Loop Hike: Nicholson Hollow, Stony Man, Whiteoak Canyon, Berry Hollow, Weakley Hollow (~1000-4011')

For the last of my spring-training hikes, I went big: a base-to-summit, dawn-to-hopefully-not-dusk loop from the Old Rag parking area to the summit of Stony Man, the second-highest peak in Shenandoah National Park, and back. As planned, the loop would cover 15 miles; a route change on impulse bumped it up to 18 miles, in which I gained and lost at least 3500 feet. If I could handle this hike, I figured, I could handle anything the southwestern highpoints would throw at me in a single day.

To make sure I could fit the whole loop into one day (because I kind of hate backpacking), I showed up at the Old Rag lot around 7:30 pm on June 15, the day before the hike. The place was quiet then, but the fact that the hand-sanitizer dispensers in all seven of the lot's porta-potties were completely empty testified to the crowds that had come and would soon come again (and cover those rocks in fecal bacteria, I supposed, suddenly glad I'd be hiking the other way. If you want to stay clean, BYOB.)

I tossed my tent into my pack, self-registered for a "backcountry camping" permit, and hiked a mile up the Nicholson Hollow trail until I found a nice flat spot to sleep, in a grove of pines within hearing distance of the river.

Loop Hike: Three Ridges, VA (~1000-3970')

The next weekend, I headed back to the Tye River Gap southwest of Charlottesville to hike the peaks I'd seen across the valley while hiking the Priest. That trio of summits, known as the Three Ridges, is accessible by a pleasantly challenging 13.1-mile loop along the AT and a side trail called the Mau-Har Trail.

Starting from the same parking lot, I crossed VA-56, then crossed the parallel Tye River along a cable bridge:

Enter, it seems to call...

Loop Hike: Old Rag Mountain and Corbin Mountain Trail, SNP, VA (~1000-3500')

If you've been following this blog, you may have noticed that I've been hiking a lot more this spring than I did last year. There's a reason for this (and it's not that my work schedule has eased up--haha, that'll happen when I'm dead): I'm heading west again this summer to pick off a few more highpoints! The Southwestern ones are all snow-free by July, but they're still serious ascents involving several thousand feet of gain, moderately tricky terrain, and high elevation. I might not be able to train for the last two of those here in Virginia, but I've mapped out some loop hikes along the Blue Ridge that will at least approximate the first.

And so I headed out this Friday for the first of them, which would take me back up Old Rag Mountain and some of the nearby trails in Shenandoah National Park.

As you might recall, Old Rag is one of the few genuine Class 3 scrambles I've seen in Virginia. The top quarter of the mountain is covered in huge, smooth granite boulders, which the trail to the summit takes you over, around, and through. The mountain's unusual terrain and proximity to the DC metro area leave it quite crowded in warm months, so if you prefer to hike without a bunch of randoms breathing down your neck, I recommend you get there early. By the time I arrived, at 9:30 a.m. on a Friday in late May, the (huge) parking lot at the base was already two-thirds full.

The first few miles of my ascent were uneventful, though much greener than the last time I'd been there:

Tar Tales, Part II: Crikey! It's Angry!

If you know me, you know how I handle particularly tough problems. I consider them carefully from all angles, develop a detailed plan of attack, assemble the materials I’ll need to proceed… and then shove it all into a corner of my room and ignore it for months. Not until a distant date, when forced by some elaborate chain of reasoning (I need to do this so that I can do that in order to do some third thing with a deadline), after just enough dust has accumulated on the materials to set me sneezing, do I pick them up again and actually deal with the problem.

This approach isn’t entirely without benefits: sometimes I learn things in the intervening months that improve my eventual approach to the problem. But more often than not, when the solution ends up taking much less effort than I’d feared, it just leaves me feeling sheepish that I spent six weeks putting off five hours of work.

What does all this have to do with the Lars? Well, what problem could be tougher—or bigger, or more likely to break loose and terrorize the county—than an angry feral Tyranitar falling into my care?

Crabtree Falls, VA (1600-2600')

I must say, Crabtree Falls lives up to its hype.

