Real West Virginian of the Week: Liz Love finds belonging behind the camera in the New River Gorge

By Hannah Yost, RealWV

OAK HILL, W.Va. — Liz Love is not originally from West Virginia, but in many ways, West Virginia found her.

Love, the creator behind NRG Video Production, first came to the state in 2007 when a friend brought her to raft the Upper Gauley for a birthday trip. At the time, Love had never been rafting before.

“It completely blew my mind,” Love said. “The landscape, the fog, the culture — something just clicked, and I never stopped thinking about this place.”

Originally from Kansas, Love said she grew up in a suburb far removed from the mountains, rivers, and deep-rooted history she later found in the New River Gorge. Before making the move permanent, she spent 25 years as a farrier. A broken leg forced a career change that eventually led her to nursing, and that flexibility helped her move to West Virginia permanently in 2022.

“I chose this place, and I think sometimes that choice means more than the accident of being born somewhere,” Love said.

That choice has shaped her work, her creative identity, and her sense of belonging.

Through NRG Video Production, Love documents the whitewater, outdoor culture, humor, characters, and stories of the New River Gorge. Her husband, Peyton Love, has been a video boater since 1998 and had accumulated years of rafting footage. Love saw potential in the archive — not just as clips, but as a record of a culture that felt specific, entertaining, and worth preserving.

“NRG Video Production is my business, but it’s built on the work of many videographers who spent years in the water capturing something truly special about this place,” Love said.

For Love, the project is about more than video production. It is about making sure a community’s stories are not lost.

“In the grand scheme of human history, commercial whitewater rafting is a very young thing — and it’s already changing,” she said. “These communities, these characters, this culture — it might not look the same forever. Somebody has to mind the clips.”

The New River Gorge, Love said, has its own creative world, especially among raft guides and video boaters. She described end-of-season traditions where guides and video boaters make rafting clips and skits as “this little enclave of creativity that’s completely specific to this region and this culture.”

She has always been drawn to niche subcultures, and the people of the Gorge quickly became one of her favorites.

“Getting to make videos about them doing what they love, and watching first-timers — people just like me on that first Gauley trip — experience the magic of the New and Gauley rivers for the first time, that’s probably my favorite thing in the world,” Love said.

Her work started with outdoor videography, documenting whitewater, climbing, and daily life in the region. Over time, NRG Video Production’s content grew far beyond a local audience, reaching more than 100 million organic views across platforms.

That growth taught Love something important about storytelling: people connect with what feels real.

“People are more over being sold to than ever,” she said. “Over-polished content, over AI videos, over everything that feels manufactured. There’s a deep hunger right now for something real.”

Love said the people of the New River Gorge are “gritty and genuine and specific,” and she does not want to sand that down to make it more broadly appealing.

“If I sand that down to make it more palatable for a broader audience, I’ve lost the whole point,” she said.

That belief led Love to shift NRG Video Production away from client-based video work and toward an audience-first media platform centered on the New River Gorge and Southern West Virginia. Instead of creating content calendars for individual businesses, she wants to build a platform that reflects the region’s voice, culture, artists, events, and creative energy.

“I came to believe I’d be better served as a voice for the Gorge than as a production service for hire,” Love said. “I realized I could do more good building the platform than filling the calendar.”

Love wants NRG to become a place people can go to experience Southern West Virginia virtually, whether they are reliving a past trip, planning a future one, or simply imagining what the region feels like.

She also wants the platform to support local artists, events, and creatives.

“I want to collaborate with other local creatives and build something that actually feels like this place,” she said.

One of those creative ideas is Carnage Beast, a fictional New River Gorge cryptid that began as a small monster finger puppet passed around among video boaters. Love said the puppet became part of rafting culture, appearing when someone had an “out of boat experience” — swimming down the river without the raft they paid for.

To Love, that little character became something larger.

“Point Pleasant has Mothman,” she said. “The New River Gorge has Carnage Beast.”

She sees the concept as a way to create something playful, memorable, and deeply tied to the Gorge — something people can carry home with them after an adventure.

“That’s the kind of whimsy that makes a place stick in your memory,” Love said.

For Love, storytelling is central to how people experience a place. She said people may come to West Virginia for adventure, but they return because of the stories they carry home.

“People come here for a literal adventure — and an adventure is just a really good story that you watched till the end,” she said.

Love believes West Virginia does not need to be polished into something it is not. The magic, she said, is already here.

“The region is the story — I’m just here with a camera,” she said.

Building a creative business in Oak Hill and the New River Gorge region has been “scrappy as hell,” Love said. Many creative people in the area are doing work for little reward, often while holding second jobs. Love does, too.

But she sees that scrappiness as part of the reason the work matters.

“There are so many incredibly talented creative people here doing things every day for little to no reward — just for the love of this place and the hope that their creative vision might eventually work,” she said.

Rather than compete for small business contracts, Love wants to use NRG to platform the creators who are already here, from rafters to climbers, mountain bikers, artists, and others shaping the culture of the region.

Her sense of belonging in the Gorge has grown through the people around her — guides, private boaters, drivers, rafting customers, online supporters, and strangers who have followed her work.

“NRG Video would be nothing without the support of so many people,” Love said. “This has been a total team effort. I’ve just been trying to steward it.”

Love said she wants people from West Virginia to watch her videos and feel proud — proud of where they live, what they do, and the experiences they create.

“I just want the video to prove they did something worth being proud of,” she said.

She also hopes her work brings more attention to the people who make the river community what it is. Seasonal workers in rafting and ski industries face real challenges, she said, including rising costs of living, wages that have not kept pace, and lack of health insurance for many.

“These are the people who cannot be replaced — they are the experience,” Love said.

If her work can help build appreciation for those people, she said, that matters more than any view count.

Love said WV Hive helped her define what her business was and where it was going. After making a video entry for a pitch competition, she began rethinking the client-focused model and leaning further into the audience-focused version of NRG.

“The market I was chasing was too small,” she said. “The audience I already had was much bigger.”

Looking ahead, Love is excited to keep sharing the magic of the Gorge. She hopes NRG Video Production can help people experience the place in a way that feels authentic, support local creatives, and maybe inspire someone else the way her first rafting trip inspired her.

“If I can keep sharing the magic of the Gorge and it helps somebody the way that first rafting trip helped me all those years ago — that would be everything,” she said.

For Love, belonging in West Virginia did not come from being born here. It came from being changed by the place, choosing to stay, and finding a community worth showing up for again and again.

And through her camera, she is helping others see what she saw all those years ago: a place full of humor, grit, beauty, adventure, and stories worth keeping.

“We get one life,” Love said. “I hope that if someone has a dream or a journey calling and they see that I’m out here trying to follow mine, and nothing too terribly bad has happened yet, it nudges them a little closer to trying.”

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