Our Favorite Post Hike Burger

Jack Mason's Tavern 37.815139, -79.827250

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My first time in Clifton Forge, Va was early 2020. Before COVID had really taken the country I was on the return trip from an adventure to Kentucky with one of my friends so she could get a trial run for what van life was like.

On that trip, the transmission blew on Wonder, my old 1999 Ford E250. Clifton Forge was the only nearby town with a mechanic who could fix it. We got towed there and then spent the next 4 hours in the shop, waiting for family to come from Suffolk, VA and pick us up. That trip I had little interest in exploring the town, however, I noted the name and planed to

Too good to pause to get a photo before we devoured it.

visit sometime in the future. It would be almost 3 years before I returned to the small valley town in the Virginia mountains.

May 2023, Holly and I took a trip to a wild cave that I'd been wanting to explore for some time. That trip turned into a weekend of bounding around the Virginia's ridge and valley region with Reba sleeping in Biggy, hiking Sharp Top Mountain, checking out the cave, and a couple of the small valley towns looking for food and beer to uphold our tradition of ending a long mountain hike or adventure with food and beer. We eventually ended up back in Clifton Forge.

There is not much of history to be found on the town. Clifton Forge's official website has only two paragraphs giving a brief timeline. The area was established as a land grant in 1770s during Virginia's colonial period and development didn't really start until 1820s when the iron industry of Allegheny Virginia was still in it's infancy. In 1826, a road that would later become US Highway Route 60 over North Mountain was completed and started a boom period for the two. Its heyday came in 1857 when the Chesapeake & Ohio railroad line ran through the town bringing quick passenger and freight travel to the town. Almost a hundred years later, in 1950, the C&O railroad relocated its main maintenance facilities to West Virginia and the the town began to decline as jobs moved.

Today Amtrak still maintains a stop in Clifton Forge, but aside from a historical theater that still shows old movies, a few artist shops, and a train museum in the old C&O yard, the town itself has little to do. That said, the small town is actively working to revive itself as the boom of the outdoor industry in Virginia places the town perfectly between a number of famous hiking trail heads. Sharp Top, along with the Virginia Triple Crown of McAfee Knob, Tinker Cliffs, and Dragon's Tooth Ridge and several white water kayaking locations of the Roanoke area are only and hour drive from the town, making it the the perfect post adventure refueling station. One gem stands out among everything in the town: Jack Masons tavern and brewery

Jack Mason's is one of Virginia's plethora of local breweries offering a variety of locally brewed beers, hard ciders, and hard seltzers, however, for Holly and I, these are not the best part of the restaurant. Following our 2023 adventure to the region, we were ravishingly hungry, and my legs being intensely sore from both caving and mountain hiking in the same weekend I was on the search for something with a hefty amount of protein to help my muscles repair themselves. That would be why the peanut butter and jelly, bacon, cheeseburger caught my eye. Holly was skeptic, and hell so was I, but I was so exhausted and hungry at the time I would have eaten anything.

When our food finally arrived, I hesitantly grabbed the odd combination and took my first bite. I was in absolutely heaven. Sweet jelly balances the salt of the bacon. Creamy peanut butter rounded out the sharpness of the cheddar cheese. All atop the savory and perfectly seasoned quarter pound burger patty. Needless to say, I inhaled it. It was only after I was sitting, slouched in my seat, half asleep and catching my breath, melted peanut butter running down my face, Holly and I thought to take a photo for the website. Quite frankly, I'd love to be able to write more about the restaurants atmosphere or the drinks we got, but to this day, even after several more trips to the area that ended at Jack Masons, I still find myself only able to focus on the burger while I'm there.

Today, we regularly find ourselves looking for adventures in the area just so we have an excuse to justify driving 3 hours to get the delicious reward meal. For us, its a testament to one of the things we look for when we seek out places to eat on our travels: a meal so good that it becomes the entire focus of the moment. Jack Mason's has managed to maintain this accomplishment every time we visit.

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