Part of that 90-minute-each-way drive syndrome is that we’ve pledged to walk twice that long each way – to lunch and after lunch – to justify the drive. The problem with that is that The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All drags us up and down the mountainside at paces between 18 and 22 minutes per mile on nicer sections and not much slower than that on rocky climbs or even sections such as up Three Ridges or The Priest from the Tye River. I huff and I puff, but generally stay within shouting distance. Plus she carries the water, and takes pity enough at some point to let me have some.
Her pace was a factor this past weekend when we drove up I-81 to Exit 205 and then over Va. 56 to Fish Hatchery Road and on to the parking area that is still a 9/10 mile climb from the AT. At the trail we turned north toward Wolf Rocks, a five-mile section each way that would fill in our last gap between a little south of U.S 460 at Pearisburg and the intersection of the Mau-Har trail north of Three Ridges. So yes, we did get about 12 miles in for the day, and ate lunch to great views west and north from Wolf Rocks, but our total hiking time ran to about two and a third hours each way, a little under the pledge.
This is a pretty and relatively gentle section of the trail, much of it along the ridgeline, with views east and west even at full foliage. The new side-obsession of the Greatest Day Hiker – wildflowers – provided me with some hope of staying closer to her. But the syndrome continues: She pauses, inspects, maybe even gets out the book to be sure it’s graybeard tongue, and strides ahead again. It was within this context that we spent the lunch rest with fully different perspectives – the guy looking out over the ridges to identify the aforementioned Priest and Three Ridges peaks, and the lady reading flower details from one or the other of Leonard Adkins’ terrific books on the topic; some version of the old male-lunar/female-hearth generalization.
One other part of the lunch ritual is to open the AT section map and the relevant section of the guidebook. The relief map verified the relative ease of the hike once we’d reached the trail, as well as what our handy-dandy altimeter had already told us-- that we were at the very edge of 4,000 feet, about as high as you go in this part of the state.
TGDHOTA was slightly kinder to me on the return walk, which had more downs than ups, plus wildflowers missed on the way up and a brief pause to wave hello to a group of scouts we’d overtaken on the way up; they’d set up careful camp near the Seeley-Woodworth Shelter. Gail was glad to see them safely ensconced for the evening, but didn’t start talking about sleeping bags or anything overnightish…
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