A transcription of the journal entries shown in these photos begins below the last photo. A more proper blog post with lots of photos will be up soon!
Transcription:
Saturday, July 23 to Monday, July 25, 2002
SHENANDOAH NATIONAL PARK
Five-star tours from the King and Queen of the park! Pat and Dyanne are family friends from Yellowstone days, when Pat was my dad’s Deputy. They are wonderful human beings, hosts, and tour guides.
We got here mid-day on Saturday, having spent Friday poking around the National Mall a little. After spending 3 hours outside in the blistering heat on Thursday, my heat tolerance had dropped to about 20 minutes, so we sought indoor adventures. We scoped out the National Botanical Gardens and a small bit of the National Gallery of Art, then spent one more evening with Uncle Rob.
Saturday we spent most of the day catching up with Pat and Dyanne, then headed out in the afternoon to do a bit of adventuring. We stopped a Pen Druid Brewery for some local beers. Even I tried a sour cherry, hoping for something like a Belgian kriek. It wasn’t, but it was interesting and the scenery was beautiful.
We stopped at few a other quirky local spots, then headed into the park. The goal was to see a few overlooks, maybe do a short hike up to Stony Man, then eat some nosh (Pat’s word for the amazing picnic he packed) while watching the sun set. Later, we’d go to Big Meadow for a star-viewing ranger talk. We did the overviews, but before long, it started to drizzle, and then to properly rain because we bring rain everywhere we go. We had some nosh and watched the rain, calculating our diminishing star-gazing odds. The sun winked out from behind the clouds as we departed, rewarding us with a few nice sunset photos for our efforts.
After a delicious breakfast the next morning, we struck out on our own to do a little hiking. It was hot, but the trails in the park share the excellent quality of the other AT trails we’ve been on of being almost always shady under the trees, and there was a lovely breeze.
We hiked out to Mary’s Rock, along the AT (total AT miles now 68.5!) to soak in the views, but the views were very hazy. Still a nice hike with some very pretty rocks, though surprisingly few mushrooms. I wanted to find a probably-bolete to take home for closer inspection, but no luck.
Next stop was Stony Man, a short hike that’s supposedly one of the most popular in the park, though it was nearly empty except for us. The views were more interesting here, mostly because you can see the stony outcropping you’re standing on stretching out to either side. The valley and distant hills were kind of generically lovely, but too out-of-focus to be more.
We saved our big hike for Monday, both for weather and crowd-control reasons. Old Rag is one of the most popular hikes in the park, so much so that they’re piloting a ticketed admission system. Getting tickets was no trouble. Pat says they make 800 available per day. Sunday night, we snagged the 159th and 160th tickets, and if I had to guess based on how many people we saw, I’d say they didn’t sell (for $1 each) many more than that.
In our usual style, we didn’t get moving very early, despite good intentions. We were on the trail by 9:35, but the weather was pleasant enough that it was okay. Afternoon thunderstorms were now the main concern. We figured we had until 2:00 to get off the top of the mountain.
The thing that makes Old Rag Special is that once you get near the top, you enter a boulder field, where you have to “scramble” rather than hike. There are warnings everywhere about not taking this on if you’re not sure your body is up for it. I expected it to be like the boulder fields on Mt. St. Helens: piles of rocks you have to haul yourself up while your calves weep and the soles of your shoes disintegrate, but this wasn’t like that at all.
The top of Old Rag is composed of giant granite boulders, well-smoothed with millennia of weathering and toppled over each other like a toddler’s blocks. Did I mention that they’re huge? To scale them, you don’t just haul yourself up one after another. They’re too big for that. Navigating them is more like solving a puzzle, or a 3-D maze. Blazes mark the official route, but even those are more like clues than answers. You don’t have to have rock-climbing skills to do this, but there were moments when knowing a few tricks came in really handy.
The top is beautiful. It’s the same kind rocky outcrop as Mary’s Rock and Stony Man, only more. More rocks, bigger rocks, wilder rocks. They’re incredible. We ate our lunch on a stone ledge all alone, our shirts spread to dry on the rock beside us (the weather” was decent, but 87° + humidity still equals a lot of sweating), and watched the afternoon storm roll in.
The hike down follows a different route, so we didn’t have to worry about wet boulders. The rain started at 2:30, and was nothing like the other soakers we’ve hiked through recently. We were no wetter when we got back to the car than we’d’ve been from heat alone.
Thither & Yon 