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: