Friday, May 12
Woke up after wrestling with the haunted bedspread all night and stumbled down to the small lobby/breakfast room after my morning routine. They didn’t have much breakfast variety, but they had cereal and yogurt which I dug into while listening to characters. There was a lady who was hassling the manager about wanting to have laundry done but ordering them to not dry it (must have been trail gear) and the lack of bananas. She and a few other guests were Appalachian Trail hikers and exchanged Trail Names. I reflected for a while and then figured mine would be “Aggrieved.”
That day we had a good stretch of miles to cover to get over to our next destination, in West Virginia. But if we went there directly we’d arrive in early afternoon, so we had some wiggle room in the itinerary. We figured this should be a day to start off by heading further down the Blue Ridge and then let serendipity strike.
So that’s what we did … we were getting used to traveling and it helped that the car was right outside the door, so there wasn’t too much schlepping of stuff involved in getting loaded up. I like to have an iced/hot green tea or two while driving but I hate Bigelow tea, which is what every hotel carries. Tea drinkers get no love in America. I’d brought some good tea with me and we realized we could fill up our metal water bottles very morning with my teabags and the hotel’s hot water.
We headed back East out of Waynesboro and back uphill to Shenandoah’s Rockfish Gap entrance station, but then turned right instead of left.
There is one continuous Parkway in Virginia from Front Royal in the North down to Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. The 105.5 mile section within Shenandoah NP is called the Skyline Drive, but the other 469 miles(!) is the Blue Ridge Parkway, which winds and winds along the crest of a mountain ridge through Virginia and North Carolina. We’d never been on it but I was dying to check it out. Would it be as beautiful as Shenandoah? Would it be crowded? Would it be a fun drive? All questions about it were answered positively, it’s just a wonderful place. Though an NPS site, there were barely any people there when we visited. We had most of the overlooks we stopped at to ourselves. The views are just as sublimely lovely as in the NP to the North, perhaps more so because it gains even more elevation. And the speed limit is up to 45 instead of the plodding 35, so you can get some good cruising in. In fact, many of the people we saw there were doing just that in motorcycle touring groups or little sports cars.
Our first stop was at the Humpback Rocks VC, a dozen or so miles South of the start. It was closed, but we got some brochures from their kiosk and then had a great talk with a Ranger and volunteer who were just coming in to work. I feel a little self-conscious about it but often introduce myself to NPS staff as a VIP from MIMA (Volunteer in Parks at the Minute Man NHS). It breaks the ice and can help the conversation along because they realize I’m on their team and not just a visitor who might give them a hard time. They were curious about our trip and gave us some good tips about where to go and what to see at New River, our next stop.
As with many NPS sites, the Blue Ridge Parkway is starved for funds and many of their facilities are run down. They have a model mountain village at Humpback Rocks (shows you how old it is, the NPS would not do that now), but it’s been untouched for years, which kind of adds to the authenticity. Many waysigns there and at other stops were so faded they were barely legible. We had a good time looking around, on another crisp and clear mountain morning.
We stopped for another short hike a while later, at an overlook that featured a last-maintained-in-1970?? Geology Trail. We had to push some brush aside to get at some of the signs, and some trees they mentioned were not there. But the rocks were of course, and we learned that most of the green-black ones we were seeing were still young enough to be called lava, though further down in the valleys, sandstone and the underlying schist predominate. The Blue Ridge and the other wrinkles in the Earth to its West, the Massanuttens and the Appalachians, were formed when Africa bumped into North America long ago.
We made several other stops along the incredible Blue Ridge Parkway. One was at a trailhead for St. Mary’s Wilderness in the Washington and Jefferson National Forest. One featured a restored stretch of railroad in the middle of nowhere, and a trail up to one of the most beautiful of the many waterfalls we saw on the trip. We stopped again a while later at the Boston Knob Overlook for a possible lunch break, but realized that the morning was getting on and we began to wonder how far South we should go.
Some day I’ll go back there and do the whole 469 miles, but that would have taken us a couple of days to do then, and we had other things we wanted to see. We pushed on instead of stopping for lunch, and Sarah started looking for nice restaurants. But of course there was just spotty reception and apparently no nice restaurants until we returned to the double-edged sword of “civilization.” We exited on route 60 in Buena Vista and went way, way downhill into that run down town, and then West to Lexington VA, which hosts Washington & Lee University and Virginia Military Institute, two major colleges.
I had this idea in my head that a “college town” would have good brewpubs, and sometimes I was right, but most times I was wrong. This time we got lucky and after some hassle parking downtown we walked over to Salerno Wood Fired Pizza and Taproom, which is a pour-your-own taproom. We had some excellent salads and I sampled their DIPAs, including Reaver Beach Hoptopus. They had cider too, and Sarah tried their Buskey Blue Ridge Cider.
