Hiking Virginia: Newport News Park

Distance: 5 miles
Start: Discovery Center
Difficulty: Easy
Admission: Free
Pets: Allowed on a leash
Accessibility:
Camping: 188 large, shady sites (fee charged)
Link to Park Website

Highlights: Reservoir, boardwalk overlooks, wildlife, Civil War earthenworks, varied habitats

As Hurricane Earl is doing a cat-and-mouse with the Atlantic Coast, we headed to the Virginia Peninsula for a night of camping and hiking in Newport News Park.

The nation’s largest municipal park—8,000 acres—is a gem of woods, marsh and lake habitats and more than 30 miles of hiking and biking trails just off busy Interstate 64.

If you ever find yourself backed up in traffic getting to Hampton Roads, consider hopping off at the Ft. Eustis exit to do a leg-stretcher, ranging from the .4-mile nature trail, to five miles connecting the White Oak, Wynn’s Mill, Twin Forts and a couple of other connectors. We did the later and so much wildife: ducks, swans, turtles, egrets and great blue heron on the reservoir; several deer and even an owl in the woods.

Got your bike along? The 5.3-mile Bikeway is a winner and connects to adjacent Yorktown Battlefield. The park also rents bikes at the Campground office.

Newport News Park will be a new chapter in the update of our book, Hiking Virginia, a National Outdoor Book Award winner in 2000. Between now and next spring, we’ll be rehiking, re-photographing and GPS-ing many of the hikes in the book, plus adding some new ones. Follow the progress here!

Hiking Virginia Book Update

When we’re not paddling this fall, we’ll be hitting the trail, quite literally, for the 3rd edition of our first book, Hiking Virginia. It’s been 10 years since we did the initial research, so we are going to re-hike many of them, add new chapters (like James River State Park, which wasn’t even open back then!), and add GPS coordinates and color photos to every chapter. 

We’re excited to make this book we love even better: a National Outdoor Book Award Honorable Mention, it has sold more than 20,000 copies. 

We’ll be posting trail reports here weekly, from easy walks near cities, like Newport News Park, to the lung-busting 100-plus-mile Pine Mountain Trail that follows the high ridge between Virginia and Kentucky.  The first post will be up soon!

Blue Ridge Parkway Turns 75

The Blue Ridge Parkway’s 75^th Anniversary culminates Sept. 10-12 at the VA/NC border in Galax, VA and Cumberland Knob, NC where Parkway construction began on Sept. 11, 1935. Click for details.

Dubbed America’s Favorite Drive as the most-visited national park in the nation, the Blue Ridge Parkway is celebrating its 75^th anniversary this year. But tourism to this region dates much further, back to Thomas Jefferson who became enamored with the Peaks of Otter.

National Parks Service District Superintendent Peter Givens explains how this 469-mile road traversing three states came about:

“Someone put the bug in President Roosevelt’s ear that we could create a third national park that would be a graceful, recreational mountain road that would reveal the natural and cultural history of the southern highlands, connecting Shenandoah National Park in the north and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee to the south.”

Read the complete article by Mary Burnham in the September 2010 issue of Hampton Roads Magazine.

Black History Month in Virginia

Each February, up to 100 African American horseback riders take an 8-mile ride through the Hampton Roads city of Portsmouth, this year on Feb. 20. They do it in honor of the Buffalo Soldiers, the black Cavalry of the US Army, established in 1866.

See more Black History Month events throughout Virginia at www.Virginia.org