—
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul and his wife, Kelley, visited Bell County on Thursday as part of a tour promoting tourism in southeastern Kentucky. He spoke at the Kentucky Leaf Trail and Blossom Byway Conference at Pine Mountain State Resort Park and then stopped by Boone’s Ridge to see the progress being made at the wildlife center, which is projected to open next year.
“We like coming out here. This is our personal leaf tour — we are going throughout eastern Kentucky and we take pictures everywhere and put it on our social media.,” he said. “We’ve been to Cumberland Falls, we’ve been to the railroad depot at Stearns, we’re going to Boone’s Ridge and Kingdom Come State Park and some distilleries in Whtesburg and Pikeville.”
Loosely modeled after the Bourbon Trail in central Kentucky, the Kentucky Leaf Trail goes through 28 counties in eastern Kentucky and aims at providing a unified website and national brand where all of those counties and their businesses can promote local tourism.
The idea is draw visitors who go to the Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina to see fall foliage to this area where there is less traffic and they can have a more relaxing experience.
“We don’t need all of them, we need five or ten percent of all the people lining up in Tennessee to see Dollywood and Sevierville,” Paul said. “If you go there to see the leaves and follow the roads, they are bumper to bumper going 30 miles an hour. We can get some of that through unified advertising.”
Paul also toured Boone’s Ridge, the 12,000-acre attraction centered around giving visitors a chance to view a restored elk herd along with hundreds of bird species and other local wildlife.
Plans are for the site to have a soft opening next fall.
State Rep. Adam Bowling shared a story of taking the Pauls up to see the Pinnacle at the Cumberland Gap National Park as he introduced Paul at the conference.
He said the towns in Bell and Harlan counties are ready for a boom in tourism with Boone’s RIdge projected to bring over 900,000 new visitors to the area within five years.
“Our cities, our towns have all invested in our communities, Through their Main Street programs, they’ve brought in private investment,” Bowling said. “You got any town, whether it’s Middlesboro, Pineville, Harlan or Cumberland — there’s restaurants, there’s shops, there’s people out and about. It’s really amazing, you wouldn’t believe the change in some of these towns over the last 10 years.”
He added that Boone’s Ridge was the largest attraction investment in eastern Kentucky and probably the whole state.
“This is something we own. Mother nature gave us this beauty, and I think people will come once they notice that it’s here, and also that it’s less crowded.” Paul said.
