Back To the Woods (and the Bridge)

Oh my Dog, Monticello had been a trip and a half, and then Charlottesville made it a bit more unreal ... or perhaps more real, hard to tell the two apart sometimes.  But we woke up after a decent night's sleep in a nice hotel with the cars buzzing around the cloverleaf outside, and the sun was shining again.

I should mention the shower at the Country Inn and Suites, that kind of added to the unreality.  It was really big (room enough for the whole family) and did not have a real door, so I was always jumpy about checking that I wasn't drenching the floor.  And the drain was not one drain, like in a regular shower, but kind of a gutter like`maybe I was supposed to be discarding more water than I was?  Maybe I should have been taking a longer shower??  What were they trying to tell me anyway???

Got dressed and went downstairs for their nice breakfast and then back upstairs for the quick packing routine.  I was ready before the others that day and had time to lay out some maps for a mini-meeting in their lobby.  We'd bandied around a few possibilities the night before, but looking at the geographic realities I felt we were ready to make a decision.

We had decided to spend that night at a Ramada Inn in Strasburg and then go to Harper's Ferry the next day.  We were also agreed on going back into SNP on the way back North, but it was unclear how to sort the possibilities there.  SarahP had a specific covered bridge in mind for the afternoon but didn't have a good idea where it was (I had found the answer) ... the point was actually seeing the Shenandoah River up close and there was also a State Park that was a possibility for a river pilgrimage.  I showed people the geographic realities and possible routes, proposed we go to the Turk Mountain Trail in SNP (which we were leaning towards anyway) first, then eat lunch, and then the time would dictate would route we should follow to arrive at Strasburg at a decent time.

Jeez, I wish I'd had time to prepare a Power Point and book their Business Center!  But my presentation was convincing enough as it was, and we set off.  It was already brutally hot and bright outside again, but we loaded the car in their porte cochère like experienced travelers, took a left out the driveway, and were immediately at the on-ramp for the highway and off like bats out of hell on Route 29 to Interstate 64 West (I'd been studying the cloverleaf).

A bit of rush hour traffic later we were back up the hill, back in the woods, and back turning into the Rockfish Gap Entrance of SNP.  The friendly Ranger at the entrance looked at my pass (I had scored a Lifetime Senior Pass for all NPS sites this past Summer, that SarahP was very jealous of).  The Ranger checked my ID and then with a smirk told us to enjoy our day and our trip back to Woburn.  I thanked him and then drove away, but hit the brakes hard after 30 feet or so.  "Wait a minute," I shouted back at the kiosk, you pronounced it right!"

"I grew up in Massachusetts!" he shouted back.  "I was born in Hudson, went to college in Worcester [also pronounced correctly], and relocated down here!"  The Massachusetts Diaspora strikes again.  I gave him the finger (as per Mass-hole protocol) and then sped away.

The Ranger at the Byrd VC had told us about the Turk Mountain Trail the other day, and for some reason it kind of appealed to all of us.  It looked like the right trail at the right time and it sure was.  This was such a perfect hike, it still makes me smile all over thinking about it.  We pulled into the lot at Turk Gap in mid-morning with one other car in it, and got all loaded up.  Started off across the Skyline Drive and followed the AT for a bit (where we met one hiker, presumably the one with the car), and then turned down the Turk Mountain Trail.

The trail went downhill onto a saddle over to Turk Mountain, then flattened out for a long while, and then went gradually more and more uphill to the summit.  The light through the trees was perfect and as we marched along the trail alternated between us being swallowed up by trees and bushes, to being able to look down the steep slope to the left and out to the mountains to the East, and to being able to look up the steep slope to the right and the trees clinging to the mountainside.  We'd been told that the bears were currently most often to be found in trees hunting not-quite-ripe acorns, and there seemed to be thousands of oaks around us, possibly hiding bears in their upper branches, as well as maples, pines, poplars, hickories, and who knows what else.

We saw old knurled trees and young saplings with outrageously big leaves, laurels, sumacs, wildflowers, all kinds of lichens and moss and fungus, and rocks of various ages.  This seemed to be a long hike and the day was hot, but we were mostly in the shade and we were pacing ourselves well.  The trail finally turned sharply to the right, uphill, and we knew that we were approaching the top, though as is usually the case there was a lot farther to go than we thought.

Finally we were on a ridge and though the brush was as high as ever, the rocks became huge boulders like at the top of a mountain and we could get some fantastic views to the Southeast.  The blurb about the trail had heralded a great payoff view to the Northwest however, and so we pressed on, though the boulders we were scrambling over were now as big as American pickups.  We'd been warned that sometime snakes like sunning on top of boulders so we were careful where we put our hands.

Jim and I were in front and suddenly there it was, the view, at the top of a field of rockfall.  We scrambled over a few last large boulders, found seats, and yelled encouragement at the others.  Hawks and turkey vultures were circling below us, looking for little animals scurrying among the rocks strewn down the mountain beneath us.  The visibility was as perfect as it had been in our other two days at SNP and we could see for a long, long way.  There was a town way below us and off to our left, and several houses nestled into hollows in the mountains in front of us and up the valley to the North, interspersed with a few ponds in the creases of the hills.  We sat there for a long time and talked a little and looked a lot.  This interlude was more valuable than the rest of that great vacation put together.

I'd been as hot and sweaty as ever when we arrived there, but the mountain-top wind cooled us all off perfectly.  It must have been an hour(?) that we were sitting there, watching the clouds slowly draw shadows on the mountain range, watching the raptors float and swoop and dive, listening to chipmunks or other animals worrying in the brush, and looking at the rocks.  It's remarkable how much quartz was in the boulders we were perched on, and that color combined beautifully with the palette of lichens.  SarahP (or her boot) was blessed by a katydid named Humphrey, who may have had something important to say.  We also saw a millipede halfway up a tree and a small toad hiding in the underbrush on that hike.

