Tinker Creek, just upstream from its flow into the Roanoke. Kurt Rheinheimer
Narrow, 12-mile Tinker Creek, in Roanoke, Virginia, has gained fame far beyond its size for several notable reasons.
It’s a tiny little flow, especially at its headwaters on the side of a relatively small mountain. It builds in size from a jump-across to almost full-stream size over its approximately 12-mile flow, before it disappears from the map and the world into a small river.
Perhaps one hint at its outsized identity is that over its brief blue life, Tinker Creek makes its way through parts of three municipalities—the counties of Botetourt and Roanoke and the City of Roanoke, Virginia.
Is there a more famous-for-its-size waterway than little Tinker Creek? Its headwaters, on the north flank of its namesake mountain, are not far beyond the point where Tinker Mountain makes a sharp hook after presenting the drama and viewpoints of Tinker Cliffs.
From its modest start at about 1,950 feet in elevation—the high point of the same-name mountain is about 1,000 feet higher—the little creek builds momentum and size slowly, paralleling the mountain as it glides south for those 12 miles until it achieves stream size and then flows unceremoniously into the Roanoke River.
But those 12 miles have gained outsized fame, perhaps most importantly via Annie Dillard’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” written from her home and in the Hollins College (now University) library, both in near proximity to the stream. The book is the result of some 20 journals filled with her observations and thoughts on Tinker Creek and which brought the stream into a collective consciousness in some parallel to one of the book’s inspirations, Henry David Thoreau’s book on Massachusetts’ Walden Pond.
More recently, as the Appalachian Trail evolved from an obscure, aficionados-only walkway into a much more popular and more visited entity, the magic of Tinker Cliffs—offering majestic and inspiring views across the Catawba Valley and upon layers of blue mountains reaching westward into West Virginia—gave the noun “Tinker” a further reach into the minds of many.
In 2001, the Roanoke Valley Greenways Commission brought into being the first section of the Tinker Creek Greenway, a paved trail paralleling the creek’s last and largest 1.4 miles, further ingraining the name in people’s minds.
The next section of the Tinker Creek Greenway, opened in 2012, does not parallel the Creek, but its 2.3-mile length is scheduled, sometime in the future, to link with one of the several proposed routes of what will someday bring even more fame to the name Tinker Creek: a full-length-of-stream greenway.
Tinker Creek has become an important little subset of the penchant of The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All and I to take a hike somewhere in the Virginia mountains every weekend. One highlight, some years ago, involved the realization that while the flow of Tinker Creek and the expanse of Carvins Cove—our city’s primary reservoir—are separated by the nearly 3,000-foot Tinker Mountain, little Tinker Creek has another area where it punches much bigger than its size: At times of low water in the reservoir and a certain level of flow in the stream, the gates open for a 6,528-foot, six-foot-diameter tunnel to deliver water from Tinker Creek through Tinker Mountain and into Carvins Cove.
One more piece of big identity for a little stream.
The story above first appeared in our July / August 2022 issue.
