The Friendliest Little Town on the Appalachian Trail — and About 24,350 of Its Closest Friends
Damascus was the final stop on our Spring 2026 road trip. We packed up at Anchor Down and pointed the rig northeast, running up I-81 to the southwestern tip of Virginia. Our home base, technically, was not even in Virginia:
the campground (Old Mill Music & RV Park) sits just across the state line in a wide spot called Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee, about five minutes south of town. But few people make this drive for Laurel Bloomery. The draw is the place just across the line, the one that calls itself Trail Town USA.
We came to Damascus for the bike trail and left calling it one of our favorite little towns anywhere. The plan was simple enough: park nearby for a few days, ride the Virginia Creeper, and poke around between trips out. What we did not plan on was rolling in during Appalachian Trail Days, when this sleepy mountain town swells into a tent-and-trekking-pole city of more than twenty thousand hikers, vendors, and well-wishers. So we got both versions of Damascus at once, the hushed early-morning kind and the full-on festival kind, and four days later we drove off already plotting our way back.
Tucked into the Blue Ridge Highlands of Southwest Virginia, Damascus is about as small as a town gets — roughly 650 full-time residents. But at the intersection of seven nationally recognized trails, it has quietly become one of the most remarkable outdoor recreation destinations in the entire Eastern United States. The town has a nickname it's earned: Trail Town USA.
Where Seven Trails Meet
The trails that converge in Damascus aren't backroads. They're big ones:
- Appalachian Trail — The full 2,190-mile AT runs right down the sidewalk of Laurel Avenue, Damascus's Main Street, through the Town Park and past the Trail Center. Damascus is one of only three downtowns in the entire country the AT passes directly through (the others are Hot Springs, NC and Hanover, NH), and it's the first stop for northbound thru-hikers after they cross into Virginia.
- Virginia Creeper Trail — One of the most celebrated rail trails in the country. A 34.3-mile multi-use path connecting Abingdon to Whitetop. More on this in a separate post.
- Iron Mountain Trail — A rugged backcountry hiking and equestrian trail through Jefferson National Forest.
- TransAmerica Bicycle Trail / Route 76 — The original coast-to-coast cycling route, which passes right through town.
- TransVirginia Bike Route — A long-distance cycling route crossing the state.
- Mid-Atlantic Backcountry Discovery Route — A long-distance adventure route for motorcycles and overland vehicles.
- The Crooked Road — Virginia's Heritage Music Trail, a 330-mile driving and cultural route through the birthplace of American roots music.
Originally a railroad town that boomed in the early 1900s hauling timber and iron ore out of the mountains, Damascus reinvented itself through outdoor recreation and tourism starting in the 1990s. Today, tourism is the second-largest economic driver in Washington County, second only to agriculture. The mountain economy that once depended on the railroad now runs on trail shoes and bike tires — and it works beautifully.
The Town Itself
Damascus is genuinely walkable. The downtown is about 1.6 miles end to end, and a slow stroll covers a lot of ground:
outfitter shops where you can rent bikes and get shuttled to trail heads, restaurants and breweries, handcrafted goods, and live music in the evenings. The Damascus Trail Center — a collaboration between the town and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy — sits right downtown and is open seven days a week as a hub for visitor information, trail maps, and AT culture.
The vibe is something you feel pretty quickly. It's genuinely laid-back and welcoming. Trail culture is woven into the DNA here. The AT literally walks down the sidewalk in front of your face.
Trail Days: When 650 Becomes 25,000
We happened to be in Damascus for Appalachian Trail Days (May 15–17, 2026), and it's an experience worth mentioning because it transforms the town completely.
AT Days is the world's largest celebration of the Appalachian Trail and hiker culture. It started in 1987 through a collaboration between the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and the town, and what began as a humble gathering has grown into an annual event that draws an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 people to a town of 650. It happens every year the weekend after Mother's Day.
The streets fill with backpackers — trekking poles, trail-worn packs, and the kind of scraggly beards that tell you someone has been walking for three months. There are roughly 100 vendor and exhibitor booths, live music, educational workshops, gear raffles, author signings, and the famous hiker parade on Saturday afternoon, a hiker talent show, and programs and presentations. It's all free to attend (there's a fee for overnight camping at Tent City, the festival's dedicated camping area).
The economic impact is real: the 2025 festival generated an estimated $1.5 million in output for the local economy. For a town this size, that's not nothing.
Two Breweries in a Town of 650
Here's a fun fact: In a town of 650 residents, Damascus has two breweries. But when you sit at the intersection of seven major trails, you're serving a lot more people than your zip code suggests.
Damascus Brewing Company was our first stop. No Hazy IPAs on tap (a personal disappointment), but the other beers were solid and the atmosphere was easy — and dog-friendly, which Juneaux appreciated. We ended up in a conversation with who appeared to be the owner — turns out he's a Radford University alum, which is also my alma mater. We got to talking about old times and how the town we went to school in has changed, and he mentioned that Damascus Pizza had the closest thing he'd found to Chancey's Crusties since leaving Radford. More on that in a minute.
Appalachian Heritage Distillery & Brewery is the other stop, and it has a genuinely great backstory. The distillery traces its roots four generations back to a great-grandfather named Bud, who ran a smokehouse where customers left with more than just a ham — a copper vessel in the back wasn't for smoking meats. Bud was, by all accounts, a champion covert distiller with patrons coming from three states along the Tug River: West Virginia, Kentucky, and Virginia. Four generations later, the family describes his legacy as living on, with "the recipes, equipment, and unlawfulness of the operation slightly amended." It's located directly on the Appalachian Trail on Laurel Avenue, dog-friendly, open from early afternoon daily, and very popular with the post-Creeper Trail crowd.
A Pizza Story Worth Telling
After the Damascus Brewing conversation about Chancey's, we went to Damascus Pizza — and I'm glad we did.
For those who didn't go to Radford University in the early '90s: Chancey's was a late-night pizza institution near campus, and their signature item was the Crustie — a stuffed pizza roll made from pizza dough, loaded with cheese and pepperoni (or BBQ chicken, or eventually cheeseburger), baked until golden. The name came from what happened in the oven: the cheese bubbled out, hit the baking sheet, browned, and turned into crispy little cheese bits around the edges. Gooey and molten inside. Crispy and golden outside. The stuff of late-night college legend. Chancey's has been closed for years, but the RU alumni nostalgia for those things is very real — there are copycat recipe websites and Facebook groups dedicated to finding the real deal.
Damascus Pizza's version wasn't identical, but the spirit was there: stuffed garlic knots made from pizza dough, loaded with cheese and pepperoni, baked until golden-brown with crispy cheese edges. They were excellent. The kind of thing you eat more of than you planned because you kept thinking "just one more." It brought back exactly the kind of memory it was supposed to bring back.
It's a small detail in a trip full of bigger experiences, but it's one of those unexpected connections that makes travel actually interesting — stumbling into a conversation in a brewery in the mountains of Virginia that leads you to a treat that you haven't tasted in thirty years.
Worth the Trip
Damascus is one of those places that earns repeat visits. You could spend a week here and not run out of things to do — the AT, the Creeper Trail, Mount Rogers just up the road, Grayson Highlands State Park, the Cherokee National Forest, day trips in every direction. We were there for four days and barely scratched it.
For anyone who loves the outdoors and doesn't mind a mountain drive to get there, it belongs on your list.
Check out our other posts about this stop:
