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Weekend Hikes - Week 81
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The weekend hikers: Gail and Kurt Rheinheimer stand on top of Rice Fields, a bald southwest of Blacksburg, Va. along the Appalachian Trail. They were photographed in May by a couple who were thru-hiking the AT with their two children. |
Week 81: There are a few spots we’ve encountered along the Virginia Appalachian Trail – as you approach the Lynchburg reservoir from the north, for one, or for several miles where the trail parallels the Blue Ridge Parkway to the west side – when you’re at a certain level on the mountainside and the mountainside has a particularly undulating side, that you get a little bit of “Groundhog Day” feeling. You walk along the ridge, you turn right at a ravine, you walk to a mild promontory looking northwest, you turn back along the ridge and then repeat the process, maybe a dozen times in less than a mile.
The stretch of the trail from U.S. 52/21 near I-77 southward to the intersection with the Trail Boss Trail is as striking example of the phenomenon as we’ve seen – a pleasing visit and revisit of classic Virginia terrain. The variance along here is an occasional strong stand of rhododendron amid the otherwise deciduous forest. It was as we approached one such stand that The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All took her eyes up briefly from the brightly sunlit trail bed and its trail-side wildflowers, and had her eyes register – perhaps 200 feet ahead – a mass so black and round as to appear to be… well, something that took her breath away.
“A bear, I guess,” Gail said, coming back toward me and already laughing. And indeed, so bright was the day and so deeply dark and gently round was the rhodo-tunnel that the eye at that distance wanted to translate the darkness into a mass instead of a hole.
This a good and easy hike – so easy that we went nearly a mile beyond our planned turn-around point at the Trail Boss Trail before we did start back, extending our trek to 5.7 miles each way. We walked back to the Boss intersection for lunch and then began the familiar, reassuring turns of Brushy Mountain back toward the big interstate.
Click here for the archive of Kurt's Hikes
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