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Why Sugar Hill?

As travelers pass by the small town of St. Paul, Virginia, on alternative route 58, they may notice a little blue and white sign announcing “hiking/biking.” I drove by this sign at least a hundred times before I bothered to stop, assuming that the wayside was a small town park with a playground and paved walking path. Imagine my surprise when I was finally introduced to eight miles of trails threaded through a hundred acres of woodlands and meadows.

Sugar Hill contains the only public hiking trails along the Clinch River in Virginia. The river itself must be seen to be believed, with its rare aquatic life including the two-foot long Hellbender salamander and 21 types of federally threatened or endangered mussels and fish. The Nature Conservancy calls the Clinch the number one river worth protecting in entire the continental United States, and I would add that it is certainly the number one river worth visiting.

But Sugar Hill is more than just a river trail --- it is a microcosm of central Appalachian ecology. Spend a day or two on its trails and you will walk through floodplains, cove hardwoods, and oak-hickory forests, through open fields, young woods, and climax forest. Here, you can listen to the spring chorus of mating frogs and toads, uncover the secrets of the smelly millipede, and trace the history of a sex-changing flower. Sugar Hill even offers a human mystery for the amateur historian, a real-life whodunit which has yet to be solved. All told, the preserve is the perfect spot for naturalists to hone their skills of identification and deduction.