The weekend hikers: Gail and Kurt Rheinheimer stand on top of Rice Fields, a bald southwest of Blacksburg, Va. along the Appalachian Trail. They were photographed in May by a couple who were thru-hiking the AT with their two children.

Week 89: 10/23/05, There's a slightly different feel to a hike when you're on 1,650 acres of carefully preserved land not far from an urban area. Yes, you work to be light on the land on any trail, and do all you can to leave no trace, but there's another level of awareness when you're walking on land set aside by The Nature Conservancy, with all its careful signs, its gentle admonitions about wildlife, its self-consciousness as a place preserved.

The Bottom Creek Gorge Preserve, south of Roanoke off of U.S. 221 and barely across the Roanoke County line into Montgomery County, feels precious for all those reasons as well as for its three intersecting and interlocking trails, which total about 5.5 miles of generally easy walking. There are remnants of structures from as far back as the 1700s, and from as recently as the 1930s, when people last lived here.
The highlight is the view, albeit from sort of afar, of the 200-foot waterfall that Bottom Creek makes on its way to the South Fork of the Roanoke River. Not a massive falls, but touted as the second highest in the state.

The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All and I ate lunch near the viewpoint, but in keeping with that feel of sharing this land carefully, found ourselves a rock a bit away from the observation spot, under a blue sky and a nice breeze, with the sound of the falls as background. The walk back completed a most pleasant circuit, taking hikers along the stream and then back into forest interrupted only by the occasional presence of stands of invasive tree of heaven, which, according to their brochure, the preserve is "keeping an eye on."

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