In early May, with an extra day off work and a sunny spring forecast, I had all I needed to get me pointed in the general direction of Old Rag Mountain, a Blue Mountain outlier in Shenandoah National Park. Old Rag is a classic hike and rock scramble that no dedicated hiker in the great state of Virginia (and beyond) dares to miss. In other words, it's a crowded place, but for good reason.
The standard loop up the ridge and over the summit is about eight miles long with 2,500 feet of elevation gain. Feeling spunky, I opted for a 17-mile, 5,000-foot option. An extra stretch of the legs would do me some good, I thought.
I reserved the weekend special at the Enterprise dealer in Falls Church and motored on over to the Blues mid-day Friday. The freeway signs pointed me to the city of Front Royal--a place regarded in the late 1700s as the royal (i.e. British) frontier. Others knew it by another name, Helltown, apparently well earned from the scrappy, drinking, mountain-man demographic--most likely a pain-in-the-arse nuisance demographic to the more cultured townsfolk of the time--though we might prefer to look back on them today as, well, colorful. But Front Royal does work nicely as a name, once you determine what it signifies.
The signs directing me off the interstate and into town were good. Signage from there to the park were not so good, but I followed my nose through several ninety-degree bends and quickly stumbled upon the start of Skyline Drive, the 105-mile-long central nervous system of the national park.
The drive climbs past a fee station and visitor center to the crest of the mountains, then snakes along one flank or the other, always within moments of the next vista, and never too far from a campground, picnic area, trailhead, visitor center or lodge. Yet, the mountains remain surprisingly wild and inviting here, beroamed by bears, bobcats, deer, coyotes and perhaps even a few cougars. Two hundred species of birds spend some or all of their life history here, including eighteen warblers and a gaggle of migratory pals from the neotropics.
I pulled off at a few stops to view the views and say howdy at the Dickey Ridge Visitor Center, then scurried over to Big Meadows Campground to ensure I had a spot before the last-minute campers lined up at the gate. Tent pitched and boots cinched, I retraced my route back to the upper trailhead for Hawksbill Mountain--at 4,051 feet above sea level, it's the highest peak in the park.
The hike to the summit of Hawksbill was enjoyable and included a brief encounter with a rabbit that sat in the trail awhile contemplating whether or not to skidaddle. You could see him thinking--yes, no, maybe--and then he was gone. At under two miles roundtrip and 400 feet of gain, the grunt up Hawksbill is certainly nothing to brag about. But the view at the top is. It is quite special, especially since I'd arrived just before sunset, alone, in beautiful light and few clouds. Raucous ravens demanded that I look west from my rocky perch and appreciate the grand view across the broad valley of the South Fork Shenandoah River. All was still and warm, as the settlements far below began to turn their lights on. Too soon, I headed down.
In a fit of whimsy, I stopped at the lodge at the old Skyland resort close by and treated myself to a tasty mac-and-cheese dinner--my carbo-loading strategy for the big day ahead. After all, this trip was mainly about climbing to the summit of Old Rag Mountain, a tantalizing place I'd first heard about at the end of winter, not long after arriving in D.C.
I could be civilized, I thought, and make the long drive around through Sperryville to the usual start up Old Rag. But through my homework in the days prior, I'd settled on a much more direct route that would begin not far from Big Meadows--one that I could walk about as fast as I could drive. I would begin the trek at Hawksbill Gap, descend 2,300 feet in three miles to the White Oak Trailhead on the Robinson River, climb along a paved road and an unpaved fire road, regaining 800 feet in two miles, then descend again for three miles, losing all of that 800 feet I'd just earned, in order to reach the traditional Old Rag trailhead at 1,100 feet above sea level (a lazy Atlantic beach, for example).
After a couple of beers in the lounge--Part B of my Macaroni Strategy--while also catching the end of a hockey playoff game--and a great save by Detroit--I motored back to camp, passing at least two dozen deer in the headlights.
At 6 am Saturday morning, I crawled out of my tent, reminding myself that I could still change my mind. Nah, it was a gorgeous day and I had plenty of time. I'd certainly done harder hikes, as recently as last fall, but none yet this season, so I might be dragging a little toward the end. So be it.
