Hiking in the Dolly Sods Wilderness, WV

June 19,2015

I was reluctant to go backpacking. Packs are heavy when you carry your sleeping bags and tent and food and all. It was supposed to rain with Hurricane Bill coming up from the Texas Gulf, aiming right at West Virginia and likely to get stuck in the mountains. But, I pushed myself to go because I have not been much fun lately and obviously need a kick start. Jeff did all the work of planning for us with his amazingly detailed lists of things to pack. Luckily we pared it back down when we realized how much it would all weigh. I can do 25 pounds all day but do not want to go over that and Jeff carries the tent, which is the heaviest thing, even though it is fairly light. His lists actually have weights on each item. Still, we should not have carried as much water as we did, considering how wet it was, and we ended up dumping a lot of it. We were planning on only two nights camping, not a big deal.

Dolly Sods is about three hours from home but we stopped in Winchester for some doctor’s   appointments on the way. We drove out Route 50 west to 259 south and then Route 55. When we finally got to the top of the mountain  the clouds were looking ominous but scudding by pretty fast. We wanted to see the view from Bear Rocks,  since it was early yet,  but as soon as we got there the clouds decided to roll into a thick foggy ground blanket, and it started to rain. So much for that idea. We drove back to the trail head parking area, where the sun came back out, so we loaded up and headed down the trail to the campsite along Red Creek some friends had already claimed for our group.

Mountain Laurels were in full bloom all over the place. They always

make me happy

because as a kid they were always blooming on the last day of school so I think of them as the beginning of real summer. Their

flowers are geometrically gorgeous with many shades of pink and the coolest UFO like shapes. Low bush Blueberry plants were scattered all through them and I was glad they were not ripe yet because I did not want to disturb any foraging bears. The cloudy skies and being up at 3800 feet kept the air from being too hot but the trail was fairly muddy going in. On some sections stepping stones had been laid which helped keep our feet dry but it was tiring to keep adjusting our stride to fit the spacing. We only hiked about a mile and a half to the campsite where our group was setting up and crossed only two creeks on the way. No rain yet. I was still glad we weren’t hiking a lot further. We are both out of practice wearing a full pack. We visited for a while at the group tarp and wandered around looking for a spot for our tent, not too close to the creek. We settled on a tight little space under some hemlocks on the other side of the creek where we would still be able to get out if it flooded. It started to rain again as soon as we settled in and after having a little snack of walnuts and dried apricots we went to sleep with the rain gently splattering on the thin nylon roof.

There were some small leaks that night (right over my head of course) while it poured but it wasn’t bad during the light stuff. We adjusted, but in the morning we decided one night in the tent was enough for now.  We had been here before and could come back and hike in dryer weather. The trail was seriously muddy on the way out and much harder to walk on. We were looking forward to spending the next night in a comfortable bed in our nice dry cabin only about an hour away. We are into comfort more these days. When we got back to the trailhead we were surprised to see a whole bunch of people running down the dirt road  towards Bear Rocks in some kind of race.

We maneuvered our car around them and tried Bear Rocks again but the clouds would not part long enough for us to see anything so we gave it up. The dash thermometer climbed 13 degrees as we descended into the valley and we stopped at Seneca Rocks to change into shorts and sandals. On the way to the cabin we stopped at the Fireside Café in Franklin for fresh barbecue. West Virginia and US flags fluttered on every other light post all the way down Main Street for West Virginia day.

It rained on and off all day Saturday, about once every hour, and we were nice and cool out on the porch reading.

It had been 90 some degrees when we left Winchester on Friday afternoon so we were glad to be in the mountains where it was only in the low 80’s when the sun was out and way cooler at night. I was hoping to see a Luna moth again, since it is about the right time for them, but I guess they don’t fly in the rain. Last year they came to the cabin window at night in mid June.

We had some hard rain Saturday night and spent a few hours Sunday re-trenching drain bars on our steep driveway and then went down to the creek, which was actually running, and messed around building a rock dam for a wading hole. I kept my hiking boots on so they could get cleaned up as I played in the water. Our creek is called Dry Run for a reason. The water tends to run underground by us unless there is a good fresh rain. The town pulls their water from a good spring just below us though and it never runs dry there.

-Wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods.com