Tiny Tour of the Mountain State

So it’s home again, home again, friggidy frog. (Or so our kids used to say.) And I won’t bore you with all–but only some–of the details.

As you can see from the image up top, my friend Steve and I did go where wise men fear to tread–at the almost-top of Seneca Rocks, stopping short of putting ourselves at so much risk we might become numbers 16 and 17.

The mile and a half climb pulled up a thousand feet–then add the height of the final spine where only the folks with ropes, helmets and on-call angels dare to tread.

We were chilly at the trailhead at 9am, warm and thankfully only slightly winded for the next two hours, and chilly again in the sun-with-wind up top. Highs each day of our trip were in the upper 50s or low 60s.

The trip also included a drive-by approach to Dolly Sods, a place I’ve heard of since the 70s but my old hiking buddy and I never got up that far, and neither did we, but almost.

Monday, we stayed in and around the Blackwater Falls area and had breakfast in Davis at the Bright Morning Inn and lunch at the Purple Fiddle in Thomas.

Monday afternoon, because I wanted to at least say I’d been to Elkins, we left the broad valleys, straight-ish roads and green of the national forest and returned to more urban-familiar traffic, strip malls and American commercialism–not that Elkins is not without charm.

We walked in the town park near the campus of Davis and Elkins College, and had a great dinner at C J Maggie’s in the heart of the old downtown. God help the old downtowns across this sad retail-bloated over-franchised country of ours.

I have some take-aways from this trip, and a long list of questions about the towns we passed through or near, the geology and hydrology of that part of WV and some thoughts about what comes next, having been away from blogging and other excessive busy-ness for the better part of a week.

And I’ll probably just cobble together a gallery with a few images and post that here sometime soon.