Our Mission - Hiking and Nature Discovery
The first step in getting outdoors is to discover good places to take a walk. Our site provides recommendations for trails in the Central Virginia that might interest you, and offers mobile apps that can guide you along the walk. Using our tools, you can travel with confidence in the woods, because your smartphone will show you the path to take.
Our site also has a special focus on enjoying nature while walking in the great outdoors. The guided hikes described here will help you find and learn about a few interesting natural features in each park such as wildflowers, trees, and birds. Our Parks section continues this theme by offering inventories of the plants and birds found in selected parks, while our Activities section presents special interest activities such as tree tours and wildflower walks. We encourage all users to take the time to observe nature as they travel along the trail, and most of the recommended trails can be completed at a leisurely pace.
Mobile Aids for Hikers
All of our tools are designed to be used on your iPhone or Android smartphones, so that you can receive guidance and information as you walk the trail. Here are a few examples of the hiking aids you will find on this site. This is just to familiarize you with the types of tools available – we will explain how to use them later.
GPS Hiking Apps – Finding Your Way in the Outdoors
Similar to Google or Apple Maps, these are commercially available apps that use the location services on your smartphone to find and locate you on a map, and then track your progress across the landscape. Unlike those other common apps, they are specifically designed to help hikers navigate in the outdoors. We will help you choose an app that works with our site, and teach you how to use it. You can get a flavor for the features of these apps by visiting the Web site for Ramblr
Guided Hikes – The Easy Way to Travel
To help you get started on your outdoor adventures, we have created a number of hiking guides for some of the popular trails in our area. You can download these files to the app on your smartphone and follow along as you walk the trail. These guides provide the following benefits:
- Descriptions of the hike and the park
- A well-defined path to follow on your walk
- Turn instructions at trail intersections
- Location of amenities such as parking, restrooms, playgrounds, and so on.
- Location of natural features such as birds, wildflowers, trees, and others.
- Photos and audio for points along the trail
- Links to Web sites for additional information about the park and its features
Have a look at one of these hikes here: North Anna Battlefield Blue Trail
Specialty Hikes – Learning More About Nature
For the nature lover, we offer guides targeted at specific interests, such as birding, wildflowers, trees or geology. These guides will help you find and identify wildlife along the trail. Here is an example of a wildflower hike.
Challenges – Go a Little Farther
As you gain experience in hiking, you may want to challenge yourself to complete a set of goals. Examples might include hiking 10 different trails in Chesterfield County, hiking as many of the trails in your favorite hiking book as you can, or completing all of the kid-friendly trails in the Richmond area. We will provide you with a few suggestions, along with a spreadsheet to keep track of your progress. Shown below is an example.
Challenge Map | Challenge Checklist
Scavenger Hunts – Test Your Skills
As you learn more about nature, you may want to test your skills. Our scavenger hunts challenge you to find a number of different species of wildlife along a given set of trails. They are based on actual, verified observations of these species at specific locations on or near the trail. We will provide you with a trail guide to follow, hints as to the locations of past observations, and a checklist of the species with photos and text.
Scavenger Map Scavenger Checklist
Additional Trails
Guided hikes are the best option for the person new to outdoor adventures, presenting the top hikes in the region and providing guidance on the trail. At some point, however, you may want to further explore a specific park by hiking additional trails in that park. Our park pages offer collections of additional hikes for a specific park, allowing you to experience all the park has to offer. You can download these collections and choose which hikes to take. Here is an example for Pocahontas State Park.
Park Inventories
For featured parks, our naturalists walk the trails and catalog the wildlife that they find. We then create an inventory of species by groups, such as birds, wildflowers, and trees. These inventories include photos, text, and Web links, and can be used to help identify and learn about the species that you encounter as you walk the trails. Here is an inventory of wildflowers for Deep Run Park.
Ready to Go Hiking? Use our Quick Start Guide