VA Shenandoah National Park: Loft Mountain Loop - 3 miles

Loft Mountain Loop via Appalachian Trail and Frazier Discovery Trail: 3 miles

The Loft Mountain Loop (plus one mile getting turned around) took us three miles around a beautiful saddle and ridge circuit that started and ended at the wayside at Loft Mountain (MM 79). We initially wanted to extend the loop by walking the water station service road to the AT but couldn't find the connector so turned around and walked back to start the loop at Skyline Drive. No matter, it was a great day on the trails in the Southern District.

Root scramble

Overhang shelter

Quartzite fracturing

We climbed the west slope of Loft Mountain, past a closed PATC shelter and rushing spring pipe, and on up to an intersection with the AT.  Turning left on the AT we climbed even further, steady upwards on the famous trail and along came four thru-hikers, tags dangling from their packs, heading northbound. We stopped to listen to Overnbirds, Towhees, and Woodpeckers. "How many lives have been changed by these white blazes?" I wondered aloud. My sister added "And how many souls healed?"

Quartzite daggers

First lookout with Turk Mountain rising up from the valley

At the first overlook we looked southwest across the valleys and ridges of the Southern District. Smoke and water vapor blurred any view beyond ten miles but the prominent cone of Turk Mountain rose up out of the haze. At the second lookout we could see the stern-end of Massanutten, the famous canoe-shaped double ridged mountain, stood in dark contrast to the brightening skies. The haze gave every mountain a dark shadowy look while valleys were filled with smoke. A slight scent of burning balsam was in the air. 

Granite summit of Loft Mountain

At the summit we were just at 3,000 feet while the plant life around us took on a very northern look including great swathes of sphagnum moss, a tough old Table Mountain Pine, and a scattered stand of Spruce. Beneath the cover of the pine, a juvenile Black Racer whipped across the trail with its lunch of Black-Cheeked Salamander half gobbled down. We were really happy with that! It stayed in place long enough for us to observe its forward-facing, large eyes - its head blunter than a Black Rat Snake. 

Broad-Winged Hawk feather

Table Mountain Pine and its "mouse-tailed" cones

American Chestnut

We searched for and found an occasional American Chestnut surviving high on the bluffs in shallow soil with cold exposures. Some of these survivors were producing decent numbers of burrs. Mountain Ash was flush with red berries. Huckleberry and Low Bush Blueberry were heavy with green-blue berries with another week to ripen. Ravens quorked above us. We admired a Broad-Winged Hawk feather and I wondered if they are nesting nearby, surely with fledglings ready to launch. Dog Hobble or Mountain Maple did its best to trip us up on the decent. 

I will always love the diversity of crags and bluffs. 

Columbine in abundance!

Black Racer easting a Grey-Cheeked Salamander

With the trail loop almost complete, a fine mist moved upslope and we walked into pockets of leaf-drip and showers. Sounds of motors drifted up from the Skyline Drive with the faint sounds of people talking and laughing at the wayside. Someone slams on breaks - a deer crossing no doubt. A band of motorcycle riders lean into the big curve around Rocky Top just north of us and their collective growl grows louder as they approach Loft Mountain.

Gilled mushroom and friends 

Scratch-and-bite post for Black Bears

With our approach to the road, we see utility poles that carry lines into the valley where the pump station sits on the headwaters of Ivy Creek. One stands out from all the rest, skinny waisted at five feet from all the back-scratching bears who've bitten and clawed the wood to raise splinters and jagged prongs for the perfect deep massage. A bear trail runs right up to the pole and crosses the service road to the creek. The pole and the trail no doubt have served generations of bears who have marked, bitten, and scratched their way out of hibernation into an Appalachian summer for years. 

