Wildewood A-frame: Hot Tub, Yoga Studio, Fire Pit
6 guests · 4 bedrooms · 4 beds · 2 baths
The glaciers that flattened the rest of the Midwest stopped short of southeast Ohio, which is why this county has steep ridgelines, sandstone outcrops, and river gorges where the rest of the state has cornfields. Layer a 220-year-old university on top of a 19th-century coal region and you get Athens: a genuinely strange, genuinely good small city with forty miles of singletrack starting three blocks from downtown, a brewery that ships nationally, and a festival calendar built around a fruit most Americans have never eaten.
Based in Athens · all drive times measured from Court and Union
Before you plan
The university calendar governs everything.
Mid-August through early May the town is full, loud, and hard to book. Mid-May through July it empties out, some kitchens cut hours, and the trails and the bikeway are yours. Halloween weekend is a decades-old street party that draws tens of thousands into a town of 24,000 and books out lodging across the whole county months ahead. Either plan for it or plan around it; there is no middle.
Free · Thu–Sun 12–5 · 5 min
In the original administration building at The Ridges, above town. Strong holdings in Southwest Native American textiles and jewelry alongside rotating contemporary exhibitions, plus a small section on the building's own history. Free, an hour start to finish, and open Thursday through Sunday only.
Free · Wed–Sun 12–5 · 5 min
A 1914 dairy barn on the old asylum farm, saved from demolition and turned into a regional arts center. It hosts Quilt National, a juried biennial that draws fiber artists from around the world and is the single most significant thing that happens in Athens County that most visitors have never heard of. Free, with a genuinely good gift shop. Wednesday through Sunday.
Free · Wed & Sat 9–12 · 5 min
Wednesdays and Saturdays, 9 to noon, year-round on East State — pasture-raised meats, produce, mead, bison, pottery, ironwork. The Saturday market is a social event as much as a shopping trip and sits right at the eastern trailhead of the bikeway, so you can ride to it.
Free · Year-round · 25 min
Twenty-five minutes northwest, a brick square from the coal era, now an arts district with galleries, studios, and a startling amount of live performance for a town of 4,000. Final Fridays — every last Friday of the month except December — keeps the square open late for exhibits, street performers, and workshops.
Ticketed · Year-round · 25 min
An 1879 opera house on the Nelsonville square, restored and running more than 75 events a year. Touring acts, theater, and its own arts education programs, all funded in large part by the music festival it produces. The room is small enough that there is no bad seat. Box office is weekdays only, noon to four.
Ticketed · Weekends, seasonal · 25 min
Volunteer-run since 1972, operating restored early-20th-century equipment on the 1867 Mineral Railroad line out of the Nelsonville depot. Themed and seasonal excursions run most of the year, mostly weekends. Reviews are mixed on the ride itself — go for the equipment and the volunteers, not the scenery, and check what is actually scheduled before you build a day around it.
Ticketed · Downtown
An independent theater on Court Street running documentaries, foreign films, and classics alongside first-run work. Athens has had a movie house on this block since 1915.
Ticketed · Athens
The place to make sense of everything else in this county. Regional exhibits, archives and a research library covering the Adena people, the coal towns, the railroads and the asylum on the hill — the layers this landscape is built from. Invisible Ground extends the same work outward with place-based markers and digital interpretation across Athens County, so the history keeps going once you leave the building.
Free · Grounds year-round · Athens
The former Athens Lunatic Asylum, opened 1874, on the hill across the river from the university. Ohio University owns it now and has been reusing it building by building — the Kennedy Museum of Art occupies the original administration block. The grounds are open and walkable, and the three hillside cemeteries hold more than 1,900 graves, many of them marked only with numbers until a volunteer effort began matching names to them in the 1980s. Read it as architecture and as documented history; the building's own interpretive material is the best guide to what happened here.
Roughly forty miles of trail wrapping Dow Lake and running continuously from a city park at the edge of downtown into the state park. Most of it was built by mountain bikers, most of it is shared, and nearly all of it is runnable — which is why the Thunderbunny 50K happens here every May.
Trails are unmarked or poorly marked in places past the main junctions; download the map before you go. Some southern trails fall inside the state park hunting area, so wear orange in season.
The park itself, rather than any one route through it. Strouds Run wraps Dow Lake with a swimming beach, boat and paddle access, fishing, a wooded campground, and trails open to hiking, mountain biking and horseback riding — all of it beginning ten minutes from Court Street. Come for the water and the beach as readily as the singletrack; the routes below are the recommended ways to walk and ride it, not separate destinations.
