Jordon Blevins with DCR will discuss the different trees, plants, animals, and spring ephemeral species of a high elevation spruce and northern hardwood forest. We will hike the Twin Pinnacle trail loop that is approximately two miles long.

Join Nancy Adamson to find some of the unique wildflowers along local trails.  Expect an abundance of blooms. If you don't already use iNaturalist or Seek and would like to, download both apps before the walk. Bring a hand lens and a camera!

Learn to enhance your observational skills and record your experiences in the natural world. Artist Suzanne Stryk will share her drawing process by demonstrating how to make quick sketches and more sustained studies. Pencils, kneaded erasers, and paper are provided, or bring your own. Children under 12 are welcome if accompanied by an adult.

In this live reptile presentation, we will take a look at native reptiles' role in environmental conservation, changes in status decisions, cultural history, old wives’ tales, and beyond. From the beginning of the United States until now reptiles play a big role in the formation, conservation, and future of our wonderful nation.

Meet Tom McMullen, Tumbling Creek Cider Company co-owner, educator and orchard manager. This session focuses on the science behind apple propagation and growing methods both old and new.  It includes a visit to the Old Kelly Orchard. These orchards have more than 1400 apples trees mostly grafted by Tumbling Creek Cider folks.  The orchards contain more than 60 varieties of heirloom apples preserving some apple diversity and resulting in some excellent hard cider.  After the orchards we head to the Cider Barn and a discussion of the "apple to glass" process of hard cider making. 

Bruce Grimes will lead a group to look for butterflies around BRDC campus and perhaps elsewhere nearby. Expected butterflies include silver-spotted skipper, pearl crescent, Eastern Tailed-blue, Spring Azure, and a variety of fritillaries and swallowtails. Other insects are also fair game. If it rains, Bruce will share a program on the butterflies of the region until weather permits chasing them.

Do you love fiddle tunes? Do the melodies seem to echo through these hills? There's a geological reason these tunes feel so at home here. The rocks of Scotland and the southern Appalachians were once part of the same mountain chain 400 million years ago. Join Elaine Jacobs, retired Geologist, on an easy ~1-mile walk out to Buzzard Rock on Whitetop Mountain where we will travel through deep time to explore collisions of tectonic plates, the formation and breakup of supercontinents, the opening and closing of ancient oceans and where in the world Whitetop Mountain has been through it all.

Join Dr Steven Hopp, retired professor from Emory and Henry and current board president of the Blue Ridge Discovery Center, for an afternoon session that will focus on birds. We will identify resident species and discuss their ecology and nesting behavior. Bring binoculars. Limited participants.

Learn compass skills and how to read topographic maps with naturalist educator Brendan Murphy, then put your skills to the test in an orienteering course.