Fanous cement posts of Shenandoah trails

Up from  the piped spring

AllTrails map (minus our foray down and back a service road)

Notes:

American Black Bears love utility poles. For the curious naturalist, different marks on different trees and poles may mean different things. https://bear.org/marking-trees-and-poles/

VA Shenandoah National Park: Upper Pocossin and Dean Mountain

 On a hazy, Canada fire smoke-filled day in Shenandoah National Park, we decided to go exploring down a nearly hidden fire road off Skyline Drive to visit the ruins of the Far Pocosan/Upper Pocossin mountain community and mission. Like so many dozens of other mountain communities, this village crossroads and surrounding hill farms were cleared to make way for the new park in the 1930s.  As many of our hikes in to the park have revealed over the years, the story is a similar one of displacement, resettlement, and return to nature.

Remains of the mission worker's house

As we walked along we encountered a bear-scrounged tree missing its yummy ants and cronchy beetles. We were happily surprised by the calls of Blackburnian and Hooded Warblers and escorted almost the whole way down the holler by Eastern Wood Peewee and Goldfinches. The road under our feet slipped from pavement to cobbles to dirt to wagon ruts to single-wide trail. 

Mission workers house next to the stone chapel at Upper Pocossin Mission.
Source: Larry E. Lamb Collection (BRHP) 

At the crossroads, we explored for an hour or so, poking in and out of cellar holes, peering into the precariously leaning remains of the mission house, probing stone foundations and the remaining stone steps. I don't know why we didn't go further down the road towards the South River - there are more ruins and foundations, including a cemetery closer to the river. Instead we lingered for long in one place. I can't speak for my sister, but I found myself lost in imagination, trying to reanimate the place in my mind. Could I hear hymns being sung in the church or children reading aloud to their teachers in the school? Or did I hear someone yell a warning to folks further down the holler that a revenue man was making his way over from Dean Mountain?

Tall Thimbleweed, Anemone virginiana

In this place,  a bridle path and trail intersection are all that remain of the busy mountain crossroad. I tried to imagine the general store and post office, and in the 1920s, a filling station (built in anticipation of increased vehicular traffic as the national park was established). The people who lived here had an intimate knowledge of the land as farms, orchards, and wild edges that climbed the mountain to its ridge.  To outsiders like those mission folk, the mountain community here was isolated, superstitous, marginal, and in need of a modern God. 

Amos on the steps of the Upper Pocossin Mission Church

A builder of churches, Minister Frederick Neve answered the call to build Epsicopal missions clear up the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains across seven Virginia counties. He arrived in Virginia from England in 1888 and served as rector of Emmanuel Church in Greenwood, Virginia, until the mission bug bit - and bit hard.  Receiving permissions from the regional bishop, Neve set out to site, build, and staff a dozen new mission churches and schools to serve mountain communities.  With each site, he included the main church or chapel, mission worker's home, and a school or community hall that doubled as school and meeting.

Left front facing corner of the church. 

"After the work [in the Ragged Mountains] had been carried on for some time, I could not help thinking what a good thing it would be if the same kind of work could be extended to the Blue Ridge, where I knew from what I had heard, the conditions were very similar to those prevailing in the Ragged Mountains, only worse...my idea was to plant strong missions all along the Blue Ridge, about 10 miles apart." - Frederick Neve, 1902

Black bear scavaged tree

Of course the communities that Neve selected for "saving" didn't all want to be saved. In fact, many resisted his efforts and in the case of Upper Pocossin, violently so.  The community liked its isolation and that, for them, could be interpreted as a kind of depth of place felt by people having for so long been left alone.  But the Episcopal Church prevailed and the mission was built and the young, good virtuous women of God, sent to serve as school teachers kept diaries and wrote letters home. They painted a picture of both pity and reverence for these people, being not at all what they had expected, and with whom they found a firece sense of independence and spirit. 

Missy Breeden, at her home in Upper Pocossin Mission. She was given 
lifetime tenure of her home by the NPS and died in her beloved
cabin in 1949.  Source: NPS Archives

The intersection of trails that wraps around the ruins once carried horse and wagon, buggies, and mostly people walking up and down the mountain. Before the mission, the most engagement these folks had with the federal government would have been the post office. A young mission worker wrote home that while the community folks were interested in what was happening in the outside, they were content not to have the government or wars or extractive industries intrude upon their world.  Over time, the community came to accept the young mission workers and their church. No one could have imagined then the impact the new park would have had on this and dozens of crossroad communities throughout the Blue Ridge in the coming decade.

