Wild Appalachia: The Great Outdoors of Virginia & Beyond

Wild Appalachia: The Great Outdoors of Virginia & Beyond Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Wild Appalachia: The Great Outdoors of Virginia & Beyond, Digital creator, Blue Ridge, VA.

🌄 Celebrating the wild beauty of Virginia & Beyond
📍 Scenic trails, mountain views, waterfalls, wildlife, and outdoor adventures
👉 Follow along and discover your next favorite place
🌿 Your daily escape into the great outdoors

The wildest thing happening in these mountains in August happens at two in the morning, about four feet off the ground, ...
08/19/2026

The wildest thing happening in these mountains in August happens at two in the morning, about four feet off the ground, and almost nobody goes and looks at it. 🌙

The setup could not be simpler. Hang an old white sheet between two trees, put a light behind it, and wait. Warm, humid, moonless nights are best, and August is the peak of it. Within an hour you will have moths on that sheet that you have never seen in your life, and some of them are the size of your hand. Virginia has thousands of moth species compared to only about 170 butterflies, and most of them are working the night shift right over our heads while we sleep.

Scientists call it mothing, and it is one of the few kinds of wildlife watching where the animals come to you. 🦋 A regular LED shop light works. A blacklight works better. Kids lose their minds over it. And a real courtesy: kill the light after a couple hours and take the sheet down, so the insects get back to their night instead of circling a bulb until daylight.

You could do this tonight in your own backyard for the price of a sheet. What is the biggest moth you have ever found on your porch?





08/15/2026

We named the oldest thing in the region "New." Somebody in the 1600s made that call and we have all just been living with it ever since. 😄

The New River is what geologists call an antecedent stream, which means it was already flowing on its course before the land it crosses was pushed up. Instead of being diverted when the Appalachians rose, it simply cut down through the rock as fast as the mountains lifted, and it has been sawing through them ever since. That is why it runs straight across the grain of the ridges instead of following the valleys like every other river around here, and it is a big part of why it flows north when almost nothing else in this country does.

You will hear people say it is the second oldest river on earth after the Nile. 🛶 That specific claim is folklore more than geology, and researchers go back and forth on how to date a river at all. What is not in dispute is that it is ancient, that it predates the mountains, and that it holds species found almost nowhere else. In Virginia you can ride 57 miles of the old rail line beside it on the New River Trail, and downstream in West Virginia it carved a gorge deep enough to become a national park.

Grayson, Carroll, Pulaski, Giles, take your pick. What is your stretch of the New, and what did you do on it?





Somewhere under all of that is a house where a family ate supper every night, and it took about fifteen summers to disap...
08/13/2026

Somewhere under all of that is a house where a family ate supper every night, and it took about fifteen summers to disappear. 🌿

Kudzu came to this country in 1876 as an ornamental at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and for a while everybody loved it. Then in the 1930s the federal government started handing it out on purpose. The Soil Conservation Service promoted it for erosion control, the Civilian Conservation Corps planted it across the South by the millions of seedlings, and farmers were actually paid by the acre to put it in the ground. Nobody stopped to ask what a vine that grows up to a foot a day in August would do once it ran out of hillside.

Here is the part that surprises people though. 🐐 Kudzu is nowhere near as widespread as its reputation. It looks like it has eaten the whole South because it grows exactly where we all see it, right along the roads and the railroad cuts. Researchers who actually measured it found far less of it than the legend claims. And in late summer it blooms, and those purple flowers smell exactly like grape soda. Folks around here make jelly out of them. Goats will clear a bank of it faster than any herbicide.

Every county has one spot where it has taken something over. What has kudzu swallowed near you?





08/13/2026

Step off a trail in Shenandoah, walk fifty yards into the woods, and you will eventually put your hand on a stone wall that somebody stacked by hand. 🏔️

The park was authorized in 1926, and Virginia acquired the land the hard way, through purchase and condemnation, then handed it over to the federal government. Roughly five hundred families lived in those mountains at the time. There were schools, churches, mills, post offices, and orchards up there. Some families sold and left. Some fought it all the way through the courts. A few dozen of the oldest residents were granted the right to stay in their homes for the rest of their lives, and the last of them lived into the late 1970s. Others were relocated into government-built homestead communities down in the valleys.

Then the woods took it all back, and it happened fast. 🌳 Chimneys still stand out there. So do springhouse foundations, rock walls, and small family cemeteries that descendants still walk in to tend. In spring the old yards give themselves away with daffodils blooming in the middle of nowhere, planted by somebody's grandmother a century ago.

Loving this park and remembering who lived there are not in conflict, they belong together. Does your family have a name that goes back to one of those hollows?





Every August the rivers drop, and things start showing up in them that were built before anybody in your family tree set...
08/13/2026

Every August the rivers drop, and things start showing up in them that were built before anybody in your family tree set foot in Virginia. 🪨

Those long V shaped lines of rock in the James, the Rappahannock, the Shenandoah, and the Roanoke are fish weirs. Indigenous people built them, some of them many hundreds of years ago, by hauling stones into the current and walling them into two arms that funnel the whole river toward one narrow opening. You set a basket or a trap at the point, and the river does the work for you. They are engineering, and they are still doing exactly what they were designed to do, which is why you can watch the current bend through them today.

Most of the year the water covers them and you would never know. 🛶 Then late summer comes, the flow drops, and the shape rises up out of the river like a signature. Some were reused by colonists for centuries after. Some appear on old maps. A few are visible from bridges if you know what you are looking at.

