By Dave Mezz | Dec 09/Jan 10 | 

Out of This World

A new lodge in Virginia is light-years from the ordinary

The first thing you notice after entering the gate to Primland is the sheer enormity of the place. Twelve thousand acres to be exact, all set amid the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains in southern Virginia. Following the winding road, you crest yet another hill, revealing a seemingly endless vista of peaks and valleys. Everything looks bigger up here—the views, the trees, and come nightfall, the stars. And if you’d like to get an even better look at those stars, the resort’s new twenty-six-room main lodge has something that’s out of this world.

Located in the lodge’s attached silo (which also boasts the most exclusive room in the house, the two-story, $1,200/night Pinnacle Suite) is a full-fledged observatory, featuring a Celestron CGE Pro 1400 telescope, which enables you to view deep space objects such as the Pinwheel galaxy, some twenty-seven million light-years away. At the touch of a button, a panel opens in the silo’s rotating dome, the telescope swivels around to track its target, and the images can then be beamed via computer to any of the rooms’ flat-screen TVs in addition to the lodge’s private eighteen-seat theater.

Not that there isn’t plenty to see in the more immediate vicinity. Exploring the network of ninety-plus miles of trails—by horseback, mountain bike, or ATV—is an otherworldly experience in itself. And the lodge, awash in walnut, oak, and Tennessee stone, overlooks the Donald Steel–designed Highlands golf course.

Orvis-endorsed, the resort also offers a fourteen-station sporting clays course and guided hunting for pheasant, chukar, and quail; deer; and turkey in the spring, as well as trout fishing (catch and release only) in the secluded waters of the Dan River. But after a day in the field or on the links, you might want to kick back, maybe with one of the lodge’s fifteen hundred bottles of wine, and do what folks in these mountains have always done: stare up at the night sky. Now it’s just a little bit closer.

For more information, visit primland.com