Trail Review: Flight 93 National Memorial Visitor Center to Memorial Plaza

The trail starts from behind the bathrooms near the Visitor Center/Museum at the Flight 93 National Memorial. It’s .3 miles to the Western Overlook and .7 miles to Memorial Plaza. The entire thing is wheelchair, and therefore stroller, accessible.

It’s only for walking, so no bikes and no horses allowed, but you can take your pets as long as you keep them on a leash and clean up after them.

The trail isn’t paved, but the gravel is easy to walk on. The Memorial Plaza is down the hill from the Visitor’s Center, and they made sure to keep the grade easy. There are switchbacks and benches along the way if you want to sit down and rest or admire the view.

The views are impressive in both directions. The platform that we first walked out on juts out over the top of the hill and reminds me of a jetway from this angle.

It’s like you are in a plane, seeing the jetway out the window as you taxi away. The Western Overlook is where the command post for the investigation was located as well as a number of spontaneous shrines.

Off to one direction, you can see a number of windmills installed across a wide sweep of land.

And to another you can see the trail ahead of you ending at Memorial Plaza in the distance. There are forty white marble panels, each engraved with a name and with an American flag at its base, to honor the forty passengers and crew who died in the crash.

There are benches and other places to sit and contemplate. There’s a black walkway and a sloped wall there to mark the edge of the debris field and crash site.

The Plaza is a quarter of a mile long and paved. So if you want to drive down and then walk just that much, you can do that.