VA Shenandoah National Park: Northern District Hiking

The Northern District of Shenandoah National Park in Virginia made for a week of exploration, hiking, and even playing a little catch-up with work and research basecamped at Mathews Arm Campground. Each day I set out to do a minimum of five miles hiking while setting aside time to work on projects I've had no time to tackle in this new universe of work-from-home/ at-work-all-the-time daily routine. I finished a journal article, did some artwork, attended Zoom meetings for work, and did 30 + miles of hiking. I considered it a major victory week for not a having heard one notification bell alerting me of new emails. This was also a work test for a future nomad adventure.

North Entrance at Front Royal, VA

Day of arrival, late afternoon hike on the Traces Trail

After arriving at Mathews Arm Campground off the Skyline Drive, the major road through the park, Amos and I set out to hike the Traces Trail accessed from the campground entrance. Setting up camp could wait as daylight was quickly fading and we needed to get a good walk in after three hours driving. We made a fast circuit hike through beautiful transitional forestland where one can still see the outlines of old pastures and stone fences. It is important to remember when hiking these mountain landscapes that nothing is totally "natural" and very few places within this large Eastern park have not been modified by human activity in the last century.  More on that in a future post. Once back at camp, it was an easy task to set up my simple site - tarp, work table, stove, water. My little SUV provided sleeping room for both Amos and I and was warm and cozy.

Starting Day Two in morning fog.

Day Two dawned with mountain fog blanketing the highest peaks and we set off to hike a six-mile loop around Hogback and Little Hogback Mountains in mysterious light. Using a combination of trails, including the Appalachian Trail, we traversed old roads, rocky footpaths, and pasture traces (now trails), to circle the mountain along its flanks and summiting two peaks. Gildart names this the Sugarloaf-Keiser Run Road -Hogback Lariat with an added mile to the forested summit of Hogback. Little Hogback afforded a great westerly view but Hogback Mountain was a bit of a let down as its highest point was socked in with a rather ugly radio repeater station and tower. Never mind, the hike was wonderful and we saw so much along the way. More on that later, too.

Day Two:  Hogback Mountain Loop

The Appalachian Trail is always close by - or underfoot. 

Summit of Little Hogback looking SW towards Hogback Mountain.

Day Three we hiked a combination of trails that lead off the Compton Gap parking area for total of five miles. We started with a morning loop past Fort Windham Rocks, across the Dickey Ridge Trail, connecting to the AT and a visit to Indian Spring. Then off to find wifi for a Zoom meeting (work). We returned for the second hike from Compton Gap to the fantastic outcrop of columnar jointing and summit at Compton Peak and an out-and-back lollipop towards Jenkins Gap on the AT.  This second section is where we met a family with a leash-aggressive dog that the owner could barely control. It yowled at Amos with its teeth bared and its family all screaming for it to stop. Amos was trying to protect me and accidently pushed me over into a scree pile. A little cut-up and angry, I waved off the family when they approached (with the angry dog!) to see if I was okay. "Go away!" I said. Amos was very helpful in the steep climb and rock scramble down to the rock formation on a side trail. He stayed on alert the whole afternoon. 

Fort Windham Rocks and the beginning of a nice ridge of columnar jointed basalt.

Indian Run Spring bubbles up from the mountain flank. 

AT approach to Compton Peak.

Amos keeping an eye on a leash aggressive dog as the family scurries down the mountain.

A bit of a rock scramble to get here but worth it! 

Day Three we hiked a nine-mile loop that took in Overall Falls and a remote mountain ridge trail. We'd already seen a bear at a pull-off on Skyline Drive, but this hike encompassed such great bear habitat that I knew we'd more - and we did. Two cubs and a Momma bear! We also saw a Timber Rattlesnake and stopped to visit with it for a few minutes. This was a hard hike and we were both dragging at the end, but luckily it started and ended practically at my campsite with no drive needed today. The Overall Falls Trail was weak on water but huge on steep, treacherous climbs down into the ravine where hikers can find a nice cascade and a sheer drop falls within a mile. Overall Run Road made for some very rocky and slow hiking and the return up Beech Mountain Trail was up, up, up. This connects with the Mathews Arm Trail, an old farm community and fire road road to the saddle between the peaks at Mathews Arm Campground. This was a modified version (longer) of the Tuscarora-Overall Run Trail Loop in Gildart's Falcon Guide (see below).

Beech Mountain Trail for the return - near where we saw Mom Bear and two cubs.

At the bottom of the ravine on Overall Run Road (note stone wall) at the river.

View to the west from Overall Run Trail near the sheer drop falls.

At the sheer drop falls, a little short on water, Overall Run Falls. 

