Ashley Stimpson

Ashley Stimpson

Ashley Stimpson is a Maryland-based freelance journalist who writes about science, conservation and outdoor adventure.

Related Posts

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The Great Connector: How West Virginia’s Greenbrier River Trail Is Fostering Recreation and Revitalization in the Allegheny Highlands
June 05, 2025
For 45 years, the Greenbrier River Trail has fostered recreation, relationships and economic revitalization in the Allegheny Highlands of West Virginia. In June 2016, as a massive thunderstorm system triggered mudslides, rockslides and catastrophic flooding across the mountains of southern West Virginia, Nancy Harris’ thoughts turned to the Greenbrier River Trail. “My first thought was […]
Bicyclists on the Greenbrier River Trail in Greenbrier County | Marlyn McClendon, courtesy Experience Greenbrier Valley
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Revisiting John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry
March 07, 2025
History Along the Great American Rail-Trail: A Trip to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, Reveals Forgotten Details Behind One of American History’s Most Daring Uprisings In the late hours of Sunday, Oct. 16, 1859, a band of 22 armed men slipped out of a darkened Maryland farmhouse and began a silent proces­sion to Harpers Ferry, Virginia, […]
The fire engine house used by John Brown and some of his men in the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 | Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC­DIG-ppmsca-40573 (digital file from original item)
Blog
Virginia’s High Bridge Trail State Park
June 01, 2024
Trail of the Month: June 2024 In the last few decades, the tiny hamlet of Pamplin, Virginia, had earned a bit of a reputation. Once a thriving railroad hub and home to the largest manufacturer of clay pipes in the United States, the town of 200 had fallen on hard times, its hollowed out downtown […]
High Bridge Trail State Park is a multi-use trail ideally suited for hiking, bicycling and horseback riding. Its centerpiece is the majestic High Bridge, which is more than 2,400 feet long and 160 feet above the Appomattox River. The majestic bridge was built in 1853 as part of the South Side Railroad. Virginia Tourism Corporation, www.Virginia.org
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How Council Bluffs Became the Eastern Point of the First Transcontinental Railroad
May 02, 2024
In the 1860s, Council Bluffs became the eastern terminus of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad. Today, it’s a linchpin in the 3,700-Mile Great American Rail-Trail. Just a few months after Council Bluffs, Iowa, became a city—with a name that commemorated a historic meeting between the Lewis and Clark expedition and Otoe Tribe leaders on the […]
1867 Union Pacific advertisement poster | Courtesy Union Pacific Railroad Museum
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First in Class: Washington Trailblazer Clara McCarty Wilt Was UW’s First Graduate
March 04, 2024
UW’s First Graduate Clara McCarty Wilt Was Also the First Woman in Washington State to Hold Public Office—40 Years Before Women’s Suffrage In June 1876, the Territorial University of Washington—later the University of Washington—celebrated the conferral of its first degree, a Bachelor of Science diploma. Perched on a hill overlooking the village of Seattle, which […]
Clara McCarty Wilt and YWCA friends, likely in the 1920s | Photo courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections (POR2339)
Blog
Awaiting Takeoff: The Wright Brothers’ Biking Legacy
December 04, 2023
On a gray North Carolina beach, 120 years ago this December, Orville Wright completed the first powered flight of a heavier-than-air aircraft as his brother Wilbur looked on. The 12 seconds that the Wright Flyer—which the brothers designed and built back home in Dayton, Ohio—spent airborne would earn the inventors an enduring place in both […]
Wilbur Wright working in the Wright brothers’ Dayton, Ohio, bicycle shop in 1897
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End of the Line: How Timber and Train Tracks Transformed the Olympic Peninsula
October 25, 2023
At the end of the 19th century, as transcontinental railroads began crisscrossing the country, connecting people and buoying economies, residents of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula looked on with envy. Around them stood some of the tallest, most valuable timber in North America. A constellation of shoddy, narrow-gauge railroads and barges carried felled trees to the mainland, […]
U.S. Spruce Production Division splicing an eye into cable during a logging operation | Photo courtesy Bert Kellogg Collection of the North Olympic Library System
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Remembering the Chinese Forerunners Who Built the Northern Pacific
May 05, 2023
Acknowledgments: The article includes contributions from Avigail Oren. On Aug. 22, 1883, the final tracks of the Northern Pacific Railway were laid when a Chinese crew from the West met an Eastern crew of mostly Irish and Slavic workers near Inde­pendence Creek, Montana. It was the country’s fifth transcontinental line—stretching from St. Paul, Minnesota, to […]
A Chinese railroad worker on the developing Northern Pacific line in 1905 | Photo courtesy University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections
Blog
Industrial Heartland History: Scott’s Run—the Most Diverse Coal Camp in America
February 02, 2023
Take a step inside the Scott’s Run Museum in Osage, West Virginia, on a Saturday afternoon, and you’re in for a story time like no other. You might hear Helen Wassick, the child of Russian immigrants, reminisce about pumping gas at her father’s service station and the handful of languages she spoke to communicate with the customers. […]
Once the most thriving coal district in the U.S., Scott’s Run fell on hard times in the 1920s. Residents who were not allowed to move to the nearby New Deal community of Arthurdale banded together, forming workers alliances and cooperatives to survive. (1937) | Photo by Lewis Hine
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