Blacksburg Remote Work Week: Brush Mountain Park, Hahn Horticulture Garden &
the Huckleberry Trail – 6/17 & 6/18/21
The remaining two days of our remote work week in Blacksburg, VA were wide-ranging, checking out more hiking venues, riding on a familiar bike trail, and one discovery that had escaped our attention for 30+ years of campus visits.
On Thursday’s lunch break we hiked around the McDonald Hollow section of Brush Mountain Park, created by conservation efforts of the New River Land Trust. The trail system includes an old roadbed that traverses the mountain, alongside criss-crossed trails built with a mountain biking focus. It is a multi-use system, also welcoming foot and horse traffic.
Since our visit in June 2021, an update on the website: “We closed on a 3rd property of 208 acres on Brush Mountain in December 2021 and are working on the site plan. With this land, we’ll add another 6 miles of new multi-use trails to Brush Mountain Park for a future total of 617 acres of new public parkland and 18 miles of trails.”
Amazing work, y’all! Support land conservation organizations!
On the dinner menu was a new-to-us brewery, Moon Hollow Brewing, part of the reimagining of old Prices Fork Elementary School. While waiting in the food truck line, Jim struck up a conversation with a fellow from the Charlotte area who moved here in retirement. Seems he loves Blacksburg like we do and has made a lot of friends, some of whom he was hanging out with at the brewery tonight. Why don’t we live here?
With a couple of hours of daylight still to go, we visited the Hahn Horticulture Garden on the Virginia Tech campus. We enjoyed a revelatory twilight wander in this amazing botanical world, 5.5 acres that felt infinite in design - how have we missed this?
Relax and enjoy the sunsetOn Friday morning Jim and I had to leave Shangri-La, but we stretched out our departure to ease the pain. First up was a bike ride on the Huckleberry Trail, a paved rail trail that includes connecting Blacksburg and Christiansburg. [Be advised, there are a number of spur trails off of the Huckleberry so know your route before you go. This website is most helpful for info and links for parking and route-finding.]
We started from the trailhead by the Blacksburg library and rode out to Highway 460, where the trail splits north and south. North goes to Heritage Community Park where we had explored earlier in the week. Today we took the south branch rolling up and down hills towards Christiansburg. At Coal Mining Heritage Park we turned around. Going back seemed harder and I walked my bike up one long stretch…what tired legs? Me?
Last gasp: We stopped at Beliveau Farm Winery/Brewery as we drove out of town, a spectacular setting with those front row Blue Ridge Mountains.
Very few folks were there in the early afternoon and we had the view to ourselves as we toasted to a unique adventure that we hope to repeat often.
Our expectations of a remote work week in Blacksburg were for nostalgia and comfort of a familiar place. Jim and I know that the university and the town continue to grow – after all, we visit a couple of times a year for home football games (more nostalgia). We were both surprised, though, at the abundance of outdoor recreation right outside our door. Breweries and restaurants come and go, but public lands well stewarded for all to enjoy are a gift that the New River Valley in southwestern Virginia does extremely well.
I returned home with the notion that any hometown has much to offer if you just look hard enough for parks, greenways, nature preserves, interpretive homesites, museums, galleries, and on and on. What are the top 10 natural/cultural/gastronomical points of interest where you live? Go deeper - what are the next 10, the next 20? Go ahead, surprise yourself!
~Wallace Stegner
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