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View south from the summit of Mount Holyoke in Skinner State Park, looking down across the Connecticut River as it curves through farm fields and wooded hills of the Pioneer Valley on a clear spring day, with red sandstone bedrock in the foreground.
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The Connecticut River and Pioneer Valley from the summit of Skinner State Park (Mount Holyoke), South Hadley, May 2019. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, source, CC0 / public domain.

Welcome to PioneerValley.org

What this site is, who it's for, and the first wave of entries now live across outdoors, things to see, and things to do.

By PioneerValley.org · Published 2026-04-21

Hello, neighbors. This is the first post on PioneerValley.org, a neighbor-run guide to the Valley, built slowly and verified against primary sources rather than scraped from the usual aggregators.

What’s here today

The first wave of entries is live. In Outdoors:

In Things to See:

In Things to Do:

And the first guide, A Rainy Day in the Pioneer Valley.

Every place entry has a lastVerified date in its frontmatter and a Sources section at the bottom, so you can see when we last checked the facts and where they came from.

What’s coming

The next wave will deepen each section: more trails in Franklin County, more museums and historic sites, and town pages for Amherst, Northampton, Easthampton, and the rest of Hampshire County. After that: Franklin and Hampden.

How to help

If you live in the Valley and spot something out of date or wrong, or if you have a favorite place we should add, email corrections and suggestions to contact@pioneervalley.org. Small notes are welcome. “The hours changed” or “the auto road opened late this year” are exactly the kind of updates this site is built to absorb.

Thanks for reading. More soon.

#announcement