The park is long and thin, connected from Front Royal, Virginia, in the north to Rockfish Gap (near Waynesboro, Virginia) in the south by the winding and scenic 105-mile long Skyline Drive. I entered from the south, where it was 80 degrees at 1900 feet around 2 p.m. A half hour later, I had driven north about twelve miles but had risen in elevation a thousand feet and it was 71 degrees. It's a classic drive: you go from scenic overlook to scenic overlook, although a number of them were closed for repairs. No worries - everything was beautiful.
It's still spring so the trees weren't all yet green in the valleys, and most of the deciduous (I love that word) trees in the mountains were still bare. But you can't get that high without being awed! Here are a couple of shots:
This second one is of Bacon Hollow, which I must warn you has no bacon. I know, truth-in-advertising and all - I think I'm going to write to the President.
My goal was not simply to drive through the park but also to go on a short hike, and I found one at the Frazier Discovery Trail. It is a 1.3 mile loop 450 feet up to the top of Loft Mountain that is advertised as "moderate hike to beautiful views" which was exactly what I was looking for. And I think "moderate hike" is probably the right phrase: it's pretty steep in parts, and there are some rocks you have to cross which are slightly treacherous, but you never have to really do any climbing (i.e., with your hands) - you're walking the whole way.
And here's the best part: you are on the Appalachian Trail for a couple of hundred yards. Yup, you are reading the blog of an Appalachian Trail hiker. That's me. You can tell it's the Appalachian Trail because the blazes (that's what we Appalachian Trail hikers call the little spots of paint on trees which mark the trail) are white, whereas on the rest of the Frazier Trail they are blue. They also have some guideposts to keep less, um, experienced hikers from getting lost.
But I didn't expect you simply to take my word for it, so here is photographic evidence:
I had come to the mountains somewhat prepared for a hike. By "somewhat," I mean that I was wearing jeans and hiking shoes, and had a jacket in the car should I have needed it which when I set out for a 45 minute hike I didn't think I would. (Turns out I was right about that.) But that was it. I hadn't even remembered to bring the compass that my friend Kelly gave me for Christmas, which might have been at least fun to use, if unnecessary due to the blazes marking the trail. I didn't have any water either, which turns out to have been fine since it was about 70 degrees and the hike was not a long one. I had my cell phone, although I hadn't thought to use it to tell anyone where I was.
But as I set out on the little trail, it occurred to me that perhaps the part of the hike I was least prepared for was what to do in case of meeting a bear.
A couple of weeks ago my friend Cathie lent me an excellent book called A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, about hiking the Appalachian Trail. If you haven't read it, I'd highly recommend doing so. He talks a lot about bears in the book, and those pages were still fresh in my mind. Bryson points out that there are very few bear attacks and then says, in one of my favorite lines in the book, "...but, and here's the thing, it only has to happen once." Exactly.
Therefore I tried to develop a bear plan as I walked along, hoping that I wouldn't come across any grouchy "just waking up" bears or worse, any baby bears with their mamas nearby. In previous lives I have told many people that "hope" is not the same as "plan," and of course I am correct about that, but I will admit that I did more hoping than planning during my little hike.
Bryson says that black bears, the kind I would be most likely to encounter in the Appalachians, can climb trees so there's no point trying to do that. Anyway, it's been so long since I've climbed a tree that I probably couldn't even out climb a grizzly. Experts have different opinions as to whether you should either make noise or not make noise, run away or stand still, so I was left without enough information to matter. I never did come up with a bear plan, although I assume that I would have done the "run and make noise" option had it come to that. And perhaps I'd have thrown my cell phone at them.
Fortunately, to paraphrase the old saying, God looks after fools and Goldners, so I didn't have to test the "noise scares them off" hypothesis and I got to keep my cellphone. Plus as I was walking down from the trail there were two women walking up it, so I wouldn't have laid there too long before help arrived.
The other thing you need to worry about in the mountains is rapidly changing weather. When I started off on the little hike I was going more or less straight uphill, and that combined with the sun kept me plenty warm. The Appalachian Trail part of the hike was flat so I stopped huffing and puffing, and the views were spectacular.
It was starting to cloud up a bit when I was at the summit, so I didn't dawdle and worked my way around the trail. This rock formation was cool, but made me worry more about bears. I kept going.
By the time I reached the trailhead, it felt quite a bit cooler although certainly was still comfortable in a short sleeved shirt. I felt badly for the women who were just starting out though, because as I got in the Vue and headed back up Skyline Drive, it started to rain, although it didn't last very long.
Speaking of the Vue, the Driveabout hit 17,000 miles at the Upper Hawksbill Parking Lot, elevation 3630 feet.
The highest point on Skyline Drive is at a resort called Skyland, where you can rent cabins, eat in the dining hall, shop in the gift shop or, as I did, go to the bathroom. The elevation is 3680 feet, which is 2200 feet lower than Silver City but still pretty respectable.
The Shenandoah National Park was built in the mid-1930's, at which time they relocated several hundred families from the property - I don't know to where. This was before the Uniform Federal Relocation Act so it wouldn't surprise me if they were just told to leave, perhaps being paid reasonably for their homes and perhaps not. It would be interesting to know more about that story, but this afternoon was about the outdoors, not history. Sometimes you just need some fresh air and a good walk in the woods.
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