Recreational Land in Washington County, Virginia: The Virginia Creeper Trail

A real 34.3-mile trail with genuinely mixed landownership

The Virginia Creeper Trail is a 34.3-mile rail-to-recreation trail running from Abingdon -- Washington County's own seat -- through the Town of Damascus and on to Whitetop near the North Carolina line, following the route of a former Norfolk & Western rail line. It draws cyclists and hikers from across the region and is one of the more heavily used rail-trails in the mid-Atlantic. What makes it directly relevant to a land buyer, rather than just a regional amenity, is that its ownership and right-of-way are genuinely mixed: in Virginia, the right-of-way is owned by the Towns of Abingdon and Damascus, and by the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service, but the route also traverses rolling farm country through a number of privately owned sections.

On those private sections, trail users are required to open and close landowners' gates as they pass, and camping is not permitted without the specific landowner's permission -- a genuinely unusual, documented arrangement in which public recreational access and private property rights coexist on the same stretches of trail, rather than the trail corridor being uniformly public land end to end.

What this means if your land touches the trail corridor

If you're evaluating a parcel that the trail crosses or borders, confirm exactly what legal arrangement applies to that specific section: is the right-of-way itself owned by a town, the Park Service, or the Forest Service (in which case your parcel likely abuts, rather than includes, the trail), or does your parcel's own title carry an easement or license allowing public trail use across it (in which case you would inherit both the recreational-access benefit and the obligation described above -- gates, no unauthorized camping)? These are materially different situations for what you actually own and control, and the answer is parcel-specific, not something the trail's general reputation tells you.

The trail's Trail Advisory Board -- which includes representatives of the Towns of Abingdon and Damascus, Washington County, the U.S. Forest Service, the Virginia Creeper Trail Conservancy, and adjacent private landowners themselves -- is a real, existing governance structure for the corridor, which means there is an established channel for an adjacent landowner to raise access, maintenance, or boundary questions rather than dealing with an informal or undefined arrangement. For a buyer, that cuts in your favor: a landowner with legitimate questions about a boundary or access dispute along the trail has a real body to engage, not just the trail conservancy's goodwill.

The recreational upside, separate from the ownership question

Separate from any direct-frontage or easement question, land anywhere in reasonable reach of the trail -- particularly near Abingdon's own trailhead -- sits within a real, currently active regional tourism draw, supporting demand for cabin rentals, bike-shuttle and outfitting businesses, and similar trail-tourism-adjacent uses. As with any Southwest Virginia recreational-land purchase, confirm Washington County's current zoning and any short-term-rental or commercial-use permitting requirements directly with the county's planning office before assuming a specific business use is permitted on a specific parcel.