If you live--or have lived, as in my case--anywhere in the vicinity of central Virginia, you've most likely heard of Crabtree Falls. It's right up there with Whiteoak Canyon and the Cascades on the list of classic Virginia waterfall hikes. On summer afternoons, especially in laurel-blooming season, folks flock to it from all over the state, braving crowds and splinters and scraped knees for the chance to glimpse the 1000-foot falls--the highest* east of the Mississippi--in all its crystalline, rock-slicking glory.

Fortunately, the (commodious) parking lot was almost empty when I arrived that April afternoon. I paid the $3 entrance fee, took my pick of parking spots, and headed up to the trailhead.

The first stretch of the trail was paved--universally accessible, as the sign at the base explained. Here, as elsewhere along the hike, big orange signs warned against careless scrambling:

"Now I'm never gonna climb again/slippery feet have got no traction..."

The Priest, VA (4063')

A couple of weeks ago, I drove south to hike a mountain called The Priest, a 4000-footer in the Blue Ridge a few dozen miles south of Shenandoah National Park (and the high point of Nelson County). The drive down, through Charlottesville on US-29, was a little awkward--they've built up the area north of town so much, over the past few years, that I could barely tell where I was going. But once I turned off the highway and onto the country roads and found myself face to face with this beauty:

I knew I'd made the right decision to come out.

That particular road, VA-56, took me right into the gap north of The Priest, carved by a little river called the Tye. The hills rose up around me, the houses and fields drew in towards the road, and then, a couple miles into the George Washington National Forest, the trailhead lot appeared to my left.

Annapolis Rocks, MD (1700')

About two weeks ago, on the recommendation of SummitPost's Eastern States Climber's Peak List, I ventured north to central Maryland to hike Annapolis Rocks. I had never heard of the Rocks before, but if they'd made it onto that list--in the company of Katahdin, the Presidential Range, and Old Rag Mountain, among others--I figured they must be worth seeing. Even if they were in Maryland.

Remember this map? The Supreme Court just heard a case over whether these districts are unconstitutionally gerrymandered... for reals.

But what the Rocks lack in elevation, at a measly 1700', they make up for in accessibility. They lie just off the Appalachian Trail on the slopes of South Mountain (a long, flat-topped ridge much like the Massanuttens in Virginia), about two and a half miles north of I-70. East of the mountain, farm country descends to the growing exurb of Frederick, MD; to the west, steep slopes look out upon the Cumberland Valley, northern neighbor to the Shenandoah. In other words, the country seemed fairly familiar to me, right down to the white-haired farmer waving at my car as it passed through the village of Wolfsville.

My original plan had been to approach the Rocks from the north, starting about six miles up the AT at the next road crossing, and make a full-day hike of them. However, I wound up starting late (though not late enough to avoid the tail end of the Beltway's morning rush hour) and arrived around 11 at the trailhead--well, at the mountain gap where Google Maps had claimed there was a trailhead. I didn't see a thing as I drove by.

Savage Gulf, TN (~1800-2000')

Later that week, once my feet had recovered, the Chattanoogan and I drove up to a place on the Cumberland Plateau called Savage Gulf State Natural Area. Not a gulch or a gully, mind you, but a "gulf." Guess that's the local word for them.

But hey--sounds like our kind of place, lar!

The main attraction on the eastern end of the Natural Area (why they don't just call it a park, I have no idea) is a ~4-mile loop trail that wanders through the woods for a bit, then takes you right along the edge of those bluffs.

Southern Sixers: Mt. Collins (6188'), Mt. Love (6400'), Clingman's Dome (6643'), Mt. Buckley (6560')

On the way down to visit that Chattanoogan fellow I've mentioned in previous posts, I thought I'd stop by the Smokies for a bit of February mountaineering. I hadn't hiked through snow since my winter ascent of Mt. Washington in 2016, and the ice axe I'd bought after that trip was long overdue for actual use. Plus, what better time to snag the handful of Southern Sixers along the main drag of the Smokies than in the dead of winter? I'd have the mountains to myself, I figured--my own little ice-encrusted wonderland at the crown of the southern Appalachians.

Now, if you've noticed any trends while following this blog for the past two years, you're probably wondering what's about to go wrong. And the answer, my friends, is...

