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.

Side Trip: Mississippi and Ohio Rivers (280')

After Taum Sauk, I headed east to Cape Girardeau, MO to visit my cousin. Situated on the shores of the Mississippi, the Cape is the central metropolis of an area of very small towns—or, to stretch a metaphor, a medium-sized fish in a pond of minnows. On my way into town, in the early afternoon, I hit traffic for the first time in several days. The town was large enough to offer a full complement of civic conveniences, so I grabbed some lunch, then holed up in the (surprisingly nice) local library until my cousin got off work.

Just as the Deep South differed from the Appalachians, so too did Missouri from the both of them. The accents were gone, for one, and the place-names took a sharp swing towards the bland. I was still solidly in the Bible Belt, though, with all that implies: pro-life signs along the road, Christian pop playing overhead in stores, churches all over the place, and so on. This is the Midwest, I suppose.

My cousin showed up around dinnertime. While we dined (at an Italian place in the old town), we caught each other up on our lives. She lives in Cape Girardeau, but works 45 minutes away as an engineer at a plant in [Bloomfield?]. Hardly an ideal living situation, but it’s the norm for a spread-out place like southeastern Missouri. She took the job—her first out of college—hoping to be promoted and reassigned somewhere more urban, but after spending a year in town she’s come to like the place… even with all the flooding.