Blacksburg Closed Its Last Trail Gap This Spring. The Money That Built It Won't Come Around Twice.

How do you get from the middle of downtown Blacksburg into the Jefferson National Forest without spending any real time on pavement built for cars? Until this spring, the honest answer was that you didn't, not the whole way. You could ride most of it on protected trail, and then you hit a stretch where you had no choice but to share the road with traffic.

That gap just closed. And the way it closed says something worth knowing if you walk, ride, or run these trails regularly, because the funding pattern that built this connection is already changing.

The Island Everyone Rode Around

Heritage Park, on the north side of town, has been open for years with its own walking trails and a natural area worth visiting on its own. The problem was that it never connected to anything else. Dean Crane, Blacksburg's Parks and Recreation director, put it plainly when describing the town's long-term goal for the site.

"We got the Heritage Park, which was great, but it was an island. It didn't connect to anything. And the vision was, how do we connect town to Heritage, and Heritage to Pandapas Pond area."

For anyone trying to ride from Heritage Park toward the mountain bike trails on Brush Mountain, that meant a stretch of Meadowbrook Drive with real traffic. One mountain biker described the old route to a local TV crew last summer, saying the road section could get busy depending on the time of day, and that sharing it wasn't always comfortable. It was the kind of gap that didn't show up on a trail map as a problem, just as a thin connecting line that happened to run down the middle of a road.

What the Meadowbrook Greenway Actually Fixed

The fix is the Meadowbrook Greenway, a paved trail and boardwalk that runs from the end of Heritage Park's existing walking trail to the parking lot at the corner of Glade Road and Meadowbrook Drive. That intersection is also the trailhead for McDonald Hollow, the first trail network built inside Brush Mountain Park. Construction started in March 2025, designed by the engineering firm RK&K and built by King Construction, and needed two separate landowners to grant easements before crews could break ground. It opened to public use this spring.

That single connector is why the Town of Blacksburg can now say something it couldn't say a year ago: a rider or walker can go from the center of town into the national forest almost entirely on trail that's physically separated from car traffic. Blacksburg has spent the past several years building out what now totals more than 60 miles of trail, and town officials say the Meadowbrook Greenway alone opened up access to more than 55 miles of connected recreational trail once you count everything it now links.

Here's what's actually stitched together on the other side of that boardwalk:

• McDonald Hollow, roughly 200 acres with 5.4 miles of trail spread across seven routes, including the flowier Ida May Trail and the expert-level Blunderbuss Trail further up the mountain. It opened first and sits right at the Glade Road and Meadowbrook Drive trailhead.
• Stonecutter's Hollow, purchased in the same 2018 land deal as McDonald Hollow, part of the same 552-acre buy at the foot of Brush Mountain.
• Millstone Ridge, a roughly 205-acre parcel the town helped acquire in 2021. It currently has 3.8 miles open with three more trails planned, and it has no direct trailhead parking of its own. You get there by riding or walking in from Heritage Park or from the Pandapas Pond lot.
• From there, the network reaches into the Poverty Creek Trail System around Pandapas Pond, inside the Jefferson National Forest itself.

That last detail about Millstone Ridge is worth sitting with. This isn't a park you drive to and unload your bike at the trailhead. Part of getting there is treating the ride in as part of the outing, which changes how you plan a visit if you're used to parking right next to the trail you want.

A Land Trust Did Most of the Heavy Lifting

The town didn't build this network alone, and knowing who did explains a lot about how it came together. The New River Land Trust, a nonprofit focused on protecting farmland, forest, and open space across the region, received a $1.2 million grant from the Virginia Outdoors Foundation's Forest CORE Fund back in 2018. That grant paid for the purchase of the McDonald Hollow and Stonecutter's Hollow properties, 552 acres combined, placed under conservation easement. In 2021, the Town of Blacksburg secured a separate $210,000 grant from the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation that let the land trust add the Millstone Ridge parcel.

The physical trail building fell largely to volunteers. The Poverty Creek Trails Coalition and a contractor called Eastern Trail Co. cut the actual tread on McDonald Hollow and the rest of Brush Mountain Park. Ownership of each parcel transfers from the land trust to the town only once trail construction on that piece is finished, which is part of why the network has come together in stages rather than all at once. The long-term plan calls for 20 miles of trail across more than 700 acres once every parcel is built out, so what's open today is a meaningful chunk of that, not the finished product.

Why This Might Be the High-Water Mark for a While

Here's the part that matters if you're hoping the next connection comes just as quickly. Blacksburg paid for a lot of its recent bike and pedestrian infrastructure, including the Meadowbrook Greenway, using American Rescue Plan Act funds that arrived after COVID. That money is gone. Town Manager Matt Hanratty has been candid that the town is now working with a much smaller pool of dollars, and that federal grants the town might otherwise have leaned on for pedestrian and bike safety work were canceled last year at the federal level.

Hanratty's framing was direct: Blacksburg is a comparatively large town for Virginia, but still a small one, and building this kind of infrastructure takes years and real money that isn't guaranteed to keep flowing. The next round of improvements he's mentioned, things like better lighting and signage at crosswalks, will happen as funding allows rather than on a fixed timeline. The land acquisition side depends just as much on outside grants landing again for the land trust, which isn't something the town controls.

None of that undoes what opened this spring. It just means the version of the trail network you can ride today, from downtown through Heritage Park, across the Meadowbrook Greenway, into McDonald Hollow and toward Pandapas Pond, might be close to what exists for a while before the next piece gets added.

Worth Knowing Either Way

If you already live near Heritage Park or on the north side of town, this is the kind of change that's easy to miss unless someone tells you directly, because a boardwalk opening doesn't make headlines the way a new business does. But it changes what an ordinary Tuesday evening ride or a Saturday morning walk with the dog can look like, and it's one more piece of what makes this corner of Blacksburg feel connected rather than scattered.

We spend a lot of time paying attention to details like this, not because they show up on a listing sheet, but because they're part of what it actually means to live somewhere. If you're weighing a move to Blacksburg, or you're already here and curious what else has quietly changed nearby, Wendy Swanson and the team are glad to talk through it, no pressure, just a conversation with people who live here too.