On Day Four I had a morning Zoom meeting to attend so it was back up the road to the Visitor's Center for wifi service, then an afternoon exploring another old woods road and Lands Run Falls. Amos seemed a little sore from the previous day's nine mile hike so we only did five miles on an out-and-back on the old road. He had plenty to explore though, and we spent a good amount of time peering under rocks in the creek looking for aquatic life. More on that later, too. We also hiked a section of AT - about a mile - around an old CCC camp and Amos had his picture taken by a nice park maintenance worker who showed us photographs of the camp mascot in 1935, a Black and Tan Coonhound named Blackbird Joe.  We had a great conversation with him and wandered some more around the old camp. 

Lands Run Road

A little off-trail bush wacking to explore the creek above the falls.

Some wandering after our hike found this great site. 

Amos does a proud pose on the porch of the CCC camp HQ building

Another CCC building near the barracks site. 

The only original CCC building left in the parl. This was a great wander walk. 

On our last day we did a few slow miles on the Dickey Ridge Trail and Snead Farm Loop. Amos was a little tired and so we took it easy. I'd massaged his paws the night before and checked for cracks or cuts and found a little blister between his toes. He can go a long time hiking, but when he's hurting or sore, he's he first one to say "time for a wander, not a hike." Still we did just under five miles, slowly (it took hours) and Amos was very happy with all the smells and cold spring water stops. 

Dickey Ridge Trail

Snead Farm Road

Our last lunch on the trail was at the Snead Farm barn.

Total hiking thirty miles for the week with a few extra miles of just wandering and exploring. I'll post another time on the plants and animals we saw. Amos did great but I was paying very close attention to his paws as many of the trails we hiked were very rocky and he wasn't wearing boots like I was! This was prefect weather for strenuous hikes, cool and breezy with the coming of deep autumn. It's good to remember that any trail leading off from parking areas along the Skyline Drive always goes down, so saving snacks, water, and energy for the long, steep returns is important. We stopped and gave water to one exhausted hiker and his small collie who were just slogging it uphill. The AT is really the only trail that travels the ridge line with less ups and downs than all the side trails and old roads. Next post will cover geology, plants, and animals. 

Notes:

Bert and Jane Gildart offer a nice set of hikes for all three districts of the park in their Falcon Guide Hiking Shenandoah National Park, Fifth Edition (2016). I wouldn't rely entirely on this guide book, however, since there are so many more trails to explore or combine with what they have here. I used my All Trails app as well as a small booklet on circuit trails I picked up at the Dickey Ridge Visitors Center. 

I stayed at the Mathews Arm Campground just off Skyline Drive in the Northern District. It was the perfect basecamp from which I could go hiking each day whether by car to a distant trailhead or right out of my tent site. There are no showers and the campground does close in November for the winter. https://www.recreation.gov/camping/campgrounds/232432

PA Susquehanna Bedrock Terraces

 Autumn comes to the Susquehanna River. Water levels are low, this is part of the annual cycle of the Lower Susquehanna River Basin (LSRB). The last good high water flow was weeks ago and with it went the annual plants that have hardly a foothold. Seeds from upstream were flushed downstream to lodge into wrack or flood plain sediments and may germinate next spring. Now we see the this harsh bedrock environment for what it is, exposed to the sun, scoured by eons of floods, and soon, hopefully, ice floes will come in winter. The bedrock terrace is a tough environment and now it has shed the lush summer mantel while only the toughest plants survive. 

When we visited Great Falls on the Potomac River this summer and walked out over boulder fields, across wooded islands and ravines, we noted the park service interpretive signs that pointed out the ecological uniqueness of these types of bedrock habitats. We could as well erect similar signs here in the bedrock flats of our own river to alert people to its rare and challenging landscape.  Deformed schist and gneiss is the bedrock complex, a sharp, granular metamorphic rock that formed from ocean bottom sediments during the great squeezing together of tectonic plates.

A sandstone boulder erratic, not native to this bedrock type, but flushed downriver on floods. 

The origins of this bedrock terrace is the Iapetus Ocean  that existed before the Atlantic.  Kenz wonders if there might be fossils here but I assure her that any relics of ocean life have been squeezed and flattened, folded and made semi-molten as continents drifted towards each other. But she looks anyway. There is plenty of sandstone washed down from New York and occasionally we found shattered cobbles that contained impressions of mollusks and other shells.  So yes, there are fossils here and I stood corrected. 

Pickerel Frog

Pools of water trapped between sharp ridges of bedrock yield hundreds of tadpoles and crayfish that dart into bottom mud to escape detection. Occasionally we disturbed Pickerel Frogs that launched themselves five feet or more to escape our clumsy footfalls. The seasonal assemblages of plants included grasses in seed, autumn standards like Thoroughwort and Boneset, and the most delicate of fall flowers,  Slender False Foxglove that is only in bloom for a very short period of time. This is a brave and tough little plant that survives in the most inhospitable places and I admire it year after year for its tenacity.  