The abandoned stone and timber built Episcopal church,
Upper Pocossin Mission, 1940s.
Source: Larry E. Lamb Collection

We hiked back up the old road to the Skyline Drive and the hidden dirt lot where we'd left the borrowed truck. (I hope I can get my truck back soon!) Then we drove to another hidden road and found the Dean Cemetery, still in use and very well cared for. Again, we lingered here. The Dean Mountain community thrived on the western flank of the ridge, opposite the Upper Pocossin community.  Reading the log book for comments left by relatives and visitors was really cool. 

Dean Cemetery

The system of mountain roads that once tied these far-flung communities together are now designated as fire roads and can be explored with thr right maps. Not all are marked today as trails in the park literature, so many are overlooked by hikers. It made us more curious about finding and following these old roads, though there are many folks who have made it their outdoor passion to do this and several folks have written books or maintain YT or blogs about these adventures. 

Artifact from the Dean Mountain community

Later, at home, I consulted the NPS historic tract map to see which families owned which tracts at the time of the park buy-outs (or in some cases, aquisition by eminent domain). Many of the names we read on stones in the Dean Cemetery were also names from Upper Pocossin: Meadows, Greene, Dean, etc. These communities married into each other and maintained ownership of vast sections of mountain properties as farms, timber land, and orchards. The roads that connected them, as well as some of the existing trails, were walked or ridden by these people to visit, attend meetings, burials, church, and weddings for two hundred years. 

Pocossin Road  

These paths as fire roads or trails today, were the connective strands of a web of communications and thriving mountain society a hundred and more years ago. The idea of isolation and marginal existence was misapplied to these communities by outsiders then and enhanced by the take-back-by-nature appearance of these places today. Though I love the wilderness that is the park today, the road system and trails have taken on new meaning for me as I look forward to more fire road rambles to come.

Toppled stove chimney of the Pocossin Mission church.

Far Pocosan, Night or Day

Reverend Frederick W. Neve

Knight ushers in the Brighter Day

And yet she does not pass away; 

For strange to say

She shines and drives dark away.

Since this is so, it must be right

To call her Day, as well as Knight. 

 

AllTrails Map of the Pocosin Road (now Pocosin Trail) and Dean Mountain

Notes:

Ben Swenson's excellent blog Abandoned Country is a great source of information about these disappeared places that nature is now reclaiming. https://www.abandonedcountry.com/2013/01/07/far-pocosan-wild-with-moonshine-whiskey/

 

Blue Ridge Heritage Project is dedicated to raising awareness and educating SNP/Blue Ridge Country visitors about the displaced people of the Blue Ridge during the 1930s-40s. 

NPS Tract Finder Map is a useful tool for finding the old road systems (now demarcated as fire roads) and the family names of last owners. 

VA Shenandoah National Park: Shen2022 Sisters Camp & Hike

 Fox Hollow Trail (2022 52-Hike Challenge #11)

For our annual Sister's Camping Trip to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, we did a series of day hikes while base camping at Mathews Arm Campground in the Northern District of the park. As I counted each of these day hikes towards my 2022 52-Hike Challenge, I've numbered them here to add to my tally. Our first hike was the Fox Hollow Trail about two miles when we added some extra wandering we did at the Dickey Ridge Visitor Center. This is a good hike to orient yourself to the history of Shenandoah National Park - a remembrance really, for all the mountain families who gave up their homes for the national park in the 1930s. Many did so willingly. Others resisted fiercely. All are gone. Gone are generations of resilient people and their ways of managing the land, medicinal knowledge, and foodways that made these mountains their home. For us, this is an ancestral home as well with many Scots-Irish and German branches of our family tree having settled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Every time we come back, it feels like coming home.

