EDITOR’S NOTE: Annie Bailey, a rising senior at St. Gertrude, is interning with us at RichmondOutside.com this summer. She’ll be exploring the area and writing on a range of topics. This is her first piece.

The Riverside Outfitters outpost on Brown’s Island.

Being the shopaholic that I am, when first asked to go visit and explore the Riverside Outfitters Outpost on Brown’s Island I was expecting a store full of river-related apparel and outfits. However, rather than a clothing store, what I found was a place that could outfit me with an abundance of river and recreational activities right in downtown RVA’s own beautiful backyard.

The Outpost offers kayaks, standup paddleboards and mountain bikes for rent, providing customers with the ability to walk up and easily rent the equipment, no reservations necessary. Kayaks and standup paddleboards rent for $15 an hour. Mountain bikes can also be rented for $10 an hour to be used on the canal walk and a variety of nearby trails.

On a recent sunny Monday, I hopped on a standup paddleboard, or rather the “SUP,” as the staff at the Outpost refers to it. Within 10 minutes of arriving I was already out paddling around the flat water between Belle Isle and Brown’s Island.

Last summer the Outpost was often forced to close due to the high-water conditions of the river, however this summer there’s a new option when the river is too high. The company was recently granted access to the Haxall Canal, and now the Outpost has a safe alternative to offer to paddle boarders and kayakers.

This new opportunity will improve the viability of the Outpost, said Matt Perry, the owner of Riverside Outfitters. Perry has also chosen to open the Outpost seven days a week. The past two summers it was only open Friday through Sunday.

“If customers have to think about whether or not something is open, you lose them,” said Perry who hopes that their new schedule will establish the Outpost as a more reliable and convenient presence.

With the ongoing and growing success of the Old Westham Road location of Riverside Outfitters, this Outpost was not crucial for the business, Perry stressed. Instead, he saw it as a crucial “investment for the city.” With Richmond recently voted the best river town in America by Outside Magazine, Perry went on to say, it would be wrong not to have an outpost like this one.

It appears that others are realizing Richmond’s need for something like this, too. Business at Riverside Outfitters has been growing at a steady and healthy rate. In fact, since reopening for the summer, the Outpost has yet to go a single day without at least one customer. And, Perry added, on the three Saturdays they’ve been open, business has been about double the average Saturday from last year.

When asked who the company’s most common customers are, Perry chuckled as he began to list the very diverse groups of people he had seen within the past few days. From flight attendants and tourists to native Richmonders like me, the Outpost can provide any type of “shopper” with any “outfit,” specifically fitted to match your desired level of skill and adventure. In fact, I also wasn’t completely wrong thinking that Richmond Outfitters offered apparel … they have a very good selection of affordable hats and shirts, and of course, as a shopaholic, I left the Outpost with both.

Dan Hugo rode to an easy victory at last year’s Richmond race. Credit: XTERRA

A week from tomorrow, hundreds of triathletes from around the U.S. and the world will descend on Brown’s Island for the XTERRA East Championship, the elite off-road triathlon that, in one version or another, has been taking place in Richmond since 1999. As in years past, professionals and amateurs will navigate a one-kilometer swim in the James, a 20-mile mountain bike leg through the James River and Forest Hill parks and a seven-mile trail run. There is a $15,000 prize purse for the pros who make it to Richmond, the third of five stops in the XTERRA U.S. Pro Series.

There will be more on the line for many racers, though, because this year’s event will double as the USA Triathlon Off-Road National Championship. That means the top American professionals and each amateur in his/her age group will qualify for the 2015 ITU Cross Triathlon World Championship.

“That means racers who win their division (in Richmond) will be named USAT Off-Road National Champ, XTERRA East Champ, and earn qualifying spots to both the 2014 XTERRA World Championship AND the 2015 ITU Cross Triathlon World Championship,” said Trey Garman, XTERRA’s vice president for marketing and media relations. “Big Haul! Expect a strong field in Richmond this year.”

Garman and his XTERRA colleagues have also come up with a cool twist on the usual media day festivities that precede the races. On Thursday, June 12, instead of sitting in front of microphones, a group of XTERRA pros will face-off in a pre-race shoot-out to showcase their talents, the City of Richmond, and the innovation of presenting sponsor Luck Stone.

