Stony Man Trail

 Four years later and Casey is still my favorite hiking buddy and best friend.  He surprised me with a trip to Middleburg and a detour to this gorgeous Shenandoah hike to celebrate four years together a few weeks ago.  It was a stunning day, and a gorgeous drive, weaving in and out of the fog.  On our hike, the fog wafted around and through the mountains and made for some stunning scenery.  Since I've been posting all of my recent updates today, I'm a bit tired of typing, so I'll let the pictures do the talking.

Foggy Road

Feeling on top of the world

Casey and I at one of the overlooks

Crazy ice man

Cross County Trail

Here's another one that I'm significantly behind on updating.  To add to it, this one has been 2.5 years in coming.  I started the Cross County Trail with Casey and his little brother in the summer of 2013.  The trail winds from Lorton, VA all the way to Great Falls Park via a conglomeration of different trails, paths, and sidewalks.  It's about 40 miles in length and we decided to do it in a day.  This might have been a feasible plan, had the trail system been easy to follow, had we all been in good biking shape, and had I not known that two days later, I would be in Arizona attempting to hike into and back out of the Grand Canyon.  As it was, we finished about 30 miles of the trail before I pooped out and decided to call it quits.

Finishing the trail proved to be a challenge.  This was in part due to the trail itself, but even more because it wound up being just short of impossible to find a sunny day when Maxwell's high school schedule, Casey's customer service, "work a good chunk of the weekends" schedule, and my "oh my god, grad school  is consuming my life" schedule aligned.  By happenstance, it took a full year and a half until we managed to get ourselves back to Raccoon Ridge Court, where we had originally called it quits.  We had made the last three criteria align, but alas, a sunny day was too much to ask for, so we set out in the sleet.  Unfortunately, a year and a half was enough time for all three of us to forget which direction we had come from and which direction we needed to go.  And so, for three solid hours, we biked back and forth and back and forth until we had biked what felt like ten miles and gone nowhere, with no more of a clue.  This was our own stupidity, I can promise you that, but even still, after three hours of biking nowhere, we were cold, grumpy, and soaked to the skin.  We told ourselves we'd try for a different day.

That day came a few weeks ago.  It was still a bit brisk and quite muddy, but for the winter the weather was mild and most importantly, our schedules aligned.  One year was not enough time to make us forget the disaster of the last attempt, and so we did our research and determined our trajectory before embarking on the third attempt.  We returned to Raccoon Ridge Court (I don't think I'll ever forget the name of that street) and headed in the direction that we now knew to be correct.  Two hours and ten miles later (albeit with a few turn arounds), we arrived to our car in Great Falls, muddy, but so glad to finally cross this one off the list.

 If you decide to bike this trail, it would pay to bring the map that you can find here, but also to download a better map to a cell phone or GPS.  The map that I linked is primarily what we used, but it is not detailed enough to give good directions when you reach an intersection with no trail marker (a common occurrence).  In parts, this trail is extremely well marked, if not a bit overmarked.  At other parts, the markers are scarce and not present at all trail junctions.

Old Rag

I am almost a month behind on posting this one, but for the purposes of catch up, here I go.  Just photos for today.

Devil's Marbleyard and Smith Mountain Lake State Park

This past Thanksgiving I finally had the chance to get outside again (may I mention that graduate school is consuming my life!?).  My family and I were at the lake for Thanksgiving and so I was back in the Southern part of Virginia and able to enjoy some quality outdoors time.  My family, Casey, and I enjoyed a trip to the State Park and I caught up with some college friends on a trip to the Devil's Marbleyard the next day.

Casey on a rock wall at Smith Mountain Lake State Park

Boo at Smith Mountain Lake State Park

Sneaking some photos through the trees of my friends at the marbleyard

I may have mentioned my last experience at the Devil's Marbleyard in which a boulder fell, plinko-style, down the marbleyard while I stood transfixed as I waited to see if it would stop before turning me into a human pancake.  Fortunately, that day was not destined to be my last, and the boulder finally wedged itself behind another boulder after an eternity-seeming several seconds.  This time around, my friends were set on returning to the marbleyard (they were not there to witness my near death boulder experience).  I was not about to turn down an opportunity to hike and socialize and so I tagged along with the plan to avoid the boulder field.  The trip from the lake made me long to return to the mountains.  Instead of following the route through Bedford and onto 81, we climbed up and over a mountain on some tight little back roads. Southwest VA, oh how I have missed you.

Another view of my friends on the boulders

When we finally arrived to the marbleyard, we met up with a friend's brother who had brought along his four month old puppy.  If you haven't been to the marbleyard, let me start by saying that it is not an ideal place for dogs.  The hike to the boulder field is just fine for your four-legged friends.  The boulder field, however, is far from an ideal playground for a dog (this is coming from someone who is generally all about bringing the dog on every possible excursion).  As it turned out, the fact that I was planning to avoid the marbleyard came in handy.  It took some convincing, but finally the friend's brother agreed to let me walk the puppy up the bushwhacked path along the side of the boulder field.  We would reconvene at the top.  I'm not exactly sure what his alternate plan was - perhaps to carry the dog on his shoulders?  That seemed like a disaster waiting to happen and so I was happy to take the dog.  Plus, a little company is never a bad thing.

