Walk the Montour Trail near mile marker zero on a Saturday morning this fall and you might pass a police officer on a mountain bike, something that hasn't been part of the scenery here in two decades. Head a little further toward Hassam Road and you might spot hoofprints pressed into the mud that don't belong to any horse boarded locally. Most people who use this trail regularly have noticed one or the other. Almost nobody has connected them, because they aren't the same program, and they didn't happen for the same reason.
Both showed up within about twelve months of each other, and together they say something about this stretch of Moon Township that the average visitor would never guess: the same ground residents use for an evening walk has become a working training site for two different specialty patrol units, one local and one city.
Why The Bike Patrol Came Back After Twenty Years
Moon Township Police last ran a mountain bike unit sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s, before it quietly disappeared. That changed in June 2025, when the department announced it would certify officers to patrol the trail on bikes again, a direct response to what happened the previous fall. In October 2024, a 44-year-old off-duty Pennsylvania State Police Liquor Control Enforcement agent named Ben Brallier was fatally stabbed while running along the trail near Hassam Road. A suspect was later arrested, and the Montour Trail Council and Hollow Oak Land Trust issued a joint statement to trail users in the days after.
We remain dedicated to ensuring the safety of all who visit and use the Montour Trail and Montour Woods Conservation Area.
The department's plan, according to CBS Pittsburgh's coverage of the announcement, was to have three officers certified by July 4 and eventually run six, splitting shifts between the trail and Moon Park. The Montour Trail Council's own reporting on the change is more specific about geography than most residents realize: the township's e-bikes are assigned to patrol mile markers 0 through 5, which is not a random stretch. That's the Moon Township segment of the trail, the piece that runs from the Coraopolis line out past the Montour Woods Conservation Area, and it's the only section the local department can patrol directly.
The Second Patrol Training In Your Backyard
The bike unit is the patrol you'd expect a township to run on its own trail. The other one is stranger, and most people who live here have no reason to know about it. In September 2025, officers from the Pittsburgh Mounted Patrol trailered their horses out of the stables in Brighton Heights and brought them to Havens Hideout Ranch, a property inside Moon Township, to train somewhere that isn't downtown.
Sgt. Robert Stehle told WPXI the point was exposure. At the ranch, horses that normally work city blocks get walked through creeks and mud and get used to seeing deer, conditions that don't come up on a beat but do come up in a search and rescue. Ranch owner Doug Havens, a former police officer himself, said hosting the training brought back some of his own memories of the job.
None of this training happens on the public trail itself. It happens on private acreage a few minutes from it. But it means Moon Township now plays a quiet role in keeping one of the city's most visible specialty units ready, and it's the kind of fact that only shows up if you're paying attention to what's happening in your own town rather than just what's happening on your usual loop.
What Actually Changed If You Use The Trail This Fall
Put the two programs together and here's what's genuinely different about walking, running, or riding this stretch compared to two years ago.
- You're more likely to see a bike officer specifically between mile markers 0 and 5, since that's the only segment the department is assigned to cover directly.
- If your fall plans include a longer ride south toward Library or Clairton, budget for a detour. The National Tunnel, roughly at the trail's midpoint and unrelated to the Moon Township segment, has been closed since November 2025 for a deteriorating ceiling, and the Montour Trail Council is trying to raise nearly $2.8 million for a permanent steel lining, the largest single repair project in the nonprofit's history. That's not a quick patch.
- Near mile marker 1, keep an eye out for the newer greenway acreage a local land trust picked up to preserve as open space along Montour Run, part of a broader effort tied to water quality and flood prevention in the watershed.
None of this changes the character of the trail day to day. It changes who else is likely to be on it with you, and how far you can realistically plan to go before you hit a gap that isn't getting fixed this year.
Robin Hill Park Is Also Getting Its Moment
If the Montour Trail's fall story is about visibility, Robin Hill Park's is the opposite. This 140-acre park off Thorn Run Road has always been a quieter counterpart, and most of what makes it worth a visit has nothing to do with foot traffic or patrols.
The Georgian manor near the park's entrance was built in the 1920s for the Nimick family and left to the township in 1971 with instructions that it become a place for what the original bequest called nature lovers. A short walk from the manor sits a log cabin that has nothing to do with Moon Township's own history at all. It was built in 1825 for the Coventry family roughly seven miles away, who lived there for fifty years before passing it to a second family that stayed on for three generations, and it was eventually dismantled and moved to Robin Hill by the Moon Township Historical Society in the late 1970s. The park's Log Cabin Trail starts right behind it.
Fall is when Robin Hill earns its reputation, since the tree cover along its short, occasionally muddy connector trails turns before most of the township does. It won't see a bike patrol or a mounted unit this season, because it doesn't need one. It's simply the other half of what fall recreation looks like here, the half that rewards a slower pace instead of a longer one.
Moon Park's Concerts Are Ending, The Trails Aren't
Moon Park is the loudest of the township's three green spaces for exactly one more season. The amphitheater's Thursday evening concert series, the splash pad next to the space-themed playground, and the food truck events that fill the parking lot all wind down once Labor Day passes, the way they do every year.
What doesn't end is the more than three miles of trail that circle the park's 300-plus acres and connect directly into the Montour Run Conservation Area network, meaning a walk that starts at Nelson Pond, where catch-and-release fishing is the rule and swimming isn't allowed, can continue well past the point where the concert crowd used to be sitting on blankets. The summer stage empties out. The trail underneath it doesn't.
Taken together, none of this happened because one agency decided to fix one problem. A township police department rebuilt a bike unit it had let lapse. A city mounted unit found private acreage to train horses for rough terrain. A land trust bought greenway parcels along a creek that needed protecting. Three separate institutions made three separate decisions in roughly the same twelve months, and the result is a trail corridor that feels different this fall than it did two years ago, whether or not the people using it could explain exactly why.
If you already call this stretch of Moon Township home and want more of what we notice here throughout the year, from park programming to what a listing actually looks like a few streets off the trail, the Yot Howley Group keeps a running neighborhood guide for Moon Township and is always glad to talk trail conditions, patrol schedules, or just the best bench at Robin Hill. Schedule a consultation whenever you're ready to talk about what's next, here or anywhere else in the South Hills and Sewickley corridor.
