Fall at Sewickley Heights Borough Park: Earlier Closings, Hunt Season, and the Signs That Matter

On Saturday, October 31, you can walk the gravel path until nine at night. On Sunday, November 1, you cannot be in the park after six. Nothing about the trail changes overnight. The Borough of Sewickley Heights posts summer hours of 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. from April 1 through the end of October, and standard hours of 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. the rest of the year. Halloween is the hinge. That same Sunday morning, clocks fall back. The evening window closes from both ends inside a single weekend, and three hours of legal walking time disappear at once.

That collapse is the clearest example of something residents rarely say out loud about this park: it is not one place with one set of rules. Over roughly ten weeks each autumn, the same 1,000 acres operate as four overlapping properties governed by a calendar, a color code, and a tag on your dog's collar. The borough chose that approach deliberately, and it is the reason dogs, horses, and mountain bikes still share a single undeveloped tract instead of being fenced apart from one another.

Here is what actually shifts between now and the end of November.

The tag on the collar is annual, and yours may have quietly lapsed

The off-leash privilege in this park is the most generous arrangement of its kind west of Pittsburgh, and it is now conditional. Under Ordinance 324, the Borough Park Dog Ordinance, every unleashed dog has been required to wear a borough-issued permit tag since June 15, 2025. Tags are free to Sewickley Heights residents and to anyone with a 15143 address. For everyone outside that zip code, the cost is $100 per dog, per year.

The word doing the most work in that sentence is annual. The first tags went out in the summer of 2025. If yours was issued then and you have not been back to 238 Country Club Road since, this fall is when the paperwork catches up with you. Applications are submitted in person at the borough office on weekdays, and they ask for owner contact information, breed, Allegheny County license number, and vaccination status.

The ordinance did not arrive out of nowhere. The borough describes a five-year stretch of "more walkers, more equestrians, and more dogs," and council asked the Park Commission to propose solutions after safety concerns surfaced.

At a public meeting held in September 2024, attendees overwhelmingly said they wanted to keep walking dogs off leash in the park. The tag system was the compromise that preserved that, not a step away from it.

Two rules ride along with the tag and are the ones most often broken on a busy Saturday. Leashes must still be carried, and dogs must be leashed within 100 feet of the two primary parking areas. No single person may have more than two dogs off leash, and those dogs must respond to voice command. The borough's own trail courtesy guidance adds one more: leash up when you approach horses.

Yellow signs and white signs are not decoration

This is the fall fact that most regular users of the park have never had explained to them, and it is the one worth reading twice.

The park is never open to the public for hunting. Hunting occurs only by groups the borough sanctions, and when it does, the park closes to all public use. That is the borough's stated rule, full stop.

The geography of that arrangement is what matters day to day. The Sewickley Valley Conservation Association states plainly that it hunts only the west side of Sewickley Heights Park, behind the yellow signs, and that it does not hunt the east park, the side most dog walkers use, which is posted with white no-hunting signs. The association also notes the Heights asked for an additional 30-yard buffer from property lines to minimize issues with neighbors. Color-coded signage is doing the work a fence would otherwise do.

Timing sharpens all of this. Allegheny County sits in Wildlife Management Unit 2B, one of three special-regulations units where archery deer season opens on September 19 this year, according to the Pennsylvania Game Commission's approved 2026-27 seasons. Statewide archery does not open until October 3. Deer activity around the park picks up two full weeks before most of Pennsylvania notices. On the adjoining 33.6-acre Fern Hollow green space, Allegheny Land Trust permits archery-only whitetail hunting from September 1 through January 31, and hunting on some of its Sewickley Heights parcels is managed by Neighborhood Deer Management Associates rather than by an ALT permit alone.

None of that means staying home. It means the bulletin board at the trailhead is worth thirty seconds before a November walk, and it means knowing which color sign you just passed.