I promptly departed the sleepy campground and about three bends down the road, a lonely coyote trotted across the pavement. I slowed to watch him, or was it her, threading the shadows just inside the line of forest. Quickly, s/he was back in the road again and padding along the opposite shoulder. At a low stone barrier along the road, Mr./Ms. Coyote trotted right up onto the wall, with me and the rental car trailing a few yards behind. It seemed as if we were the only ones out of bed that early. I snapped a couple of photos with my cell phone and continued on to the trailhead.
When I shouldered my pack at the head of the Cedar Run Trail, it occurred to me that I was standing maybe fifty feet higher than the 3,284-foot summit of Old Rag. It isn't often that I've parked the car higher than the summit I was about to bag.
The descent into Cedar Run was quiet and solitary--mostly on coarse rubble and bedrock steps, moderately steep. The knees were happy and the rest of me moreso as the little, spring-fed fingers of Cedar Run gathered themselves into a veritable crashing mountain stream. Somehow, I missed the cedars, but the cascades became increasingly beautific. In the early quietude, I meekly hoped for a bear sighting, but to no avail. A small gorge and falls were met well down the mountain before the gradient eased and I reached a junction near the White Oak Trailhead, 90 minutes into the hike. White Oak Canyon would be my return route past some of the prettiest waterfalls in the park. It would also be the gruntiest leg of the trip--a 2,300-foot climb to complete the circuit at day's end.
Next came the upward road leg of two miles or so. Two cars passed me, loaded with smiling hikers headed for Old Rag's westside trailhead and the easiest route up the mountain. I strolled through the parking area and continued up the fire road to a junction with the Saddle Trail, the standard descent from Old Rag's summit. It would be my way down as well. From the saddle dividing Berry Hollow from Weakley Hollow, I followed the fire road downward and eastward for three miles on what would be the third and easiest leg of the trip. This trip, I figured, has eight legs. By the time I reached the summit, I would be done with half of them.
The official Old Rag Trail began as a gravelly path among large boulders, yet gentle and wide enough for a six-horse stagecoach. Having recently watched a slew of 1930s John Wayne movies, I almost expected a stage to go rumbling past, with the bad guys in hot pursuit. But in place of open sagebrush slopes, joshua trees and guns a-blazing, here was a silent young forest of oak, maple and hickory recolonizing the farm and rangeland that had existed here when the national park was established at the tail end of 1935. It seemed I had the place to myself.
Gradually, the tread narrowed and steepened and soon entered a series of long switchbacks where I finally began to encounter some fellow hikers lunking up the trail. By the time I reached the first good views, perhaps a thousand feet up, the people factor had increased substantially. These were the early birds, and they too, I suspected, were hoping to beat the crowds. You wouldn't know it then, but a hundred thousand of us may climb the mountain in any given year. Still feeling spunky, I began to pass quite a number of folks, thirty or more, before a young couple sprinted past me.
Higher up, pine and hemlock cast their shadows over mountain laurel, some of it blooming. In other places, thousands of trillium blossums carpeted the hillside in a famous springtime display of, well, copious trilliums carpeting the hillside. As I reached more hikers, I decided I'd better reserve some fresh muscle for later and eased off on the throttle. Just ahead, the trail virtually ended and the joyous rock scrambling began.
And joyous it was. There is something mystical and primal about moving over rock, whether it's the endless slick sandstone around Moab, Utah, or the precipitous southeast summit ridge of Mount Shuksan in Washington's North Cascades. Or the granite catwalks among lunging waterfalls at Yosemite National Park in the Sierras, or the brookside trails of the Adirondacks. Or the longish summit ridge of Old Rag Mountain.
Of course, it would have been nice to sustain my morning's relative solitude and grip the rock at my own contemplative pace, and maybe I will on another day, but for now I happily fell in with a train of fellow enthusiasts, easily a hundred or more of us spread out over a half-mile of billion-year-old granite.