...absolutely nothing.

The weather on the high ridge of the Smokies that weekend was perfect for hiking: warm, sunny, and snowless. And I looked like a fool schlepping an ice axe all the way to Clingman's Dome.

Tar Tales, Part I: Beware, Beware the Monster Fair

A year after I graduated from college—having both free time and disposable income for the first time in my life—I decided to get a new Pokémon. The income, part-time bookstore wages, wasn’t terribly high, so rather than hit up the fancy shops at Tysons Corner or pay the exorbitant fee to capture one from Shenandoah National Park (the nearest patch of public land where interesting ‘mons could be found), I turned to Craigslist first. Surely someone on there had a recently laid Egg they’d part with for a smile and the assurance of a good home.

Nope. Even those sellers knew their stuff—the pickings were either Pidgeys for a pittance or purebred Piplups for not much less than what the Tysons dealers were charging. With Pokémon, as with anything else, there’s no such thing as a free lunch—especially in Northern Virginia.

I did, however, find an advertisement for a breeder’s fair out in Manassas. Kind of a haul, but there might be some deals there. I’d at least come away with a better sense of the market, of how much those Piplups were really worth.

And so, one hot August afternoon, I found myself inching down I-66 among the weekend traffic, headed for that huge park beside Bull Run.

Urushiol, Scourge of the Forests

But first, a public service announcement about a certain substance found on three-leafed plants throughout North America--urushiol.

If you've done much in the way of hiking, camping, bushwhacking, orienteering, or any other activity that involves tromping around wooded areas, you've probably come across this plant:

If you're one of the 80% of humans who react on contact with it, it has made your life a living hell for weeks after the fact. And if not, then just you wait--one of these days, you will be.

This three-leafed, hairy vine causes millions of rashes and blisters each year. It grows in an impressive range of climates and soil types: from the Caribbean to the Arctic, and from flood-prone bayous to thin-soiled mountainsides up to 5000' in altitude. It and its sister species account for 10% of all lost-time injuries in the United States Forest Service. And as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels increase, it's only growing larger and more potent.

I speak, of course, of Toxicodendron radicans, known to most folks as poison ivy.

VA County Highpoint: Comers Rock, Wythe County (4080')

A couple of weeks after that, I found myself in Wytheville for the weekend with a friend. We had some time to kill, so I suggested we hike the high point of the county, Comers Rock.

I'd tagged a couple of Virginia county highpoints while chasing other goals (Mt. Rogers, naturally, is the high point of Grayson and Smyth Counties, and Hawksbill Mountain tops off Page and Madison), but this was the first one I'd done intentionally.

We took US-21 south into the easternmost arm of the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area and pulled off at the forest road to the summit:

Not suitable for passenger cars, but we saw several ATV'ers on our way up.

The road took us up through a valley, around a peak:

Signal Knob, VA (2106')

In the early autumn, I headed out to the Massanutten Mountains for a bit of weekend backpacking.

If you've never heard of them, the Massanuttens are a fifty-mile-long range (or a single fifty-mile-long mountain, depending on who you ask) smack-dab in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley. They're the easternmost in Virginia's slice of the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians, a family of long, steep-sided, flat-topped ridges that pop up between the Blue Ridge and the Appalachian Plateau from southeastern New York to Alabama. Their shape is quite distinctive, as you'll see in this aerial photo (not my work):

...which contrasts them with the Blue Ridge to the east (right).

But I grew up attending a summer camp in the Massanuttens, so until I was much older than I'd care to admit, I thought all mountains looked like that.

The range tops out at 2922', a thousand feet lower than its eastern neighbors. That altitude disparity, and the lack of roads and developed campgrounds atop the ridges, spare them the crowds that flock to Shenandoah National Park. But there's still plenty to see in the Massanuttens: the range is full of trails and gullies and scrambles and weird little microbiomes that range from quasi-krummholz to cacti.

After considering a couple of spots, I settled on Signal Knob, the northernmost tip of the range and a five-mile, ~1000' hike from the valley floor. I'd driven past the peak dozens of times (it's clearly visible from the single-digit miles of I-66), but I'd never stood on top of it.