Lock 12 Susquehanna Tidewater Canal

We come across places where 19th century canal builders quarried rock and hauled it upslope to build Lock 12. Bore holes from hammer drills and blasted sheaves of stone can be found on the slightly higher terraces above the bedrock. What high river floods haven't swept away was embedded silts or piled up against the rise to the next terrace in waste piles of split and shaped material. 

Geological map courtesy of the Susquehanna River Basin Commission. 

The lifespan of an old river can be read in its terraces and the Susquehanna has been much studied for these broad shelves of rock that step-down to the level of the river today. They tell us that the river was able to scour its way down through the bedrock at a slightly faster pace than the land was rising around it as North Africa crunched into North America.  The Susquehanna does not meander like many western rivers or rivers of the coastal plain. Instead it juts this way and that, following along the folds and fault lines of metamorphic rock through the LSRB. It has carved deep, narrow channels called the Susquehanna Deeps much studied by geologists during the dam building at Holtwood in the early 1900s. There are six Deeps located in the Susquehanna Gorge that runs from Turkey Hill to Holtwood, about ten miles of canyon-like narrow terraces and steep stream-cut hills.  

Bluestem Goldenrod, Solidago casesia

White Turtlehead, Chelona glabra

We compared the plant communities just above the scour line to the open bedrock terrace. Turtlehead and Goldenrod enliven  edge communities and all there is deep green and flowery finery. Three steep steps down to the bedrock zone, however, we walk out into grassland interspersed with tough perennials. There are no woody shrubs or trees except on slightly higher outcrops that offer crevices for deep rooting, but even these trees are stunted, twisted, gnarled from repeated flooding.

Late Boneset, Eupatorium serotinum

Kenz explores the scour line that marks the transition to the next terrace.

Slender False Foxglove, Agalnis tenufloia

We walked way out on the bedrock terrace as far as the spits of rock would allow. Great Egrets lifted from the rocks beyond the wide channel. They are passing through on fall migration now, though a few may stay as long as the fishing is good and ice doesn't seal over the tadpole and frog ponds. We were out there for an hour, late in the day and as the warm air aloft cooled with the setting sun hundreds of migrating Turkey Vultures spun round and round on sinking air to find night roosts along the river. Some trees were heavy with them while others simply congregated on the warm bedrock. Taking a cue from rock-hopping vultures, I laid down on the schist and felt the warmth radiating up. Not a bad place to stay the night.

Descending Turkey Vultures.

As day turned to dusk we clambered back to the edge of the terrace and climbed through a darkening woods to find the trail. We were happy to find a large clump of Violet-toothed Polypore on a fallen tree and watched as daylight-purple rims of this bracket fungi transformed into glowing bioluminescence edges in the twilight woods. 

Violet-toothed Polypore, Trichaptum biforme

Looking back at the bedrock terrace from a high point it was easy to see how the river has incised channels along fractured zones of bedrock. These broad channels contain fish, often trapped all winter until high water comes again to flush them out. These elongated channel ponds will soon serve as important winter feeding grounds for Otter, Herons, and Eagles. They also important to geologists who come here to interpret the tectonic and climatic history of this river. In a larger sense, the bedrock terrace interprets the formation of the Eastern U.S. and Mid-Atlantic. See Notes below. 

Amos investigating Crayfish along the edge of an incised channel pond along a fault.

On the way back to the car we watched a Red Bat fly figure-8 loops and listened to a Barred Owl holler from the cliffs of a river hill above. Soon there will be a full moon and we may come back and walk River Road under moonlight and look out over the terraces under its light. 

Notes:

Reusser, Luke, et. al. "Late Pleistocene Bedrock Channel Incision of the Lower Susquehanna River at Holtwood Gorge, Pennsylvania."  Sourced from: Researchgate.net

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237696997_Late_Pleistocene_Bedrock_Channel_Incision_of_the_Lower_Susquehanna_River_Holtwood_Gorge_Pennsylvania

MD C&O Canal Section 3: McKees Beshers to Dickerson Conservation Area

For our next section of our C&O Towpath walk, my sister and I did the 14 mile stretch from McKees Beshers Wildlife Management Area to Dickerson Conservation Area in Montgomery County, MD. This section takes up a huge river bend in the Potomac. It was a fine misty day with a low cloud deck and a few sprinkles early on, but with beautiful filtered light we were snapping wildflower pictures and shots of fungi and forest the whole way. 

Large-Flowered Leafcup, Polymnia uvedalia - a nice find!

