said.
By Amy Friedenberger
TAZEWELL — Marcus Suikki veered his motorcycle off the road, climbed off the bike and lifted up his helmet.
“That’s some intense riding! Whew!” Suikki told Phil Woods, who pulled up beside him. “I wish we had roads like this back home, I tell you.”
Not too far behind, Wayne Lake slowed down his heavyweight Harley-Davidson on a curve crawling with a kudzu wall.
“He goes a little slower, but he rides that Harley like he stole it,” Suikki, 46, said.
The three friends traveled from Canada just to ride this winding road in far Southwest Virginia. They took out their cameras and photographed the view from the overlook: mountain ranges and rolling hills dotted with barns and hay bales.
They enjoyed the views and the challenging curves of scenic Virginia 16 so much that they’d ridden it three times that day in June. For Woods, it was his third time making the trip, bringing a new person with him each time.
“The roads are fantastic, and the people are so nice down here,” said Woods, who just turned 50 and was celebrating with a road trip.
The serpentine road between Marion and the town of Tazewell has been popular among a small number of motorcycle enthusiasts long before it received the name “Back of the Dragon” a few years ago. Now it’s gaining attention as a tourism attraction, drawing thousands of motorcyclists and sports cars enthusiasts to the region each year. For the economically struggling county of Tazewell, the road has accelerated an enthusiasm among the community to revitalize.
32 miles
The road that twists and turns between Smyth and Tazewell counties has been there for nearly a century.
During the Great Depression, the federally funded Civilian Conservation Corps put hundreds of thousands of young people to work in the countryside to make sites like Civil War battlefields accessible and to clear the way for the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park and the Blue Ridge Parkway. CCC workers also built Virginia 16.
It’s a 32-mile stretch of the byway that hugs the contours of three mountains. Four hundred sharp curves zigzag up and down, making drivers feel like they’re on a roller coaster.
Back of the Dragon begins at Hungry Mother State Park north of Marion. Its terminus is in Tazewell, a town that once thrived from coal mining.
“You could come up Main Street, and there were all these retail stores, different places, furniture stores,” said Pam Warden, the economic development director for Tazewell. “It was the same as every coal mining community. You would go to town and it was wall-to-wall people on the streets.”
When coal declined, those stores closed and buildings became vacant. The people left, too. Tazewell County has about 42,500 residents, which is down 16% from 1980. About 4,200 people live in the town of Tazewell, which has lost 10% of its population over the last decade. Families fractured. A parent who loses a job finds work elsewhere while the other parent and children stay at home in Tazewell County. With too many young people leaving and an aging population, the area’s birth rate is low and its death rate is high.
Larry Davidson developed a fondness for Tazewell from frequent visits as a child to see his grandmother. He grew up 20 miles away in Canebrake, West Virginia, where he came from a coal mining family. He enjoyed the thrill of being in the car on Virginia 16 on the way to Hungry Mother State Park in Smyth County, even if it made him carsick.
He left the area in 1967 to join the Air Force. He returned in 1977 to be a miner, but soon enlisted in the Army. He came back for good in 1999 and started teaching at a high school. In his free time, he rode motorcycles on Virginia 16.
“When I came back, I saw how devastated the area had been because of coal going out,” Davidson said. “I thought, well, why can’t we do something with the road?”
New idea for old road
Davidson, now 70, set out on his motorcycle several years ago with a dozen T-shirts in his backpack.
He talked to motorcyclists about what appealed to them about the road, and he quickly sold the T-shirts featuring a drawing of a vicious dragon.
“That gave me an idea that maybe we’re onto something,” Davidson said.
Davidson had been riding motorcycles for years, and he knew people who came to the area just for the road. But what if Tazewell marketed the road? Tazewell isn’t on the way to a lot of places, so there really has to be a reason for people to visit this small town.
“I saw a community in dire straits from the decline in coal, and I wanted to see something lift it up,” Davidson said.
In another mountainous area on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina, local entrepreneurs came up with the same idea. In the 1990s, they branded a similarly sinuous road “Tail of the Dragon.” It features 318 turns in 11 miles, and it’s become a tourist attraction.
Yet Virginia 16 has more miles and turns.
Davidson talked to local government officials and state lawmakers about the idea. He whipped up another T-shirt and went to Richmond to give it to then-Gov. Bob McDonnell.