This “shootout” is the first-of its kind event where fifteen of the fastest professional XTERRA triathletes in the world will split into five, three-person relay teams to take on each other in a micro-sized XTERRA featuring a short swim in the James River, a mountain bike ride over the footbridge and through the pump track on Belle Isle, and a run past the colorful murals along the Canal Walk before finishing on Brown’s Island.  The fastest team should conquer the challenge in about 15 minutes.

Joe Mahoney of the Times-Dispatch captured this image of XTERRA pro Craig Evans taking a header into Reedy Creek last year.

Luck Stone, presenting sponsors of the event, will equip each team with a GPS tracking device and stream all the action live in high-definition at www.luckstone.com so viewers from around the world can get an up-close look — including an over head one, using an unmanned aerial vehicle — at world-class athletes juxtaposed against the coolest urban XTERRA venue ever.

“We are extremely excited to showcase a little bit of Richmond and a whole lot of our sports’ biggest stars,” said XTERRA managing director Dave Nicholas.  “While the distances are but a fraction of what these men and women will be up against on Sunday, to see them work their way around downtown like human race cars will be something to behold and is sure to get everyone fired-up for race day.”

Each team of three pros will have a local Honorary Captain, and I’ll be out there representing RichmondOutside.com as the captain of team “BermudAfrica,” composed of Flora Duffy, a Bermuda native, and Dan Hugo and Brad Weiss, both natives of South Africa. It should be a lot of fun, and you can catch all the action at www.luckstone.com. Of course, here at RichmondOutside.com, we’ll have plenty of XTERRA coverage throughout the week, so make sure you keep checking back.

‘RVA Clean Sweep’ members get after it at a recent litter pickup. Credit: Dave Parrish

Today is the final day to volunteer for Clean the Bay Day, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s annual shoreline litter cleanup to be held across Virginia this Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon. And don’t get me wrong, I love that last year more than 6,000 volunteers participated in the event, according to the CBF, removing approximately 125,000 pounds of litter and debris along 500 miles of shoreline.

But I recently spoke with a Richmond photographer who’s trying to get the word out that once a year simply isn’t enough to keep our local greenspaces and waterways from becoming landfills.

“There are a bunch of groups that do yearly or semi-yearly cleanups, but I couldn’t find anyone who does it on a regular basis,” said Dave Parrish. “There are these big once-a-year cleanups…and then two weeks later, it’s dirty again.”

So Parrish and friend Natalie Kane put together a Meetup group called RVA Clean Sweep. They hope, as they write on the Meetup page, that the group will serves as a “forum for other meet-up groups and individuals to organize litter clean-ups in and around the James River.”

Most of the groups 32 members live generally along the river, on both sides, between Pony Pasture and Rocketts Landing, Parrish said,. So that’s where they’ve focused their efforts over the first three cleanups. In the first one, a month ago at the headwaters of Reedy Creek near the intersection of Midlothian Turnpike and German School Road, a group of 13 volunteers picked up 48 bags of trash in just an hour and a half. That’s a whole lot of garbage that would have ended up farther down Reedy Creek, in Forest Hill Park and eventually the James.

That is a lot of trash for an hour and a half of work. Credit: Dave Parrish

“Most of (cleanups) we do, we only spend like an hour,” Parrish said. “We always have fun. It’s not like it’s tortuous, miserable work or anything.”

Parrish said if they can get bigger numbers in the group, they’d love to expand their reach in and around the city. The challenge, Parrish has found, is that while everyone loves the idea of a litter cleanup, especially the big one-day events that draw huge numbers, “nobody wants to go out and get dirty” on a regular basis. He’s hoping to change that by organizing a community of the like-minded. You can find out more by clicking here.

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One of many small falls/pools on the way up to the Cascades. Good looking trout hole, no?

Sure, we outdoors lovers have it good here in the RVA, with our parks and trails and river (and more). But that doesn’t mean the wanderlust doesn’t strike us every now and again. Sometimes you just want to light out for the mountains or the beach or a lake or river somewhere and get a change of scenery.

It’s with that spirit that I bring you this report from a recent RichmondOutside.com roadtrip (If you follow us on Instagram, you might have seen some of these pictures and others). And I intend this to be an every-now-and-again series.

For the past year, I’ve been traveling Virginia in search of its best waterfalls. I’m doing this for a guidebook I’m writing, and it occurred to me, as I explored one beautiful corner of the state after another, that many of these hikes to waterfalls and swimming holes are absolutely perfect for summer road trips.

