The Roanoke, Virginia metro area has been transformed over the past 25 years, and we salute Liz Belcher for leading the way to 400 miles of trails and greenways over that time.
Tell me another town where you could do this on a pretty fall day.
Roll the bicycles out of the garage, ride three blocks down the hill to a bike lane to be delivered, in three more blocks, to a riverside greenway. Ride that greenway for two miles to arrive at the riverside site of an annual festival devoted to the outdoors, where the bikes get parked in order to look around. Then set off on foot further along the greenway to its connection with the trails that lace and climb a mountain within the city limits. Walk trails to the top and a pretty park, unpack lunch and enjoy it as you look out onto the ridgeline that is home to Virginia’s Appalachian Trail Triple Crown. Pack up and continue the walking loop walk down the front side of the mountain back to the greenway and the festival, have some more fun and then ride the bikes back home.
I bet you can’t tell me another town, because I’m lucky enough to live in Roanoke, Virginia, which has dedicated some 400 miles of trails and greenways over the past 25 years. Not all of those are in the city itself, but key pieces of the metro—especially the city, the counties of Roanoke and Botetourt and the City of Salem—have come together to create a network that has a new trail or section opening every few months. It’s amazin’.
The specifics of Gail’s and my foray—Memorial Avenue bike lane, Roanoke River Greenway, the Monument, Star, Loop Road trails on Mill Mountain—are less important than the urban bounty of which they are just one tip of the proverbial iceberg.
And the invisibility we associate with an iceberg is also the perfect metaphor for the work of person who has championed and shepherded those 400 miles.
In her quarter-century career as the lone employee of the Roanoke Valley Greenways Commission, Liz Belcher has lifted the shovel, persuaded the people, protected the lands for all of us on a scale far beyond even the hardest climbs of any Roanoke Valley trail.
Liz Belcher will retire from that work just about the time this magazine goes to press.
But when you take a look at the detailed, 100-page “Roanoke Valley Greenways Plan – 2018,” you quickly discern another dimension of the iceberg that Liz Belcher leaves behind and which is generally invisible: visions and plans that reach another 25 years into the future.
This magazine was fortunate, about six years back, to feature Liz Belcher as a guest columnist. Here’s a snippet of what she said, in an essay called “Are You Home Yet?”
Recently, people (not perfect strangers, just people I don’t know) have been saying to me “greenways are the best thing to happen to Roanoke.” I agree, of course. It has been my work for almost 20 years, but it takes a village. It takes advocates, engineers, donors, politicians, friends, contractors, clean-up crews, urban foresters, volunteers. Are greenways what have made Roanoke home to me and to so many others? I think so. They sure have helped.
Greenways and trails are certainly a large measure of what has made Roanoke a treasured home for Gail and me. We have our relentless greenway coordinator to thank for that, and while we know there is only one Liz Belcher, we hope your town has a version of her too.
The story above first appeared in our September/October 2021 issue.
