The Hike, Week 103: 2/1/06

It's been noted by others, and occurred to Gail as we walked the Rock Castle Gorge Trail's beautiful, multi-faceted and strenuous 10.6 miles that the hike--off the Blue Ridge Parkway across from the Rocky Knob Campground--provides a delightful microcosm of hiking in the Virginia mountains.

When you start the walk headed south in parallel to the parkway (and with it in sight off and on for about three miles), you start on a bald with a stunning 360, on this day into blue skies and wind that seemed to come from every direction. The trail then ducks down a little here and there, and rises to views again and again as it skirts parkway overlooks on its way to turning left into the forest and down toward the gorge. Along this forested section is a series of trees with numbered markers; the accompanying sheets of explanation were nowhere to be found, and with no leaves on the trees, Gail and I came up pretty empty on the identification.

After a series of switchbacks, the trail begins to cross little feeder streams before hooking left onto the forest road that parallels Rock Castle Creek for a little more than 2 miles. It was along this last stretch of descent and the forest road that The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All--she of the fascinations with wildflowers in some seasons, with scat in others and ice ribbons in still others, cast her eye down on the trail in search of the rock formations that give the area its name--miniature "rock castles" of quartz. She found none, but did come back with a little collection of tiny shiny quartz chunks.

One of the other offerings of the trail is a "two-season" experience.
And indeed, just off the parkway at nearly 3,000 feet, it was truly wintertime. Along the flat of the gorge next to the healthy-flowing stream, it was nearly fall, and we ate in comfort (well, we kept our gloves on most of the time) on the bench just shy of the empty campground. The sun was full and the dogs' eyes narrowed against it and their satedness.

As always, the primary drawback of a hike of any distance off the parkway is that it goes down down down and then has to come back up up up. And the northern end of the trail has a climb that had even The Day Hiker huffing and puffing. In fact, the climb back to winter is about 1,300 feet in less than three miles (the beginning and end are more gentle, with the real climb packed in the middle). But that, once you're through it, is just one more aspect of this Virginia-mountain hiking sampler; some of our mountains are pretty steep, and not all the trails up them take the switchback approach.

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