Fox Hollow Trail - carefully stacked field stone piles (1800s) 

Fox Family Cemetery - late 1700s onward

American Cancer Root, Conopholis americana

Much of the trail follows old wagon and foot paths that settlers established to connect families, towns, and markets in the valleys. Over hundreds of years these paths became lines with stacked rocks, oaks, red cedar, and fencing which is still visible in many places. We heard Barred Owls in the hollow and plenty of Towhees and Wood Thrushes. Amos fell into a springhead tank, much to his surprise! 

A Virginia Black-and-Tan Coonhound, Amos attracted a lot of attention!

Windham Rocks Trail (Hike #12) 

Though I've hiked this great little geology trail before, this time it came complete with a Black Bear popping his jaws at us, hidden behind a great hardened pillow of basalt lava. We retreated for a few minutes until we were sure the noise we were making (HEY BEAR! GO BEAR!) had sent him packing down the hill. We saw several other bears in our travels on the Skyline Drive during the week.  Shenandoah has a very high concentration of this beautiful bruin. 

We sure did make a lot of noise! GO BEAR! 

We enjoyed a great look at a Hooded Warbler, Common Yellowthroat, and Whorled Loosestrife. Carrion Beetles were common, scurrying across the path to devour a half-eaten mouse, mate, or scouting for more dead things.  The main rock formation was impressive, which, like the bear boulder, is an exposed pillow of hardened lava that was squeezed up from below as colliding continental plates 400-million-years ago ground together pushing up this mountain range. Along with greenstone, another common volcanic found in the park, it displays unique structure, most famous for it columnar jointing. 

Windham Rocks are volcanic formations of basalt

Whorled  Loosestrife, Lysimacha quadrifolia

Traces Trail, Mathews Arm (Hike #13) 

This was one of my favorite loops of the week. The Traces Trail encircles Mathews Arm Campground for about two miles and has a great blend of natural history and human history. Of course, I cannot pass a mountain seep without flipping rocks and we weren't disappointed to find a bunch of juvenile Dusky Salamanders. ( https://dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/information/northern-dusky-salamander/) 

Northern Dusky Salamander

Old roads and farm paths are lined walls for livestock, field stone piles, and boundary features. One proper four-foot-wide wall demonstrates that some builders were highly skilled wallers who used techniques and traditions brought with them from England. Oaks that once shaded a wagon road lined the trail in their old age, now hundreds of years old.  Habitats included a mineral-poor lichen and moss barren where we found a rare Large Twayblade Orchid, Rattlesnake Weed, and toxic Fly Poison for which there is no cure.  

Mule and oxen path

A proper stone fence in the English tradition in a "dog hair wood." 

Fly Poison, Amianthium muscitoxicum

Rattlesnake Weed

The woodland scene was constantly shifting as slopes full of old pasture "dog hair woods" transformed into mature woodlots that have grown in since the 1940s.  This trail was a birder's paradise full of Red and White-Eyed Vireos, Veery and Wood Thrushes, Phoebes and Catbirds. There were plenty of Dark-Eyed Juncos which I loved seeing because I only have them in winter down in the Susquehanna Valley.  Even a Willow Flycatcher put in an appearance. Throughout our hike, an ever-present family of Northern Ravens croaked, quorked, and yelped from the canopy. We figured at least two young of the year were pestering their parents as they scouted the forest for food. At camp, Amy witnessed a Raven raid a Robin's nest to kill and eat a plump nestling. We're sure these squalling trail Ravens were the same ones since we were hiking around the campground.  

Indian Pipe, Monotropa uniflora

Large Twayblade Orchid, Liparis lilifolia

Maidenhair Fern, 

Old oaks mark the roadway (now trail)

Bluebell Trail, Shenandoah River State Park  (Hike #14) 

After heavy storms - it's town day!

After a night of wicked heavy storms we headed into the valley for town day in Front Royal. Such a great little town. Amos was a star. We took afternoon hike along the Southern Fork of the Shenandoah River in Shenandoah River State Park. The river was running high and muddy after the rains (which caused local flash floods) but we took the Bluebell Trail along its banks for about two miles until the mud turned us around. 

