Sonya Silver and her family had been paddling on the Rivanna and James River for the last seven days. Rainstorms had soaked them, and their weathered hands pushed their canoes through 100 miles of low water. But they had never been freer of life’s demands.
Travel
Maryland has 23 counties. All are home to at least one state park, except one.
On a Tuesday afternoon in late March, I hopped on my bike at the Patterson Trailhead in Wellsboro, PA, and headed north. Here in the center of Tioga County, snow from the night before still dusted pockets of shade along the trail.
About two dozen people garbed in winter clothes massed at the edge of a grassy field alive with the sound of murmuring birds. Pretty soon, the people started murmuring, too.
High above the trees, accompanied only by soaring birds and the rushing sound of the Appomattox River far below, Jeanene Fisher finds that she’s always relaxed while visiting High Bridge Trail State Park near Farmville, VA. As a mental health counselor, she decided to bring her clients. As t…
An effort to map sites important to African American history in the Chesapeake Bay region has uncovered dozens of previously undocumented examples and shed new light on many more — many with close ties to waterways and the Bay itself.
Shepherdstown, WV, is a community with a fascinating blend of frontier spirit, cultural traditions and a reputation for hospitality. Also home to Shepherd University, Shepherdstown shines with an ever-evolving atmosphere of progressive thinking. However, first and foremost, Shepherdstown is …
With walls of green forests climbing mountainsides in every direction, it’s hard to envision a time when Greenwood Furnace State Park was anything other than a hub for hiking, swimming and fishing.
Dragonflies hovered above the water to keep up with tourists cruising on the James River and Kanawha Canal. Loren Gustus and her girlfriend, Makayla Smith, spotted two turtles sunbathing together on its edge.
White sand and sparkling water welcome visitors to Kiptopeke State Park, one of only a few public places on Virginia’s Eastern Shore offering direct access to the Chesapeake Bay. Protecting swimmers from the Bay’s sometimes strong waves are two short rows of scuttled concrete ships that doub…
Ask just about any stand-up paddleboarder familiar with the Eastern Shore of Maryland’s slow-moving streams, and they’ll tell you: An Eden lies just east of Easton.
It wasn’t until I got home that the full measure of what I had experienced came into focus.
It was midday. But with the winter solstice drawing near, the sun was close to its most southerly track and could only manage to produce a steady twilight beneath the evergreen canopy.
Ocean waves, seagull calls and soft drums greeted Brice Lingle and his three kids as a conveyor belt transported them to the top floor of Nauticus. His daughter Grace gravitated toward a displayed sailboat. Drawing on his days of sailing as a Boy Scout, Lingle explained each part of the boat.
The sight is startling no matter what direction you approach by vehicle. Descending from the Allegheny Front or rounding the bend of a river valley, Seneca Rocks doesn’t just come into view. It smacks your eyes: 900 feet of bare Tuscarora quartzite rising straight up from a tributary to the …
Hiking the Rockfish Valley Trail System is no mere walk in the woods. It is an immersive exploration of ecology, hydrology and environmental history.
The phrase “Underground Railroad” — a term describing the network of routes and stations that freedom-seekers used to flee from slavery — demonstrates the limits of metaphor.
Some trees are spectacular to behold. Some are imbued with history. And some are both.
Cover photo: Recreational climber Paige Agnew scales the Manchester Wall in Richmond as Kasey Choice feeds her rope on June 29, 2024. (Lauren Hines-Acosta)
Seven Tubs Recreation Area, a small but breathtakingly beautiful gorge in northeastern Pennysylania, sculpted ages ago by glacial meltwater, has been reopened. It was closed in 2023 to allow the state to repair damages caused by a sudden glut of visitors during the COVID pandemic.
Few natural areas in the Mid-Atlantic region contrast as sharply with their surroundings as Patapsco Valley State Park, especially around Daniels Dam.
Looming over a ghost town in the rolling mountains of West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle lies Ice Mountain, whose once mysterious ability to store ice and breathe out cold air much of the year has fascinated travelers and historians for two centuries.
Tucked into the back of the Library of Virginia in Richmond is a small exhibit with a pretty high aim: to help tribal communities based in the state tell the stories of their present-day lives.
You can’t spell “Baltimore” without “more” — as in more asphalt, more factories, more rowhouses, more parking garages, more office buildings, more of everything. But Bruce Willen’s new public art project invites observers to imagine Maryland’s most populous city with less.
No sooner had I met Stephanie Mason than she had me squinting up at a maze of tree branches in search of a Carolina wren calling down to us. I imagine that many of her acquaintanceships begin this way.
