There’s some great Riverrock coverage in today’s Times-Dispatch. If you plan on heading down sometime this weekend, here’s your schedule of events. This is Riverrock’s fifth year and every year they add something new. Last year, they moved from two to three days and from just Brown’s Island to Brown’s Island and Historic Tredegar. Here’s a look at my Riverrock preview on today’s Sports front and click “Continue Reading” below for a list of what’s new.  

Also, if you ran last year’s Filthy 5K mud run, you may have noticed a lot of emergency services personnel running around on Tredegar Street and the Belle Isle footbridge toward the end of the race. Two runners, one 12 years old, went into cardiac arrest within 2 minutes of each other. Click here for my story from A1.

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Dominion Riverrock, Richmond’s riverlife celebration starts this Friday and runs through Sunday. Last year over 65,000 people attended the event over the three days. And the weather looks to be just as good this year, with highs in the 80s and chances for scattered thunderstorms. Registrations for the sporting events on May 17-19 will be accepted online until tonight (Tuesday, May 14) at 11:59 p.m. Admission is free, but anyone wishing to compete in a Dominion Riverrock event must pay to enter. Walk-up registration for all events will be accepted on site unless the event has reached its capacity.

Dominion Riverrock also features live concerts throughout the weekend, an interactive village, and sporting events including the Miller Lite Filthy 5k, James River Scramble 10k Trail Run, Urban Assault mountain bike race, Boulder Bash, Slacklining, and more.  For event registration and further information about Dominion Riverrock 2013, go to www.dominionriverrock.com.

Schedule of Events:

Thursday, May 16

 Friday, May 17

 Saturday, May 18

 Sunday, May 19

The Sports Backers announced on Monday its new course through Downtown, The Capitol, Jackson Ward, and Oregon Hill for the annual Times-Dispatch Go! Discover Richmond walking event on May 4. This year’s 6.2-mile course will showcase some of Richmond’s greatest treasures, such as historic sites and landmarks, restaurants and boutiques. Participants can look forward to surprises around each turn, including antique cars, costumed interpreters, and live music.

Credit: Sports Backers

Online registration for Times-Dispatch Go! Discover Richmond is available at www.sportsbackers.org.  The entry fee is $20 for adults and $10 for youth 18 and under through March 15, when the fee will increase $5. For more information, visit www.sportsbackers.org.

This year The Times-Dispatch is dedicating the weekend of May 3-5 to discovering Richmond. In addition to stepping out on Saturday for the Go! Discover Richmond walk, on Friday, May 3 you can join The Times-Dispatch and the Flying Squirrels for fireworks at Discover Richmond night at The Diamond. And on Sunday, May 5, you can pick up Discover Richmond Magazine inside The Times-Dispatch.  The annual guide explores new places to dine, shop, and have fun in the Richmond region – all things participants will explore in the Times-Dispatch Go! Discover Richmond event, too.

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The singletrack through the woods is taking shape.

I took a stroll on Chapel Island yesterday, checking out the progress the city’s trails crew has made since beginning work a few weeks back on a trail system and non-motorized boat put-in. I wrote about the changes coming to Chapel Island in a recent Times-Dispatch column. Changes are also in the works for Great Shiplock Park, just across the canal from Chapel Island. A fancy new trailhead for the Virginia Capital Trail is to be installed there. VCT Executive Director Beth Weisbrod said they should get the final permits from the city this week and that construction will begin around March 1. She also said that an anonymous $100,000 donation came in recently that helped get them across the goalline on the project. Cool stuff in the works.

Click Continue Reading below for more pictures.

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Shenandoah NP in winter. View from Pignut Mountain. Credit: wikipedia.org

With 46 (and counting) titles to his name, Johnny Molloy might be the most prolific outdoors guidebook writer on the planet. If there’s an official statistic on the subject, I’m not sure where it resides. But I know Molloy has got to be in the conversation.

I profiled the Johnson City, Tenn.-based writer this past Sunday in my T-D Outdoors column. His most recent effort is called “Top Trails: Shenandoah National Park — Must-Do Hikes for Everyone.” It’s a great reference for experienced and newbie hikers alike and not a bad idea as a stocking stuffer for that mountains-loving someone on your Christmas list.

The Chattahoochee River at Peachtree Corners, Ga.