The canal was built on the bend and in places it hugs tall cliffs while the enormous flood plain spread out towards the Potomac. It was nice to find a hardy Large-Flowered Leafcup growing right on the canal. In New York this is a threatened plant and as far west as Wisconsin, it receives protection in many conservation areas. It's not rare here, but not common either. Its superpower is surviving floods along moody rivers, anchored tight with massive root systems, able to re-emerge even when buried beneath many feet of flood-built sandbar and silt bank. 

Rough Horsetail, Equisetum hyemale - a "living fossil" 

Another alluvial survivor is Rough Horsetail, a plant that has survived since Devonian times, four-hundred million years ago, when it first appears in fossil records. This period was when much of the surrounding rust iron sands were deposited from eroding mountain ranges to form the thick red sandstone cliffs that rise up along the canal. We imagined the landscape of the Devonian where this first plant emerged - a drifting continent of the southern hemisphere, Gondwana, that would eventually drift north and become part of the great Supercontinent Pangea. Horsetails hung on for the ride and have survived eons of change. 

A very young tree bank hedge - roots will knit a vulnerable bank in place. 

A mature tree hedgerow to shade the path and anchor the rise. 

Along the towpath (thank you Justice William O. Douglas) trees grow purposefully along the canal. It's hard to know which were planted by nature and which were planted (or protected) by people long ago to serve the needs of canal operations. Either way, the utility of trees in the ancient art of hedge building for farming, fencing, and road support, the park service approach to managing them seems to be paying heed to this old tradition. There were many tagged and flagged trees along the way marked for care, removal, or trimming and there was a stretch of new tree-hedge that will serve to hold banks in place as the open hedge matures. It's great insurance against the damaging floods here.  

Smooth Blue Aster - a fall beauty.

Fall Phlox, Phlox paniculata 

Gold Moth cat, Basilodes pepita - in a "you can't see me" head tuck 

Flooding is part of the annual cycle of the life of a Piedmont river. There have been some real whoppers in my lifetime here on the Susquehanna and the general store/cafe at White's Ferry was sure to remind us that the biggest and most destructive floods of the Mid-Atlantic have happened within living memory. I remember like it was yesterday when Tropical Storm Agnes dropped feet of rain in our area of Southern PA/ Northern MD in 1972. Our family was stranded in the creek valley where we lived, surrounded by a lake of water. A mother Bobcat and her kittens took shelter in our basement and floated happily around my father's office on a sofa cushion until the flood subsided. A National Guard helicopter dropped food, emergency supplies and even the U.S. Mail (!). In this big bend of the Potomac, floods can be catastrophic particularly where people have built things like towns, canals, homes. But it was the Civil War that turned Edwards Ferry and Whites Ferry canal towns into militarized war zones caused both canal towns to decline and floods after the war swept what remained downstream.   

The developed floodplain often included ferry crossings and fords. 

The cycle of flood and saturated soils has been critical to such rich plant and animal life of the flood plain. But as easily as floods can deposit nutrient rich materials within these woods, they can just as easily remove them. Flood scouring creates interior ponds that fill with amphibian eggs and calling frogs. River boulders and large cobble are piled against enormous Sycamores that are more than able to bear the force and weight of moving water. Floods also carry seeds in and out, some native and others alien, invasive weeds. It seems this was a good year for Japanese Hops on the river bank. Ouch.

Wingstem, Actinomeris alterniflora, tall stems and floppy flowers.

Dryad's Saddle Cerioporus squamosus, a large 15" bracket fungi, holding water.

Wood Ear Fungus - a little flabby.

We assisted a Box Turtle, a heavy and healthy female, across a road and watched a Black Rat Snake explore a tree along the path. There were dozens of Painted Turtles hauled out on logs in the canal, their shells covered in pond weed and algae looking like great lumps of moss with heads. Frogs chirped and growled and barked and bellowed from the floodplain and the watered sections of canal and interior scour ponds, an amphibian paradise. 

Black Rat Snake, 4' and curious.

This old Maple shaded the lockhouse in the 1800s at Lock 26

Because a flood plain is a risky place to put a business or home and because there is fierce development that threatens to gobble up the natural heritage of Montgomery County, this river corridor is protected conservation land. For now this landscape serves as a natural commons, blending historic preservation with natural history and providing people with quiet sanctuary of protected lands - especially in these strange times. The idea of an ecological commons along this river is not new, however, as environmental historian James Rice argues in his book Nature and History of the Potomac Country (2009). I'll review that book for our next section hike and post it here.   

The Great Bend section. 

Notes:

A great collection of pictures of the old maple at Lock 26 https://www.canaltrust.org/discoveryarea/lock-26/

James Rice. Nature and History in the Potomac Country: From Hunter-Gatherers to the Age of Jefferson. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.