Bailey the puppy on the way up the mountain

Bailey takes a break on the way up

Unfortunately, the dog had different ideas.  She was not thrilled to be left with a strange human in a strange place on the side of a mountain and so conveniently tried to drag me down the mountain each time I stepped on a particularly slippery rock or patch of leaves.  As such, the trip up the side trail was a full body workout - me dragging, carrying, and prodding the puppy along while trying to maintain my footing.  In the end, we made it to the top and the dog was a trooper, but it might have been best for her to have been left at home.  Regardless, it was an enjoyable time and I remember just how much I miss being in the rural areas of Virginia.

Doyles River Falls

You may begin to notice a shift in the location and frequency of my hikes.  While I will always be a Hokie, I am no longer able to call Southwest Virginia my primary stomping grounds.  You may now call me a proud Hokie-Terp (I don't know if I could've made up a derpier sounding name).  And so, with Maryland as my new turf, hopefully you'll be able to follow me as I explore Northern Virginia and Maryland through my time in graduate school.  After that, who knows?

Regardless, I finally had the opportunity to hike again!  I did this one with Casey on the way from Southwest Virginia to Maryland and while I can't say that I loved it (the waterfalls weren't much more than a drip and it was crowded with a capital 'C'), it was so refreshing to be able to enjoy some fresh air on a crisp not-quite-summer-not-quite-fall day.  The trail was a steady downhill on the way to the falls and a steady uphill on the way back.  We passed quite a few small children who had made it to the falls just fine, but were not so keen on walking back up to the parking lot.  Casey and I practiced our trail jogging on the way down and slowly plodded our way back up.  It was enough of a workout for this newfound city girl to be sore for a few days after!  None-the-less, the hike as we did it was short (only 3.2 miles total as an out-and-back to and from the lower falls), so I wouldn't call it more than moderate in terms of difficulty level.

Casey beside the trail

Some people beside the nearly non-existent lower falls

Seattle Trip - Mount Ranier National Park, Olympic National Park, and Mount Si

 Seattle and the surrounding area screams "green!"  The city requires citizens to separate out compost from recycling from trash.  An intimidating sign on the trashcan of my sister's condo complex threatens to increase the HOA fees should compostable waste be found in the trash dumpster.  REI was founded there.  The grocery store charges you for every plastic or paper bag that you use.  There are parks everywhere including three national parks within a reasonable drive.  And it may be not be science, but it sure looked like the fitness outweighed the fatness of the passers-by that I noticed on my visit.  It seemed a natural place for hikers to convene.  And if it weren't so far away and traffic didn't terrify me (a by-product of learning to drive near DC?) I might just move there.

Recently, I was fortunate enough to visit my sister who has taken up residence in Seattle.  While there, we did some hiking, some wandering, and a whole lot of enjoying the beauty of nature. I will let the pictures speak for themselves.

View from Skyline Trail looking away from the summit of Mount Ranier (Mount Ranier National Park)

Mom and Jenny enjoying the hike

Mount Ranier via Skyline Trail

A snow tunnel at Mount Ranier

Snow covered trail on the Skyline loop (Mount Ranier)

Me and Casey at Panorama Point (Mount Ranier)

Wildflowers at Mount Ranier

Another shot from the Skyline Trail at Mount Ranier

Hurrican Ridge at Olympic National Park

Me and Jenny at Hurricane Ridge

Marmot on hike near Hurricane Ridge Visitor Center

Ruby Beach (Olympic National Park)

Sol Duc Falls (Olympic National Park)

Deer at Hurricane Ridge (Olympic National Park)

Raven Rocks

I have no photos of this hike that Casey and I did in June and not really much to say for it.  That's not to say that it wasn't a good hike.  In fact, for a hike in the Northern Virginia area, it was reminiscent of those hikes surrounding Blacksburg.  As you can see graphically if you check out the hikingupward link to this hike, the trail does not merely ascend to a ridge with views.  Instead, it climbs and then descends and then climbs and then descends, and then finally climbs again.  I can't decide if I appreciate the intermixed ups and downs or if I prefer the more typical "up on the way there - down on the way back" hike.  Regardless, we had a nice time and met a few German folks who are doing a long section hike on the AT.  They commented on how lacking the flora and fauna identification skills seem to be of hikers in the area and then embarrassed us by quizzing us on our history knowledge when they asked if we knew how Washington D.C. got its name.  Born and raised not 30 minutes from the nation's capital, I was ashamed that I hadn't the faintest idea.  I have since looked up the answer and in case you are wondering, the name "Washington" is after George Washington (I could have guessed this much) and "Columbia" is after Christopher Columbus and was an old term used to describe America.  So there you have it - a hike and a history lesson in one.