So, here it is, entry # 1 in the RichmondOutside.com Summer Roadtrip series. Where are we going? It’s 15 miles north of Blacksburg. One mountain over from where they filmed Dirty Dancing. A place every Virginia Tech grad has probably been to multiple times….A place called the Cascades.

Getting there: Take US 460 West from Blacksburg and drive 15 miles to the town of Pembroke. Turn right on CR 623 (you can’t miss the signs) and follow it 3.5 miles to the large parking area.

Hike specs: Distance: 4 miles roundtrip; surface: rocky singletrack; land status: Jefferson National Forest.

One of a couple of bridges along the hike.

It’s no hyperbole to call this one of the iconic outdoor destinations in Virginia, and yet many Piedmont/Coastal Plain peeps I know have never heard of it. The Cascades hike has it all: A gorgeous stream (the Little Stony) that crashes over huge boulders through a narrow mountain valley; a well-maintained, but challenging trail; no possible way of getting lost; a blow-you-away, mostly-sheer falls that plunges 65 feet into a giant swimming hole. It’s just crazy beautiful.

I went over Memorial Day Weekend, so there were a ton of people hiking along with me, but this hike would have been worth it if there were twice as many people. Crabtree might be the most well-known falls in Virginia, and the highest in the East, but the Cascades is the total hike/falls/swimming hole package. For my money — and I’ve seen a lot — this is my favorite waterfall in the state.

The forest service has done an amazing job keeping this well-used trail sustainable. They’ve built hundreds of stone steps from the boulders in the area to keep the trail from meandering into the surrounding forest. But the hike is by no means easy. You’ll work to get the payoff. But check out the payoff…

The Cascades, a Jefferson National Forest gem north of Blacksburg.

First Landing SP, in Va. Beach, is the state’s most visited park unit.

Virginia State Parks had a record-setting Memorial Day weekend in large part thanks to great weather and maybe a statewide case of cabin fever. Both attendance and revenue for the 36-park system reached new highs, eclipsing previous records set in 2012.

The more than 330,000 visits over the extended weekend are a 30 percent increase over last year’s Memorial Day weekend and six percent ahead of the record set in 2012. The state park system collected more than $700,000 for camping, cabin rental, parking, swimming, boat rental and other visitor-related fees over the weekend, besting the 2012 total of approximately $688,000.

“Perhaps the best part is that it appears everyone had a safe and fun weekend in the parks,” said DCR State Parks Director Joe Elton. “By all accounts our staff did an outstanding job in being gracious hosts. This all bodes well for the upcoming season.”

Seen as the traditional opening of the summer season, the record setting 2014 Memorial Day weekend follows a record setting 2013 when more than 8.8 million visits were made to the Virginia State Park system.

These kids look like they know what they’re doing. They must be newsletter subscribers.

Memorial Day Weekend, the unofficial start of summer, is almost in the books, and that means the season of hiking, biking, paddling, camping, fishing, climbing, tubing, rock hopping, sun bathing, and general outdoors carousing is upon us.

Few cities in the good old U.S. of A. can compare to Richmond in the majority of the above categories, but that doesn’t mean all of us, even lifelong Richmonders, know every good swimming hole, mountain bike trail, smallmouth spawning ground, boulder to climb, or hidden-gem park in greater RVA. That’s where RichmondOutside.com comes in. It is, quite literally, our job to know these things — and to make sure that you know about them, too.

One way we do that is through our weekly newsletter. Every Thursday, subscribers get an email blast with a smorgasbord of outdoors-related content — the top area news from the week, a look at a local destination, a feature written by one of our local experts or an eye-catching piece of news from farther afield. Every week is different and there’s often exclusive content that newsletter subscribers see before anyone else.

So enter your email below, and let us be your guide to a summer of fun in Central Virginia and beyond. (And if you haven’t already, check us out on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.)

With the 9th annual Cap2Cap bike ride set for this Saturday (May 10), I thought it would be a good time to catch up with Virginia Capital Trail Foundation Executive Director Beth Weisbrod on the progress of the trail, especially the Richmond section.

A screen shot of the USP property that the Va. Capital Trail will have to go around. Great Shiplock Park to the west and the Lehigh Cement silos to the east.

Much of what’s left to be built in Richmond — from Great Shiplock Park at the western end to Rocketts Landing and then the Richmond/Henrico line on the eastern side — will take the place of abandoned rail line. But before reaching that old rail line at Dock and Ash streets, the trail will have to go around the much discussed, disputed and dissected USP property. That’s the piece of land immediately east of Great Shiplock Park.