Waterfalls at Ocoee, TN (~900')

Later that week, my friends and I drove out to a little trail not far from the shores of Ocoee Lake, a hydroelectric reservoir on the western edge of Cherokee National Forest. My friend from Chattanooga had taken me up this way before; he recommended it again as a short, gentle hike that would fall within our joint athletic ability (there's a reason I only took one of these friends up Roan Mountain).

As you can see from the sign, the Clemmer Trail's main attraction is a pair of waterfalls along Rock Creek, one of the many mountain streams that feeds the lake. The area is also frequented by mountain bikers, though we were fortunate enough to not run into any of them while traveling uphill.

The trail started off with a fairly steep ascent, but soon leveled off into a wide, flat creek valley. It continued thus for a bit under two miles:

then, as the mountain walls closed in, it switched us back and forth across the creek until we came to the first waterfall:

Huckleberry Knob, NC (5560') ...and the Great American Eclipse

Chattanooga--and my friend there--proved quite hospitable. My hiking buddy and I arrived at his place in the late afternoon; later that evening, another pair of friends from Northern Virginia joined us. We spent the next day resting from our various drives and lives, then turned in early that night.

Our plan for the following day was to drive up the Cherohala Skyway to the bald summit of Huckleberry Knob, the high point of the Unicoi Mountains. Though a thousand feet lower and much less prominent (both topologically and in terms of renown) than its northern cousins, the Smokies, that peak was smack-dab in the middle of the Great American Eclipse's path of totality. On any other day, it'd be a gentle 1.2-mile stroll from the Skyway--pleasant, no doubt, but hardly worth a ten-hour drive--but for two minutes and thirty-eight seconds, starting at 2:35 pm on Monday, August 21, 2017, the sun above that mountain was going to disappear. And we planned to be under it.

Southern Sixers: Roan Mountain, NC/TN (6267', 6286', and 6189')

The Friday before the 21st, a friend and I headed south from Northern Virginia, hoping by our early departure to beat the worst of the eclipse-weekend traffic. As far as I know, we did, but there were still about twice as many accidents as usual along I-81 southbound through the Valley. Things cleared up somewhat once we hit the plateau west of Blacksburg, and they stayed that way until Bristol...

...where our route happened to take us past the Speedway on a race day. The two-mile stretch of US-11 running past it was lined with parking lots, carnival tents, and streams of pedestrians homing in on the racetrack. Even if that 162,000-seat stadium was only half full (which it might well have been; the night's race was only a minor one), it held a crowd one-sixth the size of the population of the Bristol-Kingsport-Johnson City region, all of whom had turned out in their best on that drizzly summer evening to watch a bunch of cars drive loops around a half-mile track. I guess you have to grow up out there, in NASCAR country, to get it.

My friend and I, however, drove on by. Our reason for detouring off the interstate lay further down the road, up US-19E among the western slopes of the Blue Ridge--which, after a summer wasted in the flatlands, looked so rugged and green and beautiful that I could barely keep my eyes on the road. But I did, and shortly before dusk we arrived at the base of Roan Mountain, a twenty-mile ridge along the TN-NC border home to three peaks above 6000 feet and the longest grassy bald in the southern Appalachians--and conveniently located two-thirds of the way to Chattanooga, our base of operations for the eclipse.

The campsite I'd reserved in Roan Mountain State Park, one of only three available when I'd picked it out two days before, turned out to be an RV site:

Note the utter lack of soft, flat ground suitable for pitching tents.

Heads Up!

Tomorrow morning, the Lars and I are heading south to catch a glimpse of the Great American Solar Eclipse (August 21--this Monday!).

Along the way, we're hoping to take in a few of the Southern Sixers and some other points of geologic interest in east Tennessee. Polish up your reading glasses for more Larvitour!

Whiteoak Canyon and Hawksbill Mountain, VA (4011')

Back in April, I decided to treat myself to a backpacking trip in Shenandoah National Park for my birthday. The plan was to hike in from the east via Whiteoak Canyon, swing around to tag the high point of the park, 4011-foot Hawksbill Mountain, and then continue down the Appalachian Trail to Big Meadows Campground, where I'd camp for the night. I'd spend the next day making my way back to my car however I felt like it, perhaps by way of the deliciously sinister-sounding Dark Hollow Falls?