All things must end and we finally sighed and got our stiff muscles working again for the walk back downhill.  We knew this would be our last hike in the deep woods on that trip, and I was trying to will a bear to appear ... no such luck.  We made it back to the AT in remarkable time (trails always seem shorter on the return), and then back to the parking lot a bit after that.  Ours was the only car there and we had just seen that one hiker at the beginning of the trail; no one at all after that, we had been alone with the mountain.  And it was already 2:30!!  We were suddenly starving, though we had to cool off a bit and drink lots of water before we could even think about leaving.  I changed my shirt at that point, the one I had on was drenched.

OK, we knew what we were doing by then and we stuffed things away, fired up the car, and headed tout suite up the 15 or so miles to the Loft Mountain Wayside.  Well, almost ... we first stopped at the Turk Mountain Overlook just up the road to see where we'd just been.  Goodbye Turk Mountain!

There was no one else in the food court of the Wayside by the time we got there, and they were out of the first two or three things we ordered.  But we all got food, got a couple of beers, a couple of bags of chips (I had Mama Zuma's Revenge), and dragged it all outside to a shady table on their deck.  A nice meal after a great hike, and we were all pooped.  The State Park we'd pencilled into our plans was definitely out of the question ... we were going to get back in the car, have a mellow hunt for the covered bridge, and then truck on up the West side of the valley to our cheap hotel in Strasburg.

Traveled the last dozen miles up to Swift Run Gap and then said a fond farewell to SNP as we exited down the steep and twisty hill toward Elkton on Route 33.  And there was the Country View, which we were glad to wave goodbye to as well.  We turned North on the valley road, Route 340, in downtown Elkton, and then West on Route 211 towards New Market after about 20 miles, then North on Route 11, now deep in farm country.  We were glad to be in the middle of the Shenandoah Valley after looking at it from the mountains on various hikes.  We were surrounded by fields of corn and soybeans for mile after mile, interrupted every once in a while by incongruously large lawns around small, one-story houses.

What we were looking for was the Meems Bottom Covered Bridge, which spans the North Fork of the Shenandoah River in Mount Jackson VA.  Google Maps led us right to it and I have to say I was a little underwhelmed.  It was a beautiful late afternoon, the miles and miles of fields spread all around us, the sky was blue, and the light and shadows were fantastic.  But one expects charm in a covered bridge and this didn't have much charm to my eye.

It's been reconstructed many times and the last time it was reconstructed it was done with steel girders and an aesthetic like, "There, this time we've built it like a brick shithouse and by gum maybe it'll last longer than 10 years this time before the next floods wash it away!"  I mean, what was the point?  History maybe, but that river crossing itself is not historic ... nothing significant occurred there.  Bridges change over time, why hadn't this one?  And it's not like it served any purpose that a more durable and simpler structure wouldn't do ... we were in the middle of nowhere.  And it's not like it was a profitable tourist site.  We were the only people there for the 30 minutes or so we gawked at it and threw pebbles in the river and there was nowhere nearby to buy a postcard or a t-shirt ("I Visited Meems Bottom and All I Got Was This Muddy T-Shirt").

But it *was* a fun experience and it was great seeing a bit of the river that carved this valley.  The North Fork was a little high and running fact, I would not have been able to take a kayak upstream in it.  We saw some freaky trees, including one huge beech.  And we were able to take a close look at one of the withered soybean fields we saw so many of around there.  We did some research and the soybean market did not seem to have crashed.  So why were so many fields left to go to seed?  Maybe they only harvest them when they're all withered, but I don't think so.  This was a mystery.

Still no one around except a suspicious farmer from across the way.  We had to admit that we probably weren't the most normal people to be gallivanting around a field in the Shenandoah Valley.  We went back South down Route 11 for a couple of miles and then took the turnoff for Quicksburg and Interstate 81.  We stopped for gas first under the burning sun and saw some impressive farm machinery being gassed up as well.  Back on 81 North, we pressed the pedal down, and the miles flew by up the flat river bottom.  Off to our right the ridge of the Shenandoahs came closer and closer as we sped North, finally exiting in Strasburg around 7:00 or so as the day suddenly turned dark and foreboding, like a long rainy period was gearing up to inundate the area.

Would we be able to find dinner in Strasburg we wondered?  There were very few likely looking spots, and when we unloaded, checked in, and got up to our rooms in the odd but acceptable Ramada Inn, we found that the one that looked most promising would be closing at 8:00.  So we were left with the second most likely looking, which was Hangouts Grill, attached to the Inn.

And it wasn't very likely, though also acceptable.  This seemed to be the kind of place where you don't bring up politics, and we didn't.  Jim gets full credit for ordering the 'Merica Burger, which did not satisfy his deepest desires.  They had an "HPA" on their menu, which the waiter gleefully described as an IPA, but with hemp!  It was not bad, but I've had hemp in beer and why anyone would consider it flavorful is beyond me.  Anyway, it was cold and beer-like and my Holy Guacamole burger was fine.  They stuck big knives in everything, like we might need them.

We had a little spare time and so played a round of bridge that night.  We kind of had the Patriots - Colts Thursday night game on the TV while we played, but they only got a fuzzy analog picture in that hotel, though they had HD TVs.  What's the point of that?

Anyway, the Patriots had the game under control and we were basically tied on the bridge scorecard ... and it was time for bed.