Weisbrod said that when the finished 55-mile trail opens next summer (fingers crossed), the section that goes around the USP property (formerly known as Echo Harbour), will be on Dock Street — at least temporarily, the only part of the trail’s entire length that won’t be on a separate, dedicated path.

“It’s about 800 feet where it will go straight along Dock Street,” Weisbrod said. “I’m hoping they put Jersey barriers, but I’m not exactly sure. Those are concrete. It’s safe.”

That piece was supposed to be completed in June, but, Weisbrod said, City Council had to approve an easement deal between the city and the USP property developer for the temporary alignment. “That should push things back about 60 days. So we’re looking at August or September for it to be done.”

From there the trail jogs down toward the river on Ash Street and picks up the old railroad bed, first along the soon-to-be-city-owned Lehigh Cement silos and then past the city-owned Intermediate Terminal.

“There’s been a little procedural holdup on that and that’s looking like September or October,” Weisbrod said of that section.

The silos, the Gillies Creek outflow, then the trail will head down past Rocketts Landing to the Henrico Co. line.

Over the winter there were some pictures on Facebook of rail lines being pulled up near Rocketts Landing in preparation for the trail. The next section goes past Rocketts, then past Vulcan Materials, where the rail heads away from river. There the trail will reach the Henrico line and run along Route 5/Osbourne Turnpike. That section has been delayed as well, but Weisbrod said it, too, is on schedule for completion by next summer.

It’s an exciting time for everyone who’s followed the progress of the trail over the past decade. The delays are maddening, but the finish line is in sight. With the World Road Cycling Championships (an the hundreds of thousands of visitors) coming here in September of 2015, there’s no way the city would drop the ball on this, would it?

Rails coming up near Rocketts Landing over the winter.

Years ago, in a former life, I wrote a column for the Times-Dispatch about taking in the grandeur of a James River flood in Richmond. I remember getting a lot of responses to that piece. Going down to places like Pony Pasture or Reedy Creek or the Pipeline during high-water events seemed to resonate with people, and it’s is still one of my favorite things to do — which is why I offer the below as a public service announcement. If you’ve never seen the river rushing over the Pipeline during a flood or taken in its power from the Floodwall or Belle Isle, this is a very good chance. There are only a few of these a year.

You had to think when Blue Ridge Mountain Sports vacated the marketplace in the spring of 2012 that Richmond wouldn’t go very long with REI as its only outdoor retailer. I mean this is Outside Magazine’s Best River Town, the home of America’s best urban whitewater and singletrack and biggest outdoors sports and music festival (Riverrock).

Well, it’s taken two years, but this spring and summer two separate retailers are moving into the area to fill the void left by Blue Ridge Mountain Sports. Next month, Walkabout Outfitter will open its fifth Virginia location when it opens the doors at the former Pirouzan Oriental Rugs store in Carytown. And in mid-August, GreenLife Adventure Sports, based in the Ghent neighborhood in Norfolk, will open its second location.

GreenLife’s Norfolk store offers free classes and community activities, like this climb night at the Va. Beach Rock Gym.

I’d heard about GreenLife’s move a few weeks ago and met up with owner Tommy Dunn — a former Eagle Scout and Appalachian Trail through-hiker — at Crossroads coffee shop recently to get the scoop.

GreenLife isn’t even two years old, but Dunn said their growth has been such that he started thinking about the Richmond market over a year ago.

“Richmond has always been on the radar screen,” he said. “It’s obviously one of the best outdoor cities in the country…But Blue Ridge always had their locations, so it was covered. Once they left it was like, ‘Okay the opportunity is there,’ but we were still really young. And we still are, but we had grown in numbers and experience, and the timing was right.”

Then last winter a number of the vendors that GreenLife works with suggested a move to Richmond. It’s an underserved market, they told him, someone is going to open up there.

The Richmond GreenLife store will be out at 9691 West Broad Street, very close to one of those old Blue Ridge Mountain Sports Locations in what is now a Hallmark store. Dunn said he looked everywhere — from Midlothian, to downtown, to Carytown — before settling out there.

Of course, the first question most people ask him when he mentions the location is, “What about REI?” The outdoor retail behemoth is just a mile or two out West Broad in Short Pump. Dunn is well aware of the competitive challenge REI poses, but he said GreenLife aims to do things differently.

