We still have beautiful autumn weather and decided to head out again for a short (3 night) camping trip. We went to Pennsylvania last time and going West toward West Virginia seems natural if a little repetitive. But there are lots of areas we have not been.
Case in point, we always stayed at Savage River / Big Run but leave Green Ridge by the wayside. Its a little closer to home and by reputation a lot busier so we avoided it until now. But hey, lets try it out
Saturday. Green Ridge State Forest. First of all, registration for a campsite is a royal pain in the rear. Some bizarre combination of sign-up sheet with missing pages, unclear instructions, line-ups of campers, odd permits for firewood harvesting (??) and so on. Basically a total mess. But we signed up, paid our $10 and went 5 miles of gravel road to the site hoping it would be free and – surprise – it actually was. We had a lot of daylight left and decided to “claim” the site with a camping chair and some notes before driving 5min toward a popular trailhead.
The trail itself was beautiful, about 4 miles with virtually no elevation change, just a fun walk through the park. Quite busy though.
We got back to our site and the camping chair we had left to “signal” that we booked it had been stolen. It was a cheap, sub- $20 chair but its annoying to have stuff stolen but whatever. We had an amazing camp site with great fire place, no neighbors and great weather. We chatted until 11:00pm with stars and planets above us – it was really beautiful.
Camp at: 39.704020, -78.483460
Sunday. With an early start, we headed out toward the Blackwater Falls State Park in West Virginia. It had been on our list for a few weeks but it requires online booking and that was never available. Its a pretty busy area of the State and the weather was gorgeous, we expected it to be very busy. And in fact the park was packed and so was the campground but only the “hook up” section. We hiked the park for a few hours but when we had to line up to see the famous falls, decided we should take a break, walk through the grounds a little and take it easy. The foliage was gorgeous and we had an amazing 4 mile or so stroll. The campsite btw, backs into the woods and has a Disc Golf (Frisbee?) course behind it. I.e. nobody is there and lots of space for the dog to run…
Alright, weekend is over, the hordes have dwindled and we have the park (nearly) to ourselves. We pack the van up and just bounce to the other side of the gorge
to scope out the hiking / cross country skiing trails there. Its very pretty, thick Rhododendron and its quite boggy – this must be mosquito hell during the summer. Now it was gorgeous hiking, only saw one or two people over the entire time.
The quality of this clip is terrible, turns out the SD card died and all I had was the stream off the phone. Real bummer, there were tons of nice scenes there.
Then onwards to the camp (via Harvest Host) for the night, this time a Vineyard / Winery (Brix & Columns) in Virginia. The hosts were incredibly supportive and had a friendly Great Dane puppy running among their guests which spooked our dog. As usual, the wine is a matter of taste but the view was unbelievable.
Camp. 38.36915, -78.69737
Tuesday
Back North and into the Shenandoah. Not sure if we are jaded but the whole “Shenandoah” experience is wearing off. Winding roads are not the problem but we didn’t have the urge to stop at every single look out to take a photo of the foliage. Pre-lunch, traffic was alright and we checked in with the rangers for a single short (but very steep) hike with an incredible view (lower hawksbill trail up to . Turns out, this is actually the highest point in the Shenandoah Park and it was truly spectacular.
And that was that, we aimed North and headed home, with one slight change, we took Whites Ferry instead of taking the obvious route via I66/I495. Not sure if that was faster but it definitely was prettier.