In 2012, the state designated the road as Back of the Dragon. It’s the only designated motorcycle route in Virginia.
“Initially, I was a little skeptical of the concept,” said Del. Will Morefield, R-Tazewell, who patroned legislation for the designation.
There are more than 4 million miles of roads in the United States. Was this stretch of 32 really that special?
Tourism driver
Jamie Cartwright waves in 178 BMW sports cars — valued at about $10 million — to park in a gravel lot at the welcome center for Back of the Dragon in Tazewell.
“Mama driving! Love it! Love it!” Cartwright cheers at an older woman driving while her husband sat in the passenger seat. Cartwright came from working at the Pocahontas Exhibition Mine and Museum in that Virginia coalfields town to do marketing for Back of the Dragon.
Each year, the BMW Z-Series Car Club of America group picks a destination for its annual gathering with a thrilling road, and this June, it chose Back of the Dragon.
“This is just a remarkable area,” said Kathy Desruisseau, who drove from Oklahoma with her husband.
Attendees crawled out of their cars and crammed into a trailer to buy T-shirts, hats and patches. They took pictures with a massive red and black dragon. Mostly middle-aged to recent retirees, they ate lunch catered by a local business inside an empty building that will soon serve as the new, spacious welcome center for Back of the Dragon.
In just a few years, the road’s souvenirs trailer has outgrown the number of people passing through, an estimated 60,000 motorcyclists in 2017, according to data. That doesn’t include sports car drivers.
“The thing that thrills me is, the biggest thing this shows is, we have an opportunity here that is phenomenal, because they’re here looking at what God has given us,” Davidson said. “The road is exciting, the road being named by the state, the road is technical, and they just love to come and love to enjoy that camaraderie and ride the road.”
The Tazewell County Industrial Development Authority is receiving a $450,000 loan from the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission to go toward the new $1.6 million, 5,000-square foot welcome center. The commission, which doles out money from Virginia’s portion of the national tobacco settlement, focuses its funding on projects to benefit economically depressed parts of the state.
The local goal is for a soft opening of the new Back of the Dragon Welcome Center in October and a grand opening in the spring.
“The success of Back of the Dragon is important, because our success as a community continues based on its success,” Cartwright said.
While it’s rare to have a large gathering such as the BMW group in Tazewell, it’s normal to have motorcycles, Mustangs, Camaros and Corvettes cruising along Main Street. They don’t just come from Virginia or the East Coast. They’ve had visitors from all over the country. Canadians come often. People put cars on ships from Europe so they can drive on roads like Back of the Dragon.
“Back of the Dragon has been a driver for people to be able to come in and have a tourist attraction,” Davidson said.
Bard Scott and Al Roberts drove their motorcycles from Michigan to experience both Tail of the Dragon and Back of the Dragon.
“Michigan is pretty flat, so you’ve got to come down here for this kind of stuff,” Scott said.
They paused at a rest stop along Back of the Dragon to look over a valley in Tazewell County.
“It’s like a picture from Norman Rockwell,” Scott said.
While a challenging road, Back of the Dragon has a safe reputation. In the past several years, no one driving the road for fun has died. The Virginia Department of Transportation sweeps the road weekly to remove gravel that’s potentially hazardous for motorcyclists.
Rick Wood, who serves on Richlands Town Council, helped usher the BMWs into the parking lot. He later asked Davidson if he ever thought some T-shirts stuffed in a backpack would lead to this.
Davidson said no.
“I always had the thought if God opened the door, do I have the stamina and patience to step through it? The door has been opened, now what do we do. This is the key,” Davidson said. “This is why it’s so important that it takes all of us. This is not about me. This is about us as a community, us as Southwest Virginia, us as the state of Virginia.”
Community transformation
Claudine Blankenship ran through that symbolic newly opened door. People were coming to Tazewell, and they needed things to do and food to eat.
She bought an old car dealership near the Back of the Dragon Welcome Center and turned it into a brewery, which her son owns and operates.
“The community is actually taking hold of being progressive and thinking beyond where we have been with the coal industry,” Blankenship said.
Painted Peak Brewing is among several businesses that have opened or expanded during the past few years. Tazewell County Administrator Eric Young credits Back of the Dragon with the revival along Main Street.