The story of these mountains is woven with that of a great sierra that once rivaled the Rockies and which predated even today's Appalachians. Beginning as magma, cooling ever so slowly, Old Rag's rocks crystalized a billion years ago, making them the oldest rocks in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
As a major province of the Appalachian Mountains, the Blue Ridge extends from Georgia to Pennsylvania and contains the highest real eastate in the eastern U.S. A number of the southerly summits exceed 6,500 feet elevation (thereby crowding my to-do list of spring hiking destinations). Still, Old Rag's rocks, rising to a measly 3,284 feet (depending on your source), are the most elderly of the bunch. On the trail, it's hard for a Westerner not to break out singing John Denver's Country Roads . . .
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River . . . life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze . . .
Long before there was a Blue Ridge to hike upon or to write songs about, plate tectonics alternately lifted then buried these rocks beneath lava flows and, ultimately, an ocean, where limestone and other deposits, tens of thousands of feet thick, covered the rocks. That was a mere half-billion years ago. The sea retreated and a new phase of mountain-building associated with the formation of the supercontinent Pangea gave rise to the Appalachians. The modern mountains, including a sizeable wad of billion-year-old granite, survived both the break-up of Pangea into the continents we know today, as well as the formation of the Atlantic Ocean--which means that Old Rag Mountain, or at least some prior rendition of it, is older than the sea. If you're a rock, then yes, life is old there indeed.
Old Rag's granite has since eroded to what we see today. The hard rock has been more resistant to erosion than surrounding rocks, and thus the mountain now stands as an outlier--a monadnock--apart from the rest. The ragged summit ridge, worn and rounded by eons of wind and rain, is the source of the mountain's perfect moniker.
The line of humanity before me heading up the ridge was guided by a series of blue dots and dashes painted on the rocks. The terrain was forgiving at times, but extreme enough in places to keep you focused on the dots, so as not to trundle off a cliff nearby. Where two dozen scouts rested after a more delicate spot, I scooted ahead and enjoyed a few minutes of solo rambling. I noticed an apparent group of friends lowering themselves into a slot and thought I might zip past them above. I soon realized my folly and had to retrace my steps and patiently get back in line.
Around the next bend, I did manage to sneak ahead, however, and was duly impressed with the creative route-making of the blue-dot briggade, or more precisely the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, and their piecing together in the 1930s of such a fabulous obstacle course. A natural stairway, known to geologists as a dike, led between narrow walls and beneath a boulder to a zigzag cave above. Pure fun.
The top seemed to loom near, yet more difficult sections still lay ahead. Awkward moves in skinny slots demanded clear focus and tricky balancing to avoid a fall. Given my own experience in technical climbing, I was surprised that more people don't tumble in the more vertical places and bonk their noggins in a bad way. Some do, of course, as a ranger would inform me later back at the campground.
"It's usually around 3:00 pm that we get the call," he said.
"A lot of head injuries?" I asked.
"Nope, usually collar bones--clavicles. Yup, mostly clavicles."
At the most difficult spot (what most climbers would consider Class 3), a fellow above offered to take my daypack.
"Way easier without the pack," he offered. And he was right.
The difficulties surmounted, it was now an easy cruise to the top, or at least what appeared to be the top. Once over this big rounded hump, the actual top smirked at us from another 200 yards up the crest. The very actual true-blue summit is a small pile of blocky boulders, which was momentarily occupied by others. So I found a spot on a broad ledge and consumed my lunch, gazing across the bright backs of ravens and vultures toward the highest visible point along the ridge of hazy-blue mountains to the east. It was Hawksbill Mountain and I was mildly impressed at the distance I'd covered. The trailhead from whence I'd begun my trek was at the gap next to Hawksbill. My dayhike was now half completed. Four legs to go.
The true summit had been vacated by now and I scooted up it to formally consecrate my peak-bagging urge. In the slabby ground along the crest, little pools of water were indented into the bedrock--what geologists call
opferkessels, chemically formed and not often found in granite. Don't drink the water, the trail guides warn. Not because of their mysterious, timeless chemistry, but because of the likely assorted byproducts of heavy human visitation.