Tulip Poplar and Paw Paw dominated the flood plain

Paw Paw fruit

This was Paw Paw Nation. The fruits were setting on almost every branch of hundreds of the small trees which lined the trail so thickly we could barely see out of our green tunnel to the river.  A Great Blue Heron squawked from somewhere along the bank and there were a few mudslides to navigate around. But mud means fresh tracks and we observed White-tailed Deer, Raccoon, and Squirrel prints. 

From a spectacular overlook - Shenandoah River and Massanutten Mountain 

Jelly Ear, Auricularia auricularia

Hawksbill Trail (Hike #15) 

This is another one of my favorites in SNP and it leads to the highest summit in the park at '4050. It starts out tame enough but soon becomes a steep series of trail pitches that lead through three different ecological zones. We met up with some impressive Yellow Birch and stately Hemlock then, near the top, we inhaled the rich scent of Red Spruce needles. This is trail where it's good to agree to hike your own hike. Everyone does it at their own pace, takes as many or as few breaks as they need/want, and no worries about who's fast or who's slow. Just go up and up. Amos enjoyed drinking from all the cold springs that bursting from beneath boulders. We met so many wonderful people along the way. 

It starts out easy enough, but then climbs steeply to the summit.

Yellow Birch, Betula alleghaniensis

Summit of Hawksbill 

One of the best meet-ups was my niece meeting a fellow lifter and strong woman who recognized her competition shirt. There are many reasons I love hiking and backpacking so much (and now bike packing) but best of all is the comraderies and conversations. There were lots of woman putting down serious miles on the AT section of the Hawksbill Trail as well as women day hikers like us who were elevating each other to the top with smiles, laughs, and support. My best meet-up was a young man who was doing a section hike of the AT for his two week vacation from work. He admitted he had "Summit Obsession Disorder" and could never pass up the opportunity to bag a peak even if it was off his chosen path, so after a good laugh about "things people worry about" off he went, lanky and fast, striding up the mountain to add Hawksbill  to his summit list. 

Rose River Trail (Hike # 16)  

This walk has become a bit of a tradition for our camp-out weeks.  Dark Hollow Falls carves its ravine in a dike of volcanic greenstone and threads its way down Hogcamp Branch to become the Rose River. We did the trail as an out-and-back but its a great loop trail, too, that offers plenty of opportunity to dunk in the river when its hot and humid. We visited as old cemetery and found that a new burial has taken place there, while caretakers have kept it looking neat and beautiful. It is one of the few cemeteries within the park that is still used and maintained. 

Dark Hollow Falls

An old gravesite is marked with a simple granite slab

We were thrilled to see and hear our first Scarlet Tanagers of the trip as well as buzzed by a Ruby-Throated Hummingbird. In fact we were thrilled with the whole week's wildlife sightings that included Black Bears, a Bobcat, Cotton-tailed Rabbits, a flock of Wild Turkey with poults ("goblets"), White-Tailed Deer, a baby Striped Skunk, Coyotes, a Brown Bat, and so much more. The birding was excellent as was the botany and geology. Next year we'll camp at SNP Loft Campground in the Southern District and we really look forward to it. Meanwhile I'll be coming back for day hikes and overnights before we can all be back together again for Shen2023. 

Notes: 

Though we arrived just as the new Visitor's Center was closing at Shenandoah River State Park, we were able to enjoy the Bluebell Trail along the river. We'd love to come back and hike the whole park, camp, and explore the valley some more. https://www.dcr.virginia.gov/state-parks/shenandoah-river

Some areas of the park, thanks to Covid, became incredible crowded and though we didn't encounter the crowds (thank goodness) I was afraid of, some trails like Old Rag now require seasonal ticketing. https://www.nps.gov/shen/index.htm

I am a salamander addict. The Appalachian Mountains in general and the Blue Ridge Range in particular are home to a large variety of sally-folk. https://dwr.virginia.gov/wildlife/salamanders/