Free · 10 min
The standard half-day. Run Thunderbunny north to State Park Road, cross, and the trail becomes Hollow Point heading south, dropping in and out of four or five hollows with small creek crossings before coming back out near the campground entrance. Gentle grades, mature forest, footbridges, and heavy wildflowers in April and May.
Free · 10 min
The climb-heavy option, reached from Sells Park at the edge of the Far East Side neighborhood. A hard pull up the Athens Trail to the Finger Rocks outcrops, then a loop back through hardwood. This is the one to do if you want the sandstone rather than the lake.
Free · Sells Park · 5 min
Runs from Sells Park to the bike path trailhead on East State Street, linking the city preserve system to the state park. Strenuous climbs at both ends, easy through the middle. Blazed with a white arrowhead "A" on red. This is the trail that makes Athens unusual — you can walk out of a downtown apartment and be on singletrack in ten minutes.
Free · Downtown access
The full circumnavigation, 95 percent singletrack, contouring above and then along the shoreline the whole way. Built for bikes and best ridden, but hikeable if you want a big day. Roots and rock east of the lake; mellow and close to the water on the west side. There's also a shorter 7.4-mile circuit combining Hickory, Strouds Run, and Lakeview with a tenth of a mile on pavement.
Free · 10 min
The short hikers-only option. A third of a mile up the White Pine Trail from the parking area just inside the park, then onto the Vista Point ridge, which runs easy to an overlook above Dow Lake. The best view-per-effort ratio in the county.
Free · 10 min
Paved and level along the lakeshore, with a viewing deck. Excellent winter birding — kinglets, brown creepers, hermit thrush from mid-fall through early spring — and the only fully accessible trail in the park.
Free · 10 min
North and west of Athens the land was mined out, then reforested, and is now some of the most interesting new trail development in the eastern United States. Wayne is Ohio's only national forest.
The reason mountain bikers now drive to Ohio on purpose. Approved in 2017 and built out across Wayne National Forest above the old coal towns, with green through black progressions and enough mileage to fill a weekend. Trailheads at Chauncey and Doanville are complete; the Buchtel trailhead is still under construction, and you can also park where trails cross roads. Designed for bikes but open to hiking and running — go on a weekday if you want it quiet.
Free · Chauncey trailhead · 15 min
Athens to Nelsonville on asphalt, mostly rail-trail, paralleling the old Hocking Canal and an active rail line. Tree cover makes most of it a tunnel in summer. The thing to look for: southeast of Nelsonville on the west side of the path, a row of concrete arches marching out of a marsh into the hills — the remains of a coal spur that fed iron smelting in the late 1800s. The eastern end is on South Canaan Road; the western end is at the Rocky outlet, one block off the Nelsonville square.
Free · Downtown access
Forty minutes north, straddling the Athens–Morgan line, with a trail circling Burr Oak Lake and a section of the Buckeye Trail running through. Backcountry campsites make it Ohio's most accessible weekend backpack. The lodge was renovated in 2025 and there's a beach, a campground, and cabins. Steep, slick sections after rain — poles help.
Free day use · 40 min
The City of Athens owns Sells Park, the Strouds Ridge preserve system, and the 106-acre Riddle State Nature Preserve, and the Athens Conservancy holds the 75-acre Blair Preserve adjoining the state park. Together they make the network continuous from town. Ruffed grouse — increasingly rare in Ohio — have been heard near the Gillett Run footbridge in the Blair Preserve as recently as 2023.
Free · 5 min
Ohio's smallest state forest, in Bern Township, and genuinely in this county rather than borrowed from a neighbouring one. A few quiet miles of trail through second-growth hardwood with none of the traffic the Baileys or Strouds Run carry. Come for an hour of nobody-else, not for a destination hike.
Free · Bern Township
Three of the best days out from Athens are in the next county over. They are the reason people book a week here rather than a weekend, and leaving them off a guide to this part of Ohio would be dishonest.
Beyond the county lineThe most visited landscape in southeastern Ohio, and fifty minutes from Athens. Blackhand sandstone cut into gorges, recess caves, and waterfalls: Old Man's Cave for the gorge walk everyone does, Ash Cave for the enormous recess and the easiest access, Cedar Falls for the best water, Rock House for the only true cave corridor in the park, and Cantwell Cliffs at the north end for the fewest people. Conkle's Hollow State Nature Preserve sits next door with a gorge floor that is flat and accessible and a rim trail that very much is not. Go on a weekday. Weekend parking at Old Man's Cave fills by mid-morning most of the year.
