Billy Goat Trail Section A (Great Falls, MD)

pond along the trail

 It's about time that I'm getting around to adding the Billy Goat Trail!  I've done this trail a good four or five times and in my opinion it is the best hike inside of the Beltway.  It's popular, no doubt, but if you can put aside the crowds and just look at the scenery, you'll be wondering how it is that you are only a quick drive from DC.  Yesterday I went with Casey, Stephanie, and Josh after Casey and I had a bike camping trip stormed out on Friday afternoon.  It was busy as expected and we saw quite a few kayakers on the river and in the canal along with swarms of hikers.  It is understandable that this hike is popular, I suppose, because along with the great views and rock scrambling, it is short.  The hike itself totals only 1.7 miles (keeping in mind that it's a U-shaped hike, so you must either retrace your steps or follow the canal path back to the beginning of the hike).  Even still, at about 3.7 miles total if you take the trail to the canal path as a loop, it's a moderate hike at most.  But boy is it beautiful.

Stephanie and Josh

There's rocks like this for most of the way

Casey by the water

A neat little bridge over a rushing creek

Casey and Stephanie aren't thrilled at the photo opportunity

Whiteoak Canyon - Upper Falls

I also don't have much time to write about this one, but it was an enjoyable hike to finish my spring break, even if the weather wasn't the greatest!  The hike is mostly downhill to the falls.  We went to the upper falls (2.3 miles one way from the Skyline Drive parking lot) and then wandered a ways past it before turning around.  As the reviews for this hike will tell you, the hike is fairly easy from the parking lot to the upper falls.  After that, the trail descends more steeply and you should keep in mind that you'll have to hike back up however far you hike down.

An overlook on Skyline Drive

Skyline Drive Overlook in Color

Creek alongside the trail

Upper Falls View Point

Casey at the falls overlook in the haze

Hay Rocks/Carvin Cove

I don't have time to write much about this one, but it was a nice hike right near Roanoke.  The views were great along the way.  The views at Hay Rock were actually less impressive than the other overlooks along the ridge, but a good chunk of the hike was right along the ridge!  This was a great way to start spring break.

View from one of the overlooks

The ridge trail

Me trying (and failing) to get to the top of Hay Rock.  It's more of a scramble than it looks!

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.