This isn’t a Central Virginia item, but I came across it on one of my favorite websites — The Outdoor News Hub — and figured there’d be plenty of area hikers who’d find it interesting.According to Jeff Martin of the Associated Press, the Trust for Public Land has been working for years to acquire the land needed to allow hikers at the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail in northern Georgia to continue hiking all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. The AT ends near the Chattahoochee River‘s headwaters in the mountains of north Georgia, and the idea is for this new trail to follow the river south to the Florida border where it will pick up the Apalachicola River to the Gulf.The trust has already acquired and set aside 17,000 acres of land that touch 76 river miles from the Chattahoochee’s headwaters to Columbus. One Trust for Public Land employee said he thought the trail could be completed in the next decade.

The Chattahoochee is in dark blue.

It’s already amazing that the AT extends 2,184 miles from Maine to Georgia. Adding another 500 or so miles would make the trail that much cooler, and make completing the hike even more impressive.

On Friday, a friend and I drove out to Charlottesville to do some mountain biking with another friend who’d just moved out there. The newly minted C-Villian (or is it C-Villain?) had been exploring the Rivanna Trail and said it was a great way to get to know the city. We spent about three hours tooling around the Rivanna and the steep, rocky trails of U.Va.’s Observatory Hill (gotta bring the big boy/girl quads for O-Hill). It was a lot of fun, and I wrote about the adventure in my column in today’s Times-Dispatch.

Crossing Meadow Creek on the Rivanna Trail

It’s absolutely worth the drive to spend a day running, hiking or biking the Rivanna Trail. And if it sounds like something you want to check out, definitely go to the Rivanna Trail Foundation website first. They have a few different maps and some written instructions for getting around on the trail, which is not nearly as easy as you’d think.

Terrain360.com screenshot of Belle Isle

It looks like our friends at Terrain360.com might have company — and not just any company — in their quest to take camera-based mapping where it’s never gone before. Google has rolled its “StreetView” technology off the city streets and into five California National Parks. You can now get the same StreetView experience at Joshua Tree, Sequoia & Kings Canyon, Redwood, Yosemite and Death Valley national parks.

There’s a difference, though, and it’s a big one between what Terrain360.com does and what Google has done in those five parks. Richmond-based Terrain360.com actually takes you onto the trails in parks all over Virginia. Google’s mapping of five California national parks still relies on shots taken from the road in those places. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very cool to get a tour of Yosemite without having to go there, but it’s also very different from what Terrain360 is planning, say, with the Appalachian Trail in Virginia (offering a visual tour of the entire length of it).

Until the Googlers gets out of their cars and off the beaten, asphalt path — and I don’t see that happening any time soon — our friends at Terrain360 will still be the only ones in the country (as far as I know) doing what they do. Oh, and by the way, you can find their trail tours right here at RichmondOutside.com. Every local destination they’ve mapped, we’ve got a link to. Try Belle Isle, for instance.

Buttermilk Trail was a mess yesterday afternoon. I actually didn’t ride all that much of it — just the section from 21st St. to Reedy Creek — because it was impassable in so many places. Sadly, the worst damage I saw was to the relatively new boardwalk skinnies over the wetland area not too far east of Reedy Creek. I remember when the city trail crew and a host of volunteers built this thing. It took a ton of labor and man hours to construct it. It might be a while before it’s open again. Here are some pics.

Looking east

Looking west

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking west

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Looking east

Credit: Jesse Peters/Backlight

In today’s T-D I offer my take on what it could mean for Richmond to win Outside Magazine’s “Best Town Ever” contest. This year the focus of the contest is on cities with a strong relationship with the river (or rivers) running through them. Outside teamed up with the non-profit advocacy group American Rivers to whittle a list of 80 or so cities/towns down to the 10 finalists. In addition to Richmond, the other finalists are Nevada City, Calif., Hood River, Ore., Nashville, Tenn., Asheville, N.C., Ithaca, N.Y., Milwaukee, Boise, Idaho, Missoula, Mont., and Durango, Colo.

Voting is being conducted on Facebook through July 10. You can vote once a day, every day. You can also post comments and upload your favorite pictures, which is just as important as voting since “enthusiasm” is a component of the final decision. The winning city will be featured on the front of the October issue of Outside — the magazine’s 35th anniversary issue.

As of this writing, Richmond was way out in the lead in both votes (close to 2,000) and enthusiasm (363 comments, dozens upon dozens of pics). Nevada City, Calif. is currently in second with 450 votes. It would be pretty cool to see the River City get some credit for being the incredible outdoor recreation destination it already is.