I took in a deep breath of Old Rag's summit air, pleased to have reached my objective, and headed west and down the Saddle Trail.
The descent passed two stone structures, the Byrd's Nest and Old Rag Shelters, both constructed by the CCC--the Civilian Conservation Corps--also in the 1930s. The CCC built or rebuilt portions of the Old Rag Trail as well. How sorely we need the CCC again today, given the poor state of so many trails and campgrounds, bridges and shelters in parks, forests and other public lands all across the country. The CCC, wrote the historians, didn't just build infrastructure, it built responsible, capable human beings. Imagine what a modern day CCC could do to rectify some of the foibles of America's current political elite. Maybe Wall Street and the big banks could cover the costs, say, as a charitable token of their appreciation for the generosity of taxpayers. But I digress.
From the saddle, I marched back down the fire road, then the paved road again to the White Oak Trailhead. So much for legs numbered five and six. Piece o' cake.
At White Oak, I noticed two park employees at what turned out to be a small entrance station for those entering the park here. I explained that I'd already paid the fee when I drove in from Front Royal the day before. They had seen me approach from the road and looked at me skeptically, until I began to explain my nutty adventure. Mention of the Old Rag scramble led us to a brief discussion of the trails at Zion National Park in southwestern Utah, and Angel's Landing in particular, where a fall isn't just bad for your clavicles, it's deadly. Every couple of years, it seems, somebody proves the point. Old Rag, fortunately, is a little more forgiving, but dangerous to the careless, just the same.
I tipped my sunhat to the parkies and sauntered up the trail. The next leg required a steady ascent of about 1,500 feet of elevation, with waterfall views conveniently placed at 500-foot intervals--perfect reststops for the glide path home. Each was more than pretty enough to help justify creating a national park three-fourths of a century ago.
Later, I would learn that White Oak Canyon was integral to the origin of Shenandoah National Park. The land here was owned by Mr. George Pollock, developer/visionary/debtor to many and son of a man who happened to own a boatload of real estate rising to the scenic crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Pollock was also a strong booster of the park idea in the 1920s, as tourism promoters north and south dickered over which part of the range should be made into a park--Shenandoah and the Great Smokey Montains being the leading contenders.
Some claimed Great Smokey was prettier, while others insisted Shenandoah was more accessible to the urban masses. Other than Acadia in Maine, no national parks had yet been established on or near the eastern seaboard. In 1925, a groundswell of business and political leaders fell solidly behind Shenandoah, raising well over a million dollars to buy up 4,000 parcels of private land for the park. A bill was introduced in Congress the next year and on May 22, 1926, President Coolidge signed the new park into law.
Not everyone was pleased, however. Local resistance to the park grew, leading to litigation and delays in formally locating the authorized park in the place it was meant to be. Appeals worked through the courts for years, and by the time the issue was in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in December 1935, the justices refused to the hear the case. Within days, Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, deemed the deeds valid and proclaimed the park campaign complete. President Franklin Roosevelt, himself an outspoken supporter during the park campaign, dedicated the park the following summer.
As an interesting aside, Congress established Great Smokey Mountains National Park in 1934, the year before the battle over Shenandoah was settled. The east could now boast of two fabulous parks within a day's drive for tens of millions of Americans. Together, the parks protect more than 700,000 acres of wildland and are traversed by over 1,300 miles of trails--which suggests I may have my work cut out trying to see half of it.
When I reached the first waterfall in lower White Oak Canyon, I was more than ready for a rest. Looking at the broad, singing streamer of water above, I had to wonder about the throngs before me who have gazed at the same tantalizing scene.
Well before the park was established, the multiple falls of White Oak Canyon were a prime destination for a half-day's outing from Mr. Pollock's resort up on the ridge. He called his retreat Stony Man Camp. It served as a place for the wealthy to leave their worries on the Potomac and enjoy a wilderness respite in the high, cool, air of the Blues. Pollock renamed his camp Skyland and his enthusiasm for the park helped make it a reality.