Hocking County · Free · 50 min · Weekdays strongly preferred
Beyond the county lineThirty minutes west, inside Zaleski State Forest. A lodge, a swimming beach, cabins, and a lake small enough to paddle end to end in an afternoon. The Zaleski backpack loop starts here and runs about 23 miles through old furnace country with three backcountry camps — the standard first overnight trip for anyone in this part of the state.
Vinton County · Free day use · 30 min · Backpacking
Beyond the county lineAn abandoned railroad tunnel from the 1850s, left standing after the coal town around it disappeared. Free, always open, and one of the most-visited sites in this corner of Ohio — the rail-trail corridor either side of it has been improved in recent years. Bring a light for the tunnel itself.
Vinton County · Free · 35 min · Year-round
Athens punches far above its size, largely because 20,000 students and a strong local-food movement have supported more good kitchens than a town this size should carry. Listed here from morning to last call.
Closed Monday
Village Bakery · Fluff · Little Fish · Salaam · O'Betty's · Big Mamma's · Stephen's · Rhapsody · Black Diamond
Closed Tuesday
Casa Nueva · Salaam · Rhapsody · Black Diamond
Coffee · Daily · Downtown
The community living room. Fair-trade, a full bar of espresso drinks, pastry, open mics, and enough seating that it functions as the town’s second workspace. Seven days, 7 a.m. This is where Athens actually starts its morning.
Bagels · Daily 8–8 · Downtown
Boiled bagels, an enormous sandwich board, and the cure for whatever happened the night before. The Abe Froman and the Morning After are the names you'll hear. Open until eight, seven days.
Bakery & café · Tue–Sun · 5 min
A pillar of the county's 30 Mile Meal movement — locally sourced, living-wage, and doubling as a shop for local cheese, wine, and craft. Frittatas, sandwiches, and a serious bread program. Its sister pizzeria Della Zona shares the building. Closed Monday.
All day · Wed–Mon 9am · Downtown
A worker-owned cooperative since 1985, no tipping, living wages, and a rotating wall of local art. Scratch salsas, seasonal Mexican-influenced cooking that leans hard on regional ingredients — foraged ramps show up in spring — plus a full bar and one of the better margaritas in Ohio. This is the restaurant that explains Athens. Closed Tuesday.
Dinner · Wed–Sat · Downtown
The county's best dinner and its most atmospheric room — Mediterranean and North African cooking, rugs and textiles, jazz at low volume, and local and ethically sourced ingredients throughout. Dinner only, Wednesday through Saturday, 5:30 to 9. Reserve.
Brewpub · Tue–Sun · 8 min
Out on the west side with a big outdoor space, and a kitchen that outclasses most brewery food anywhere — kimchi fried chicken sandwich, wood-fired pizza, a beet burger people order on purpose. Farmhouse and sour program is the strength. They brew with pawpaw in season, which is worth planning around. Closed Monday.
Brewpub · Downtown / Taproom 5 min
The original, on West Union since 2005, and the anchor of the Athens beer scene. Dark wood, darts, open mics, and a draft list that goes deep. The separate Taproom and Production Brewery on Campbell Street has the wider selection, more parking, pizza, and family and dog-friendly hours from noon. The Public House closed temporarily after a kitchen fire in November 2025 — check before you plan around it. The barrel-aged stouts are what Jackie O's is known for nationally. Brewpub closed Sunday; taproom open seven days.
Cider & cocktails · Daily · 5 min
Off the Court Street track on West Washington, with front and back patios, house cider, a real whiskey list, and bartenders who will actually build you something. Quieter and more adult than uptown. Open seven days from three.
Late night · Tue–Sat until 3am · Downtown
Burlesque-themed hot dog counter with fresh-cut fries, hot dogs named after burlesque performers, vegan options, and a walk-up window open until 3 a.m. Order the garlic fries only if you're committed. Closed Sunday and Monday.
Bar · Daily · Downtown
An unreconstructed Court Street bar that has been serving the same burgers and the same beers to the same kind of people since well before anyone reading this arrived. Just enough of a dive. Open eleven to two, seven days.
Music · Tue–Sun · Downtown
Upstairs is one of the better small live rooms in southeast Ohio — mostly $5 covers, mostly local and regional bands. Downstairs is a bar with a pool table and a patio. Check who is playing; this is where the night ends.
Bar & grill · Daily · 25 min
Opened in 1842 to serve coal miners and still going, on the Nelsonville square. The Mine Burger is absurd and the basket of fries feeds five. Open seven days, and the reason to stay in Nelsonville after a show at Stuart's.