The 2 p.m. Wednesdays

Late October brings the other traffic. The Sewickley Hunt is a drag hunt, meaning hounds follow a laid scent rather than a live fox, and it is listed among the oldest active drag hunts in the country. Mr. and Mrs. J.O. Burgwin founded it in 1922 with three foxhounds kenneled at their Sewickley Heights farm. The kennels are on Little Sewickley Creek Road. The season runs from mid-August into March, with meets on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and holidays, and hunts during the formal season going out at 2 p.m.

The formal opening is the event people photograph. In 2024 the club opened its 102nd formal season on the grounds of Wilpen Hall, with a blessing of riders, horses, and hounds before the field moved off. Confirm this year's date with the hunt rather than assuming, but plan on late October and plan on horses using the Fern Hollow trails that feed directly into the park's network.

Trail etiquette in the park is not ambiguous about who yields. Bikers yield to equestrians and hikers. Hikers yield to equestrians. A horse coming down a narrow section of Bog Run has no good options, and a loose dog removes the few it has.

Fern Hollow is running its fall season from a construction site

Fern Hollow Nature Center, 33 acres at 1901 Glen Mitchell Road, is the practical front door to this trail system and has been since 1997. It draws about 10,000 visitors a year and its grounds stay open dawn to dusk. It also holds the first certified Natural Outdoor Classroom in Pennsylvania.

It is in the middle of a build. The center broke ground this spring on a renovation plus a 1,200-square-foot addition to its roughly 2,000-square-foot building, extending toward Glen Mitchell Road without taking any of the existing green space. Fundraising began in 2023 toward a $1.5 million goal. Grounds and programming stayed open through construction, and WPXI reported in May that the project was expected to finish in the fall.

The programs continue in the meantime, and two are timed to this season. Family Fishing runs September 26 from 9 to 11 a.m. at King's Lake, on Esmark Field at 1857 Camp Meeting Road. An easy autumn hike through the Borough Park is set for October 13, from 5:30 to 7 p.m., meeting in the main parking lot with naturalist Janel and environmental educator Sam. Notice that end time. A 7 p.m. finish is comfortable in mid-October and impossible three weeks later.

One resource here is genuinely underused by property owners in the borough. Fern Hollow's naturalist advises Sewickley Heights residents directly on native planting, invasive species, meadow maintenance, and habitat health on their own land, reachable at [email protected] or 412-741-6136. For anyone holding several acres of meadow and hillside, that is a better first call than a landscaping estimate.

The map is the gear you keep forgetting

Parking and the main trailhead sit at the end of Hallaway Road. One wide gravel path circles a good share of the property, with side trails branching off and looping back. Fern Hollow Loop runs about 2.5 miles with roughly 272 feet of gain and is the most-walked route. The Bog Run, Trout Run, and Spruce Run circuit runs about 2.6 miles, with Trout Run smooth along the stream floodplain and Bog Run a narrow, rooty singletrack along the hillside. Spruce Run is easy doubletrack near the polo field. Gas Well Path climbs the most of the wooded trails. Riders know the loop reads better counter-clockwise, since the clockwise version means grinding up Beaver Dam Path.

The recurring complaint is not terrain. It is blazing. Intersections are frequent and markers are sparse, so photograph the map board at the entrance or pull the borough's park map before you lose signal. Landmarks locals navigate by, Tortilla Flats and Butterfly Field among them, appear on no official sign.

Getting there is its own fall variable. Backbone Road has been closed since the 2024 landslides, and council awarded a contract of nearly $870,000 to GeoStabilization International in July, with work possibly starting this month. Camp Meeting, Fern Hollow, and Beaver roads remain the working approach.

What the rules are really protecting

Strip away the ordinance numbers and the sign colors, and this is a borough that decided a 1,000-acre commons was worth the administrative trouble of keeping open to dogs off leash, horses at speed, and bikes on singletrack, all at once, on land that was once estate ground and has been allowed to return to meadow and woods. Very few communities anywhere still manage that. The fall calendar is the price of it.

If you are weighing a move into the Heights, or thinking about what a property here is worth to the next owner, this is the kind of detail that never appears in a listing and shapes daily life more than square footage does. Nicole Kriebel knows these roads, these trails, and the people who maintain them. Let's Connect.