Dog Walking Adventures in York County, Virginia

Most weekends, when we are in town, we take the dog on long walks. It’s the best he gets all week! There are nice parks in the region but they require longish drives on bad roads, the burning of more gas and longer times staring at the windshield.  So, we sought out a walk closer to home.  One park that I knew of is behind the York County sports complex and is called Harwood Mills.  It’s a little park, near the reservoir, the power lines and some tree farms.  Then, Adrienne mentioned a green space with power lines behind Grafton High School.  There’s also woods near a main road called Denbigh Blvd. with several access pull offs.  It’s kind of an extended part of the road, where the cars drive fast.

We went to Harwood Mills and walked those paths several times. They wind through the woods and my understanding is that they were cut by the local mountain biking association.  The woods are fine and the paths are too, although they’re very convoluted for walking.     

Then one day, we went behind Grafton H.S. and walked the powerlines. I mentioned to Adrienne that I was pretty sure that those powerlines could take us to Harwood Mills.  We walked in that direction and sure enough, we made it to the park.  Trouble was, we walked the causeway over the reservoir and were thus on the other side of the reservoir.  We walked along the water on the other side, but the water never went away, even when my gps said that it should be gone. Instead there were wetlands and a braided stream in the woods.  It was a beautiful, warm February day, the setting was lovely, and we even saw a water snake!  Ultimately, to get back to the power lines, we had to go all the way to Denbigh Blvd to get over the water.  That ended up being a 5.1 mile walk in the woods and we were pretty thirsty by the end.

So the last two times we went to the pull-offs on Denbeigh and walked through the tree farm and back over to Harwood Mills.  That walk, at times took us close to the PHF airport depending on how we went.  There are also ways, we’re pretty sure, to connect with the National Park, and I’m pretty sure we’ve already touched on Newport News park.  We’ve definitely been to those two parks on other days entering from those areas.

Anyhow, the point is, there is a lot of really great walking and bike riding areas right here in lower York County.  My one word of caution, though, is this.  When we walked through the tree farm we did notice some smelly piles of what I thought at first, was horse dung.  It was pretty funny looking though and later, when I told my friend, Wes Hudson, who did his PhD work in local tree farms, he let me in on a little nugget of wisdom.  He said the interesting thing about that particular tree farm is that it is the place where the county sprays it’s biosolids, also known as the stuff that is at the end of the sewage treatment process.  It’s supposedly a very nutritious fertilizer, but farmers generally don’t want it.  Certainly it’s not full of pharmaceuticals or anything nasty like that, is it??  Anyhow, I guess the take home lesson is that when walking through the tree farm, keep the dog on the leash!

My only other concern is the close proximity of the biosolids tree farm to the drinking water reservoir.  I guess they’ve implemented the proper BMPs.  Who knows, maybe there's an interesting project for someone to study!

 This is actually a lie because this pic was taken at Queens Creek.  We were, however, walking the dog and it was a Saturday.

This is the first big walk (red line) where we had to go to Denbigh (top of the pic) to get around the water. Denbigh also borders the tree farm.

This is one of our other walks where we began at Denbigh and walked south towards the airport.

This is a zoom out showing a good chunk of the Peninsula and our walk in red for reference.

Ahh, the lovely tree farm...

I think this is a biosolids storage structure.

Oh yeah, and this is the dog, after a walk, of course. His name is Hampton. We call him "Ham".