“We’re local. We’re your neighbors and friends,” he said. “We differentiate ourselves through our knowledge and our customer service and our products. At the local outfitter is where you find the guys and girls who are out in the woods, trails, rivers, and mountains using the stuff.”

He added that we have “a ton of brands that (REI) can’t carry or they only carry a smattering of. Patagonia is the gleaming example. They can only carry a little bit of Patagonia.”

Dunn said that, just like at their Norfolk store, they plan to offer free classes and lead trips.

“We really want to foster a huge community aspect to our store….At our Norfolk store, we have a weekly yoga class; we have a weekly climb night, all of which are free. We’re very involved with the local boy scouts, local non-profits.”

GreenLife won’t open until mid-August, Dunn said, but they will have a booth at Dominion Riverrock where they hope to begin the process of introducing the store to outdoors-minded Richmonders.

First it was the lack of funding in the mayor’s proposed budget for the Brown’s Island Dam Walk. We covered that debate a couple of weeks ago. Then early last week Phil Riggan of Richmond.com highlighted the lack of funding for general bike infrastructure projects in the mayor’s 2015 budget.

As Riggan wrote: There are dozens of projects and more than 20 miles of bike lanes planned for the city as it works to build a greater network of bike and pedestrian lane miles and sidewalks. A lack of funding hurts neighborhood projects like Brookland Parkway, Oliver Hill Way, Cannon Creek Greenway and the plan to create separate and protected bike lines on the Martin Luther King Jr. Bridge — which has been approved and ready for bids from contractors to begin work this spring.

There aren’t enough of these in Richmond.

Riggan pointed out that Mayor Dwight Jones has made promises in the past. Speaking at the press conference announcing the courses for the 2015 World Road Cycling Championships, he said: There will be many infrastructure improvements that are going to take place by the time the race is here. The plan aims to include a dozen bus projects for completion by 2015 that can be accomplished through our regular paving schedule and also would include many bike lanes. The Martin Luther King Bridge, linking Union Hill, Church Hill with downtown, will be striped this spring with wide buffered bike lanes making this a critical safe and easy path for bicycling. Also we’re excited about Cannon Creek, which will be completed in time for the races.

Times-Dispatch columnist Michael Paul Williams picked up where Riggan left off with a column in yesterday’s paper: The underfunded riverfront and cycling plans, inextricably linked, appear to be casualties of Jones’ proposed ballpark and related development, which have created a capital budget at war with itself. Until funding priorities line up with stated objectives, our bicycle ambitions will remain largely stationary.

None of this is good news for those of us who want a more walkable, bikeable, river-centric city. And there are a lot of us. But the mayor’s budget proposal is now out of his hands. What can we do about it?

“The budget is now in the hands of City Council,” said Max Hepp-Buchanan, the Sports Backers Bike Walk RVA director. ” They have the opportunity to propose amendments to the budget and prioritize new bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure. We want to see funding restored for the Brown’s Island Dam Walk and we want to see the City commit to funding bicycle projects that will get us started on a city-wide network by 2015. It’s all of our job to let Council know what we want.”

Justin Doyle, outreach coordinator for the James River Association, sounded a similar note, saying his group’s efforts going forward would be focused on City Council.

After Riggan’s piece went live, Tammy Hawley, the mayor’s press secretary, responded to a number of his points.

D.C. has spent a lot of money on bike infrastructure like this in recent years.

Hepp-Buchanan responded to those: “We’d like to see $3 million allocated specifically for on-street bike infrastructure in the Capital Improvement Program, which should be enough to build over 20 miles of new bikeways in time for the 2015 Worlds. If we want to show off a bike-friendly RVA to the rest of the world in 2015, the City needs to commit to funding a bike-friendly RVA in the FY 2015 budget. There are a few significant bike projects that might receive federal grant funding in the next year, but there are many more that probably will not, and those need to be funded, too.”

Hepp-Buchanan mentioned cities like Indianapolis, Minneapolis and Washington and the significant strides they’ve made in improving bike infrastructure. “The cities that are leading the way nationally in making bicycle travel safe and easy for everyone have done so largely with their own transportation dollars.  Bicycle travel is an equity issue, a way to attract young talented professionals to our region, and should be a budget priority for a tier one city.”

If the riverfront plan and it’s citizen-generated priorities matter to you. If a more bike-friendly city matters to you. There are less than two months to make your voice heard.