“In the past, I wasn’t convinced tourism was a way to go, but tourism is a means to an end, not the end,” Young said. “If we want to attract employers, we need amenities, and Back of the Dragon has started to bring us restaurants and shopping.”
Main Street, once lined with vacant buildings, has indeed transformed.
“I can tell you in 2012, you couldn’t buy a soft drink on Main Street,” said Todd Day, Tazewell’s town manager. “Forget about a hard drink, you couldn’t buy a soft drink.”
The Front Porch on Main occupies a historical residence and is one of several new restaurants downtown. A former jail is now an inn. Two old banks turned into The Well Coffee Shop and Clinch Mountain Motor Works, which sells custom-built motorcycles.
As the executive director of Tazewell Today, a local initiative to revitalize Main Street, Amanda Hoops has organized festivals and events to encourage people to invest and take pride in their community. She and her husband, Tazewell’s mayor Michael Hoops, moved back after living in urban and suburban parts of Virginia with a mission to help the region to which they are connected.
“Our goal is to keep pushing the town forward,” Amanda Hoops said.
Some Tazewell residents push back when they’re told the town’s population is declining. The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia projects Tazewell County’s population will decline another 10% over the next two decades.
Still, they’re starting to see some people move back to the area. Tiffany Catron, 31, went away for college and lived in various places before coming back to Tazewell. She has a new appreciation for what the town has to offer.
“I always thought Tazewell was too small for me,” Catron said.
Tazewell is trying to build a lively community that encourages people to return home, or attracts new residents, said Dave Blankenship, Claudine’s son who owns the brewery. The roadmap for change starts with Back of the Dragon.
“The brilliance of Mr. Davidson’s approach was he understood what we have to offer,” he said. “We may not have large corporate offices, but we do have natural beauty. When we started bringing more people here, we saw that trail of commerce and new businesses.”
Surrounding areas also reap the benefits from Back of the Dragon. In nearby Burkes Garden, a high, mountain-ringed valley that’s home to an Amish community, Mattie Schlabach says sports cars and motorcycles are passing through all the time to visit her store, Mattie’s Place, for food.
The increase in economic activity has contributed to “growing pains,” Day said.
Each new business increases competition among others for tourism dollars. People have increasingly embraced the sight of motorcycles rumbling through town. There’s no hotel in Tazewell to accommodate the influx of tourists, so they travel outside town for lodging.
“We have a lot going on, so we got a lot of battle scars and bruises, a lot of growing pains,” Day said.
Other localities in the coalfields have embraced promoting tourism around natural beauty as an avenue for economic development and boosting revenue.
Towns along the Clinch River, which stretches from Tazewell County to the Virginia-Tennessee border, have been marketing the region as an outdoor recreation destination, especially for kayaking and canoeing.
The Spearhead Trail System near the town of Pocahontas in Tazewell County offers more than 400 miles of trails that attracts all-terrain vehicle, dirt bike and mountain bike riders. The hope is to one day connect the Spearhead Trails with the Hatfield McCoy Trails in West Virginia. Trailhead Adventures in Bluefield offers Polaris vehicles for off-roading on these trails as well as ones that look like Batmobiles for Back of the Dragon.
“We have all these beautiful natural resources, and so we’re taking this approach of creating ways for people to engage with the outdoors,” Young said
Renewed appreciation
Davidson drives Back of the Dragon five or six times a week, mostly to look for rocks, sticks or any obstruction that could be a hazard to motorcyclists. He flew planes in the Air Force, but riding a motorcycle is “about as close as you get to flying on a magic carpet,” he says.
He rides his Ducati around the sharp switchbacks with ease. He looks into the woods to appreciate the blooming mountain laurel and rhododendron. He stops, as he always does, at a wayside that overlooks Thompson Valley, which he said provides a “$1 million view.”
He’ll stand there a while to watch motorcyclists stop, take in the view and breathlessly gasp “Wow.”
“It renews me, through them, watching them take it all in for the first time,” Davidson said.
Jody Olinger led a group of motorcyclists on her way to Saltville to participate in a motorcycle ride for a fundraiser. She’s driven Back of the Dragon numerous times, but she still likes to pause at that overlook.
“People don’t realize what’s in their backyard,” Olinger said.
