Wherein We Enjoy the Forest Primeval

Well, I'm back from camping in Ramsey's Draft Wilderness.

I planned this trip thinking that we would hike out today, but instead, we hiked out last night. Originally, I figured we'd backpack in as far as we could get on Wednesday night. We did that. Then I thought we'd pack up the next day, hike up the mountain, and find another campsite. On Thursday morning, I realized that we'd come right past this campsite on our way out of the wilderness and suggested that we basecamp instead of humping the packs up the mountain.

It had rained a bit on Wednesday night, so this way, we didn't have to pack up wet gear and this allowed us to leave a lot of gear behind. Thank goodness we did that because I didn't realized that a)the hike up the Shenandoah Mtn Trail was literally up for five miles. It's a nice grade -- my mapping software says 8% -- but that's really a sneaky sort of up. It doesn't seem like much, but as I got winded and my hamstrings got sore, I really started to look at the lay of the trail.

By the time we got to our designated lunching spot, the sun was out and the sky was blue. The temperature up there was just chilly enough that after about 5 minutes of sitting, I started to get cold and pulled out my fleece. In my mind, this is pretty much the perfect temperature for backpacking.

I was under the impression that after lunch would be all down. I was totally wrong. We had to go up another few hundred feet first. I will admit that it was lovely up there, and the campsites were perfectly spaced over the several acres at the top of the hill near the spring. During this time of year, they were all covered with this velvety looking brilliant green grass. Of course by fall, they'll all be down to dust and dirt again, but they sure looked pretty now. Oh, and the rhododendrons and azaleas were all blooming up there. They looked and smelled fabulous, but I started to be affected by some allergy at this point. It wasn't debilitating but it was annoying. It's gone now, so it was something up on that mountain.

We continued down through my idea of an idyllic Eastern forest setting. Oh, and we'd seen some people very early on in the morning (two), and we were to see and hear no more people at all. Anyway, we were hiking down Ramsey's Draft with the babbling brook noise and the deep shade of hemlocks and oaks and a thick understory of blueberries and rhododendrons. At one point, we stopped at the stream to filter some icy cold water (mmmmm...) and later on, we spotted some chairs that had been built out of the ubiquitous rocks in and around the stream in the hollow. They were incredibly comfy -- this is really rare. Usually the rocks don't conform to your ass, but miraculously, these were both built in such a way that there was no weird pressure on one's pelvis as is usual with sitting on rocks. There was a butterfly sitting in the fire ring that Paul claimed was drying it's wings, fresh from the cocoon. I'm inclined to believe him -- I don't know shit about the behavior of butterflies, but it was there as long as we were. I mean, low seventies in dappled sunlight in a beautiful campsite with a babbling brook...you'd sit for a while too.

The only depressing thing about this was all the fallen hemlocks. These were enormous trees, some of the only virgin timber left in Virginia, and they had succumbed to a plague of aphid-like-things who's name I cant spell or pronounce right. Luckily, there were a few lovely trees still standing, but the number taken down by the pests was staggeringly high. Furthermore, they block the trail in many places and much climbing over and around is necessary. Again I was glad to have only a few pounds on my back.

At this point I'd like to mention that the actual hiking today was probably about the equivalent of the AT, but that places of this character were way too far apart for my taste (at least in the areas with which I am familiar). Why bust my ass in Pennsylvania when I can get this experience here?

Just before this site, we started making the first of *many* fords of varying difficulty of Ramsey's Draft. We walked on until we found the survey marker which was at the confluence of the left and right prongs of Ramsey's Draft. We sat at a campsite near there for a while. This was one of the grass covered kind with more primitive rocks for sitting.

At this point, the trail begins to alternate with an old woods road. The part that's the road is obviously easy, but unfortunately, the road was washed out and the stream was actually moved by some cataclysmic storms over the past 20 years or so. We'd walk on the road for a while, scrambling over some fallen hemlocks, many of which were spectacularly large (the trees downed by said storms had mostly been cut in half to allow passage of humans down the trail, but not these) and bushy. Eventually we'd have to ford the Draft. After doing that, we were often on new "trail", some of which consisted of piles of rocks like a median strip in the stream, only much less tidy and smooth.

And then the Snake Incident occurred...