“Whimsy this way,” a small sculpture of Pan, the Greek god of wilderness, seems to say from his post near a pool of water at Dumbarton Oaks.
Looking for a place to stroll or bicycle through a dense forest, spy a bald eagle and comb a sandy beach for shells and shark teeth? Try Douglas Point on the Potomac River in Southern Maryland.
As she made her way out of Pennsylvania’s newest coal mine tour near Scranton, PA, an elderly woman stopped to thank one of the tour guides.
The Ned Smith Center for Nature and Art near the historic Susquehanna River town of Millersburg, PA, is not entirely a museum, nor an art gallery, nor exactly a nature center. It melds elements of all three into a unique destination.
We’d walked nearly two miles and through a handful of habitats, spotting red-winged blackbirds, tree swallows, egrets and evidence of active beavers by the time we saw the first house in the distance.
Skipjacks, deadrises, log canoes, tall ships, bugeyes — the Chesapeake Bay has no shortage of iconic boats. But if a core group of devotees has anything to do with it, a vessel closely associated with the South Pacific could be next.
Cover photo: Along the Cacapon River in West Virginia, low-lying rock ledges lead to a quickening of the pace. None of the rapids are classified higher than Class II, making for a relatively stress-free paddle. (Jeremy Cox)
Why do forest leaves that smell like a stable, wet nuggets of poop and chewed tree bark 6 feet off the ground excite Russ Gleixner in the spring?
The steel wheels clickety-clacked over the 175-year-old railroad joints and groaned in protest when brakes were applied on the curves. The rhythmic movements lulled the riders as they traveled through wooded glens and past handsome 19th-century farms.
A proverb from the coldest climes of Europe holds that “there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.”
But for the insistence of my GPS app, I would have missed the entrance. The little arrow on my phone pointed left, but all I could see was a brick driveway. For all I knew, the road, which was only wide enough to carry a single vehicle at a time, belonged to one of the homes on either side of it.
Cover photo: A visitor at Black Moshannon State Park in Pennsylvania surveys frozen Black Moshannon Lake. (Courtesy of PABucketlist.com)
Not all that long ago, these glassy lakes were sand pits used by the Virginia Department of Transportation for the construction of Interstate 64. This postcard-ready scene of oaks and cypress trees was once an illegal trash dump. And this entire 456-acre haven for greenery used to be the sce…
One early Pennsylvania settler from England was dismayed by his newfound home.
Cover photo: The Thousand Steps trail, built with rocks on Jacks Mountain in Huntingdon County, PA, rises above morning mist and fall colors. (Ad Crable)
A long a dusty road in Tioga State Forest near the northern edge of Pennsylvania, a sign marks the remains of Camp Leetonia. A picture shows a scene from nearly a century ago: a cleared field lined with military-style barracks and other buildings.
Looking for someplace quiet to paddle along verdant shores? To follow butterflies flitting across fields of wildflowers and hear birds calling as you stroll through a forest? To picnic by the water or cast a fishing line?
You can now walk or bike across one of the longest and highest railroad trestles in the nation, travelling high above the Susquehanna River for one of the river’s most breathtaking views.
David Conard of Asheville, NC, stood next to his bike in a grassy area carved from the base of a steep mountainside along gently flowing Pine Creek. His stop was near the midway point of the breathtaking Grand Canyon — in Pennsylvania, not Arizona.
In this era of exploding attendance at state and national parks, the concept of escaping to a place off the beaten path possesses fresh appeal.
Out of a crucible that included pioneering Scot-Irish farmers and the industrialist du Pont family’s fox hunting and equestrian passions has emerged one of Maryland’s most varied recreational opportunities.
Nancy Ware Sapp erupted in glee as she spotted a juvenile green heron, its feathers iridescent in the morning light, perched in a tree beside a wetland, regarding us inquisitively only 50 feet away.
For years, the backyard garden at George Mason IV’s historic home near the banks of the Potomac River featured, like many Colonial era residences, rows of ancient-looking boxwoods. Then the operators of Gunston Hall started doing some digging.
When I’m walking to the mailbox, letting the dogs outside or otherwise outdoors with time on my hands, I bring up an app on my mobile phone and tap the “record” button. A black-and-white spectrogram materializes at the top half of my screen.
Rockfish Gap, at 1,900-foot above sea level, is one of the lowest ridge elevations along Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Today, Interstate 64 and VA Route 250 cross the gap, which offers scenic views of the Piedmont hills and Charlottesville to the east and the Shenandoah Valley to the west.