OK, left town after a late lunch and traveled another dozen miles West on 60, then picked up Interstate 64, winding over the afore-mentioned mountain ranges into West Virginia and the Ohio River watershed. There were a high percentage of trucks and pickups on this road as well, our small SUV was an oddity, but most everyone was polite and we managed the sudden ups and downs pretty well. Our destination was Beckley WV, but 30 or so miles East of there we saw signs for the Sandstone VC at New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, and so pulled off the Interstate there.
We were now in a different ecosystem and a different world. The elevation is much lower in the New River valley, rhododendron thickets and deciduous trees predominated, and the flora was all younger. Much of the area had been cleared and abused in the not-distant past for logging and coal mining, and then transporting those products down the New River to the Ohio. The collision with the African plate had reverberated this far West and had forced the New River (which is actually an incredibly old waterway) into an entrenched bed in West Virginia, digging into the oldest geologic layers.
But back in the present day … we stopped at the Sandstone VC and actually wondered if it was open, there was only one other car there. We saw a few exhibits outside and when we entered we were merrily greeted by a Ranger, with whom we had a great conversation. The layout of the NP is confusing, I’d been researching hiking, but the Park is divided into at least four major sections over a very large area, and I couldn’t tell which we should opt for. The Ranger cleared up my confusion and told us in Southern phraseology that what we wanted to do was visit Sandstone Falls and then the Grandview section today, then spend the night in Beckley, and then see the Canyon Rim section and possibly the Thurmond section tomorrow.
We thoroughly enjoyed that VC, they had extensive, new exhibits. This *is* the newest National Park (a well-deserved promotion), and of course their exhibits and VCs are modern. But disparities between NPS sites abound and we quietly had to wonder if this one deserved the attention it had gotten. We had just seen amazing decay at the Blue Ridge sites, but this Park had a very ritzy VC, lots of staff just sitting around, and tons of exhibits paid for with cash that really could have gone to other Parks, like MIMA. Oh well, it may be because of influential politicians directing that NPS funds should be spent in their home states.
And the Ranger had steered us right. We followed her directions to go see the Sandstone Falls from the overlook a few miles South. We climbed up some severe switchbacks to get there and then got a glimpse of the falls through the trees. Maybe not the best spot, but it was a great introduction to the mighty New River.
From there we got back on the Interstate and traveled 15 miles or so further West to the turnoff for the Grandview section, which is then another 20 or so miles to the North. This is another part of the Park that’s equipped for a huge amount of people but only had a dozen or so visitors that afternoon. It has an events hall, an amphitheater, a sports field, and trails landscaped with wood chips, but they were mostly deserted.
We parked in the suddenly hot afternoon and walked out the paved path to the main overlook. And there it was, the Grand View of the New River. And it *was* pretty grand that sunny late afternoon, it’s a majestic bend of the river around a spur of the steep hills that enclose it. To the left we could see a huge railroad yard, then visually follow the railroad tracks around the bend and disappearing up the river to the North, and then look up see the backdrop of the mountains all around. It was another beautiful, clear, bright day, and we could see some kayakers down below on the river, negotiating a few rapids. There was a couple and a photographer staging dramatic/romantic pictures in front of the view.
To tell you the truth though, we were a little underwhelmed by Grandview and were feeling a bit abashed about not being bowled over by it, as they obviously expected. Great spot, but we wanted some adventure added in, and so left the viewing platform to the romantics and started off down the Grandview Rim Trail. This was fun, no one around and incredible rhododendron thickets enclosing the wood-chipped trail. Got some more great views on that trail, but then headed back to the car. We had to get to Beckley!
Back 20 miles South and then longer than you’d think down the Interstate to the cluster of hotels where 64 meets 77 to the West of Beckley. In some ways we were in nowhere West Virginia, but in other ways we were in a commercial hotspot. Friendly Roxanne at the front desk of the Holiday Inn & Suites checked us in (“Have you ever stayed in an IHG hotel before?” “I have no idea” … she laughed), and gave us the first room on the first floor, which in some ways was great but in other ways (like noise) was not so good. Nice room though, and we’d traveled a lot that day and seen many things, so were ready for a decompression interlude.
Where to go for dinner? There were actually no great choices around, and a small number of iffy choices a half hour away. But the Holiday Inn had a restaurant and so we ate there from their limited menu. The only acceptable beer they had was a porter from Devil’s Backbone, and I had a couple.
Soon to bed after that, having traveled 199 adventuresome miles that day.
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