I rearranged my work schedule, cleared my social calendar, packed my bags, and waited...

...until the day of, when I checked the weather and saw it was scheduled to thunderstorm every night that weekend. Discretion is the better part of valor; I stayed in town. Work kept me homebound through the next two weekends, and more thunderstorms through a third... would I ever get to take this trip?

I finally set out on the 19th, nearly a month later than intended. Despite the delays, I was excited: it would be my first proper backpacking trip, my first chance to use the Osprey overnight pack that had spent four years holding hats in my closet. Whatever happened out there, it would be an adventure.

To get there, I retraced the route I'd taken to Old Rag Mountain that winter; the Whiteoak trailhead was just a few miles south from there off VA-231. The drive was uneventful except for a tense moment when a family of geese waddled onto US-211 right in front of my car. I braked hard and managed to stop just in time. The poor gander wound up three feet from my bumper, honking his head off as if he'd had the right of way. (Maybe he thought he had?)

As I approached the mountains, I noticed that their upper ridges still looked brown compared to their lower slopes. The leaves had come in weeks ago back home; had they not yet up there?

Soon after, I pulled into the Whiteoak Canyon parking lot, which was tucked into a narrow stream valley at the end of Weakley Hollow Rd.

Old Rag Mountain, VA (3291')

Arceus, that last post was long. I'm never going to post a 4000-worder again... and, honestly, I could say the same for crossing a continent by car in six days. But the trail goes on, and the hikes continue.

For a while now, whenever I've told people either that I'm from Virginia (while climbing a mountain) or that I climb mountains (while in Virginia), they've always asked if I've climbed Old Rag Mountain. I'd heard of it, of course: that it was one of the most-hiked trails in Shenandoah National Park, so popular that lines formed on the way to the summit on clear summer days, and that it ended in a mile-long rock scramble (over what, little crumbly rocks? How tough could it be if it was below treeline in Virginia?). But until recently, I'd never felt the urge to climb it, mostly due to those notorious crowds. What made that mountain any better than the several dozen other peaks in SNP? All that praise had to be hype, and all those hikers just a bunch of trend-following, day-tripping yuppies too lazy to look up other hikes in the area.

But when I finally pushed myself out to see Old Rag this (unseasonably warm) January, I learned I was wrong... oh, boy, was I wrong.

(New readers: that's kind of a theme of this blog, me being wrong about things.)

The trail up Old Rag begins at the mountain's dedicated trailhead/parking lot, three quarters of the way up VA-600 on the east side of SNP, just south of Sperryville. My middle brother (still on break from college) and I arrived around noon to find it nearly empty:

Note the huge capacity.

Driving Across the Continent in December (~100-6329')

After all that fuss over the mold in my car, I knew I couldn't make it through another five months of Redmond rain. It was time to head home to the East Coast, where I could cuss my way through horrible traffic underneath blue skies again.

So I packed my stuff and plotted my eastward route. This being December, I figured I'd stick to the interstates--no sense detouring to parks when everything's closed for the season--and take I-90 to I-25 to I-80 to I-29 to I-70 to I-64 to I-81 to I-66 to home. Quite the simple trip, compared to how I'd gotten there.

And then I called my parents to tell them my plans. "Are you going to need tire chains for that?" my dad asked. "And what about the weather?" my mom added. "Is it safe to drive? What if you get caught in a snowstorm?"

Snow? Tire chains? I hadn't even thought of those. Nothing had frozen down in Redmond... but the Cascades were a completely different story. I looked into it and learned that Snoqualmie Pass (I-90's route through the range) had already received dozens of feet of snow that fall. East of there, I'd need to cross three major passes through the Rockies: Lookout Pass on the Montana-Idaho border, Homestake Pass over the Continental Divide, and Bozeman Pass east of Bozeman, MT. And, as I'd learned on my westward trip, the Great Plains were prone to blizzards and ice storms as far south as Kansas. Snow and sub-freezing temperatures were a certainty; the only question was how much I'd get... and whether my little front-wheel-drive sedan could make it through.