FAYETTEVILLE — West Virginia's largest one-day outdoor festival drew more than 100,000 people here on Saturday to walk on the 876-foot-high deck of the state's iconic New River Gorge Bridge and watch hundreds of parachutists descend to the shoreline below.

On Bridge Day, held annually on the third Saturday of October, traffic is diverted off the northbound lanes of U.S. 19, providing pedestrian access to the deck of the nation's second-highest traffic-carrying span. The highest is the 886-foot-tall Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge over the Colorado River at the Nevada-Arizona border.

From the deck of the New River Gorge Bridge, hundreds of BASE (Building, Antenna, Span and Earth) jumpers lined up for the chance to plunge, or be catapulted, off the bridge, deploy their chutes

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