They are protected archaeological sites, so they get looked at and left alone. Do you know of a stretch of river near you where one of these shows up when the water gets low?





An August storm in these mountains gives you about four minutes of warning, and if your tarp is already up, those four m...
08/13/2026

An August storm in these mountains gives you about four minutes of warning, and if your tarp is already up, those four minutes are the best part of the whole trip. ⛺

Summer rain here is not like spring rain. It builds all afternoon, comes hard and loud for twenty or thirty minutes, and then quits and leaves the whole hollow steaming. Which means the first thing an experienced camper does when setting up in August is not the tent. It is the tarp. Get it high on one side and low on the other so the water runs off instead of pooling, stack your dry wood underneath it before the sky opens, and turn your boots over. Everything else can be sorted out later.

And then something happens that no gear catalog can sell you. 🌧️ You sit under six ounces of nylon with the whole forest roaring, the creek coming up, cold air rolling downhill ahead of the rain, and you are completely dry and completely fine. There is not a hotel room in Virginia that sleeps as well as that does.

Some people break camp at the first rumble and some people put another log on. Which one are you?





If you grew up in these mountains, somebody warned you about this one before you could read. 🔴It is called a velvet ant,...
08/13/2026

If you grew up in these mountains, somebody warned you about this one before you could read. 🔴

It is called a velvet ant, and here is the first surprising thing: it is not an ant at all. It is a wingless female wasp, and she spends her whole life on the ground, which is why you see her sprinting across gravel roads and bare dirt on hot August afternoons. The old name for her is cow killer, which is a serious exaggeration, but it came from somewhere. Her sting is genuinely one of the most painful of any insect in North America. Nobody who has taken one forgets it.

She is not out to bother anybody, though. 🐝 She is hunting for bumblebee nests, where she lays her eggs. Her armor is so tough that entomologists have struggled to pin her, and if you pick her up she will actually squeak at you, a real audible sound made by rubbing part of her abdomen. The males look completely different, have wings, and cannot sting at all. So every red velvet one you have ever seen walking the ground was a female.

Bright red on a bare road is nature being honest with you. What did the old folks in your family call these?





Nobody knew what time it was. Nobody had to. The rule was that you came in when you could not see the ball anymore. 🌙Sum...
08/13/2026

Nobody knew what time it was. Nobody had to. The rule was that you came in when you could not see the ball anymore. 🌙

Summer in these mountains ran on daylight. You went out after breakfast, you came back through at some point because you were starving, and then you were gone again until the light gave out. Your mother did not know exactly where you were, and that was fine, because you were somewhere between the creek, the barn, and three neighbors' yards, and everybody's mother was watching everybody's kids anyway. If you got hurt you walked it off. If you got thirsty you drank out of a hose and it tasted like hot rubber and you did not care.

The signal was different at every house. 🚲 Some families had a porch light that came on. Some had a cowbell. Some had a mother whose voice carried clean across a hollow and into the next county. But everybody understood it, and everybody dropped their bike right where they were standing and ran.

That was the whole summer, every summer, for years. What was the signal at your house that meant get home right now?





08/13/2026

There are places in Nelson County where the mountainside still has not grown back the way it was, and if you know what you are looking at, you can read that night off the land itself. 🕯️

The remnants of Hurricane Camille reached the Blue Ridge on August 19th, 1969, and stalled. Rain came down in amounts the mountains could not hold, more than two feet of it in a matter of hours, and the saturated slopes above Davis Creek, Tyro, and Massies Mill simply let go. Debris flows took houses off their foundations in the dark. Bridges went. Roads went. Rescue crews could not get in for days, so people got out with shovels and tractors and their own hands and started looking for their neighbors. One hundred and fifty-three Virginians lost their lives, and dozens were never recovered.

What stays with me is how ordinary that evening was. 🌧️ Supper was over. Kids were in bed. Nobody in that county went to sleep thinking anything was coming, because the storm was supposed to be spent. The mountains we love for their beauty are also steep, thin-soiled, and honest about what water can do, and August is when they prove it.

Nelson County has never stopped remembering, and the folks who were there can still tell you exactly where they were standing. What do you remember about that night, or what did your family pass down about it?





Right now there is more free food hanging along Virginia back roads than most people will notice all year, and elderberr...
08/13/2026

Right now there is more free food hanging along Virginia back roads than most people will notice all year, and elderberry is at the top of the list. 🫐

You can find it by the stems before you find it by the fruit. Elderberry holds its berries in a wide flat cluster on stems that turn a bright red purple, and the whole head droops when it gets heavy. Late July into August is the window. Our grandmothers made jelly out of it, and wine, and a syrup they gave out all winter to anybody who came down with something. The blossoms in June got fried or turned into cordial. Nothing about the plant went to waste.

Two things worth knowing before you pick any. 🌿 The berries need to be cooked, not eaten raw off the stem, and you strip the fruit off rather than throwing whole stems in the pot, because the stems and leaves will make you sick. And do not confuse it with pokeweed, which grows in the same ditches, has a thick magenta stalk, and hangs its berries in a long skinny cluster instead of a flat one. Poke berries are genuinely poisonous.

Elderberry jelly is one of those flavors you cannot buy in a store. Did your family put it up, and was it jelly, wine, or syrup?





Address

Blue Ridge, VA
22901

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Wild Appalachia: The Great Outdoors of Virginia & Beyond posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category