This Saturday, October 24, the Pennypack Ecological Restoration Trust opens its preserve at 2955 Edge Hill Road from 4 to 9 p.m. for what it now calls the Fall Festival. The official listing adds, almost like a footnote, "Formerly known as the Full Moon Hayride." Walking in is free and needs no registration. The hayride is different. You buy it ahead of time, per person, for a set timeslot, and the Trust says no hayride tickets will be sold on the day.
So the event has turned into a festival with a hayride inside it, and the hayride is the only part you have to book. For anyone in Huntingdon Valley still thinking of this as the night you just show up for a wagon ride, that matters by Thursday, not Saturday.
Three Names in Three Seasons
The Trust has renamed this evening twice since 2024 and moved it around October each time. Its own event pages show the change.
| Year | Name on the Trust's listing | Date | What the listing emphasized |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Full Moon Hayride | Saturday, October 19 | Kids' drum circle at the fire pit, then s'mores, a bake sale, cider and hot chocolate. Every hayride slot sold out. |
| 2025 | Full Moon Celebration | Saturday, October 4 | Hayrides, live music from the band Side Hustle, the Jeet? Mobile food truck, games |
| 2026 | Fall Festival | Saturday, October 24 | Hayride, live music, food and drinks, seasonal games, s'mores |
The tradition goes back further than the table. The Trust billed its October 7, 2022 event as the fourth annual Full Moon Hayride Festival. The moon dropped out of the name first and the hayride after it, so the name now describes the whole evening. The band and food truck listed for 2025 were last year's lineup. The 2026 listing promises live music and food without naming who is playing or cooking.
What has stayed the same across all of these years is how admission works. The grounds are open to anyone, and the hayride is capped and sold ahead. In 2024 the Trust said outright that all hayride slots had sold out, and it still invited everyone to "come and hang out at the Trust" anyway. That year, parking was on the June Fete Fairgrounds with attendants. Visitors who couldn't make the walk from the fairgrounds were sent to the main entrance, where a limited accessible section was kept open. The Trust hasn't posted 2026 parking details on its listing, so check its event page before you leave.
Planning Saturday Around the One Booked Item
Because the hayride is the only fixed time slot, everything else on Saturday fits around it. The Trust's rules make the order fairly clear:
- Book the hayride first. Tickets are sold per person for a set time, and none are sold at the gate. Trust members got early access when sales opened.
- Bring cash or Venmo. The Trust asks guests to have one or the other for food, drinks, retail items and activities.
- Use the five-hour window. The festival runs from 4 to 9 p.m., so it starts in daylight and ends after dark, and the s'mores and fire pit make the later hours worth staying for.
If your household didn't get hayride seats, the 2024 note still applies. The rest of the evening is open to everyone.
The Woods the Wagon Rolls Through Are Mid-Experiment
The forest along the hayride route is now a research site. In summer 2024, beech leaf disease turned up in American beech trees along the northern edge of the Pennypack Preserve, and early symptoms were later found elsewhere on the property.
Starting in 2025, the Trust has hosted a team from Bartlett Tree Research Laboratories testing ways to slow the disease. Here is how the Trust's events listing describes the stakes:
"...preserving one of our most heavily American beech-dominated forest tracts."
The study design is laid out on the Trust's beech leaf disease project page. In summer 2025, two 1.5-acre plots were each divided into four sections:
- an untreated control
- selective thinning of beech
- root-flare injections of thiabendazole, sold as Arbotect
- thinning and injection together
The treatments are done. Bartlett now plans to monitor tree health, canopy symptoms and fine-twig dieback for five years, using aerial photography and other assessments. Maria Paula Mugnani, the Trust's Director of Research and Restoration, was scheduled to lead an October 20 walking tour on the disease, the work done at Pennypack and the next stage of the study.
This puts Saturday's hayride in a different light. The autumn woods on the Edge Hill Road property are now an active forestry trial with a timeline running into the 2030s. Anyone who comes back over the next few falls will be seeing the same trees partway through a study built to measure exactly how they change.
The Rest of the Fall Runs Through a Barn Classroom
The festival is the biggest night on the Trust's fall calendar, but it isn't the busiest stretch. In the week after it, the Trust has something scheduled almost every other day, and much of it fits the preserve's quieter side.
Some of that programming has a newer home. The BLBB Charitable Field Station opened at the Trust's headquarters on October 19, 2023, according to PA Environment Digest. It was funded in part by the Trust's Watershed Moment Capital Campaign. Its architect, Re:Vision Architecture, describes it as an adaptive reuse of the lower level of a historic barn. It has lab stations for soil and water work, flexible classroom and event space, presentation equipment and public restrooms.
The Trust's book club meets there, in what the Trust calls "our beautiful new classroom." The late-October and November dates:
- Tuesday, October 27, 10 to 11 a.m.: Pre-School Nature Club, a slow, child-led walk for ages 2 to 5 with caregivers. Registration is required, and it costs $5 per child for members and $10 for non-members.
- Wednesday, October 28, 9 to 11 a.m.: Easy-Paced Guided Hike with board member Vira Katolik. It's free, limited to 15 people, and requires registration.
- Wednesday, October 28, 7 to 8:30 p.m.: Book club on Raising Hare: A Memoir by Chloe Dalton. It's free, with registration required.
- Saturday, October 31, 10:15 a.m. to noon: Mindfulness in Nature with naturalist Erica Blatt. Single sessions are $30, and the class is capped at 15. Bring a chair or mat.
- Wednesday, November 18, 7 to 8:30 p.m.: Book club on A Place of Tides by James Rebanks.
- Saturday, November 21, 10:15 a.m. to noon: The last Mindfulness in Nature session of the fall series.
Several of these work the way the hayride does. The hike and the mindfulness class are each limited to 15 people, and every program on this list asks you to register. Outside of programs, the Trust lists its parking lot and trails as open every day from 8 a.m. until dusk.
Where the Evening Can End
If your hayride slot is early, Huntingdon Pike has an option this fall that it didn't have last October. Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant at 785 Huntingdon Pike reopened on June 22 under new ownership, after a nine-month closure, according to MontCo Today. That closure began when the chain shut all 16 of its locations and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. MontCo Today reported that it is the only Iron Hill in the Philadelphia suburbs to make it back.
The beer garden has reopened too. It opened in 2016 as the first beer garden in the Iron Hill chain. The Huntingdon Valley location also has a new beer, Hop Chase IPA, brewed only for this location and poured inside and out.
Addison Wolfe follows the details that shape a Saturday in Huntingdon Valley, from a renamed hayride to a beech study that will run for years. If you're weighing how local institutions like the Pennypack Trust fit into your own plans, Addison Wolfe Real Estate is glad to talk it through. Contact Us.