Dinner · Wed–Sat 5–9 · 25 min
White-tablecloth cooking on the Nelsonville square with live jazz most nights — the most unexpected room in the county. Wednesday through Saturday, dinner only.
Breakfast & lunch · Mon–Fri 7–6:45 · 22 min
Diner breakfast done properly, on the highway east of town. Country fried steak, omelets, a huge pie case, and a Friday sloppy joe special that's a local institution. Weekdays only — closed Saturday and Sunday, which trips up nearly every visitor.
Fried chicken · Athens
Fried chicken and traditional sides from a family whose roots in the local chicken business go back to the late 1940s. An Athens institution and the category this list was otherwise missing entirely.
Pizza · Athens
The town’s best-known independent pizza, going since 2000, with more than fifty toppings and a real commitment to sourcing locally. The destination pizza rather than the convenient one.
Winery · Outside Athens
A family-owned winery in the hills outside town, with tastings, food, and a hilltop view that regional tourism materials talk about more than the wine. The rural counterweight to a food list otherwise concentrated on four blocks of Court Street. Shade Winery to the east is the other option if you want to make a day of it.
Day 1
Start at Donkey Coffee and walk Court Street end to end; it takes twenty minutes and orients you to everything. Then give the afternoon to the Kennedy Museum of Art and the Dairy Barn Arts Center. Dinner at Casa Nueva, unless it's a Tuesday, and a beer afterward at the Jackie O's Brewpub on West Union.
Day 2
The whole day fits inside a ten-minute drive. Grab a bagel on Court Street, then park at Sells Park and climb the Athens Trail to Finger Rock for the sandstone, or start at the state park and run the Thunderbunny–Hollow Point loop for the six-mile version. Swim at the Dow Lake beach afterward. Take the White Pine and Vista Point spur near sunset for the overlook. Dinner at Little Fish on the west side, outside if the weather holds, and a nightcap at West End Ciderhouse.
Day 3
Rent or bring a bike and ride the Hockhocking Adena northwest — 24 miles end to end, or turn around at Hocking College if you'd rather do half. Watch for the concrete coal-spur arches marching out of the marsh on the west side. In Nelsonville, walk the brick square, hit the Rocky outlet, and eat at the Mine Tavern. If there's a show at Stuart's Opera House, stay for it and shuttle back; if not, ride home in the evening light. Alternative for riders who want dirt: swap the bikeway for a day at Baileys, fifteen minutes north at the Chauncey trailhead.
Day 4
Saturday morning means the farmers market at nine — go, and eat there. Then drive forty minutes north to Burr Oak for a section of the lakeshore trail and a swim, or stay closer and do the Blackhaw accessible loop and the Dow Lake shoreline. Lunch at Village Bakery on the way back through, and out east on US-50.
Spring
Wildflowers peak on the Strouds Run trails in April and May. The Thunderbunny 50K runs in early May, capped at 300 with 25K and 11K options; the course covers nearly every trail in the park plus the city preserves.
Summer
Ohio Brew Week in mid-July takes over uptown Athens. Nelsonville Music Festival — produced by Stuart's Opera House, with proceeds funding its arts education programs — runs in June.
Fall
The best season, and the Ohio Pawpaw Festival is the county's signature event — September 18 to 20, 2026, at the Snow Fork Event Center in Nelsonville, celebrating North America's largest native fruit across food, music and local agriculture. Little Fish brews with pawpaw around the same time. Fall color on the bikeway and at Burr Oak peaks mid-to-late October.
Winter
Sledding and cross-country skiing at Strouds Run, everything indoors still running, and the quietest the trails ever get.
Book a stay
6 guests · 4 bedrooms · 4 beds · 2 baths
Twelve private acres surrounded by Wayne National Forest, on the Nelsonville side of the county in Ohio's Hocking Hills region. A quarter mile from a Wayne National OHV trailhead, twenty minutes from Athens or Logan, twenty-five from the Hocking Hills state parks and Zaleski State Forest, and an hour from Columbus.
The space
A six-person hot tub open year-round, a yoga studio, a media room, a fire pit, and a private hiking trail through the property, with four separate outdoor living spaces to take the view from. The interior walls are infused with rose quartz. In-cabin chef, yoga sessions, massage, and sound baths can be arranged through the hosts — ask for details.
Megan and her husband grew up in the area and still live in Hocking Hills. There is a full cabin tour on YouTube under Wildewood Aframe, and the property posts as @wildewoodaframe on Instagram.
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