Old Rag Mountain

1. Old Rag from the road

2. a Marbled Orb Weaver (check out the horned face on his back & his trendy striped legs)

3. Virginia really is for lovers (good call Sarah!)

4.Let's be honest: a puny upper body strength girl like me could never pose as Atlas, but look at the view!

So let me preface this post by saying that this was a first time experience for me in mountain climbing... both in reaching a summit AND in actual rock climbing. This shouldn't come as much of a surprise to most of you, but before the climbing part actually came into play, I thought I was only going to be experiencing the summit portion. Ha, silly me... 

So husband suggests we tackle Old Rag Mountain Saturday morning and preps me for increasingly cooler temperatures and 5 hours of hiking, but slyly leaves out the part about rocks. Crafty, husmate, crafty. After parking our car in a random lot in the middle of nowhere, VA, we follow the half mile road to the start of the trail. We stop for a moment at the trail map, and I notice nothing out of the ordinary with the exception of this small mention of misplaced boulders due to erosion? Eh, that doesn't cause me to even guess what's coming (I can be really naive sometimes), so we start the hike up. 

We randomly come across the crazy colorful spider, the tree for lovers, and even a few pieces of fallen pine that reminded us of the coming Christmas holidays. Things are going swell until we reach nothing but rock, and I overhear this mom telling her daughter that they best turn around because she doesn't think they'll be able to finish the hike... That definitely perked up my ears. So here I am thinking that we're very near the summit... oh how I was wrong. 

5. Just following the blue stripes

6. Before I started testing my rock climbing skills

7. Anybody surprised that husband is downing this platypus of water? 

8. One of the many boulders we got to walk under/over/around

This is about when husmate (husband + roommate = husmate) tells wifey that the remainder of the hike to the summit involves rock climbing and that the summit is still about a mile away. I have to give him credit: he knew that I would fret over this portion the whole way up if he had told me beforehand, so kudos to him. Ha! About a fourth of the way into this alternating climbing and waiting period (the trail is so narrow and the hike so popular that you get to wait in Disney-like lines for your turn to go), I turn to husband and say "They really should tell people that this hike isn't for the faint of heart" to which he replies "They do... I just didn't tell you." Cleverrr... At least my panting is now justified. 

So after about four summit fake outs on my part ("Husband is this it?" "No, not yet... See that even higher point? That's where we're headed"), we finally make it to the summit. The past few hours have started to make me feel 20 years older (hello hamstrings! I hear ya, I hear ya), but it was so fun! However, let me clarify: I was not going back the way we came as I was fairly certain that I might have rolled off the mountain due to some of the rocks being so smooth. So after a light lunch on top of our rock, we escaped the crazies and hiked back down a longer and less adventurous way to our car. 

9. The view from the REAL summit

10. Both excited to have finally found it!

11. Our reactions from some of the things we saw/heard from other hikers

12. Leftovers for dinner

This side of the mountain cut down on the number of hikers significantly (probably because it was double the length) which finally allowed us to have some pretty fun conversations (much better than wifey panting up the mountain while husband was totally fine during the first half...). I think one of my favorite things that husband said during this part was sharing his excitement over potentially going to sleep at 8:30. Old man wannabe, but so adorable all the same. 

We eventually started to follow a brook back to the beginning of the circuit, which made for a nice change from all the dead leaves. Plus since all the loud and annoying groups decided to be dare devils and return from whence they came, we got to see and wait on two sweet deer to cross the trail as they looked for food.

And speaking of food, since we hiked almost nine miles and burned off over a day's worth of calories, we were totally justified in ordering a Papa John's pizza on the way home as our aching muscles began to talk to us. Right? Right? Right. Thanks for agreeing with us. At least we enacted the reduce, reuse, recycle bit by drinking the rest of our hiking water at dinner rather than wasting it. We're so granola. 

Luray Caverns

Last post I shared about our short little day hike in Shenandoah, but to finish off the day, let's go back to that morning when we went to explore the Luray Caverns (I know- I realize that I posted about the afternoon before the morning... What can I say? I work backwards sometimes). 

So to give a little background, the last time I ventured into a cave was during a third grade field trip to Desoto Caverns in the great state of Alabama (please note I refrained from using the phrase "sweet home Alabama." Growing up with that song being played at every.single.dance until you're into your 20's means that you tire of the phrase at the age of, oh, fifteen). What I remember of that trip was learning the cutesy way of distinguishing stalagmite and stalactite (some things never leave you, usually the ones that aren't useful for everyday life), being told that you should always carry a flashlight in a cavern unless you're feeling courageously stupid, and getting lost in an outdoor maze and climbing under the fences so that I wouldn't get left. Quite the adventure for a bookworm third grader whose glasses took up half of her face.

In comparison to the memories of that trip, the Luray Caverns are HUGE. Like I thought it was kind of ridiculous at the start what we were paying to see, but after the hour long walk through the massive underground world, I'd say the trip was worth it. Now that I have an inkling of what a cubic inch is and how long time can be (neither of which you understand in the third grade), it's incredible that that it takes 120 years to form one cubic inch of new deposits. I mean good grief. The tour guides at Luray estimate that with the formations they have, Luray began forming a loooooong time ago. Like 400,000,000 years ago. Hello dinosaurs, how's life up in the Shenandoahs? That's swell.

I think my favorite part of the Luray story was how it was founded: Some men discovered a sinkhole in the late 1870's, and like all men would, decided to lower one of their friends into the sinkhole armed with a candle. Excuse me, what? Yes, a candle. So the guy with the candle noticed the depth of the caverns and survived the descent, and Luray has since become one of the most visited caverns in the world. Many thanks to the courage of the guy with the candle.

Anybody else think this would be a cool place for an Avett concert?

The two neat things about Luray:

1. There was a electronics scientist who worked for the Pentagon that designed and created a stalacpipe organ, which plays a four-keyboard console by using stalactites instead of pipes. It took him almost 40 years to perfect all the notes (only two were perfect from the start, the rest were sanded until he was satisfied) and install 5 miles worth of wiring to connect them all. Nerdy, but seriously cool.

2. They have a wishing well at the end that you can throw in whatever change you have in your pocket and all the donations at the end of the year goes to a charity. The extraordinary part is that in the heat of some sort of argument, more than one soon-to-be bride has thrown in her engagement ring and called off her wedding at that spot. Crazy people. And they didn't want their rings back. Now, that's some kind of charitable donation. Hmm, I wonder if it's tax deductible?

The guides say this is several feet deep of change... Woah.

And just FYI, Luray has a garden maze of hedges. I declined to participate. Rolling under fences is so much easier than crawling through pointy hedges.

P.S. Sorry for the grainy pictures, but it's just a teensy bit dark down in the underground...

Shenandoah Skyline & Whiteoak Canyon Falls

First, let me paint you a picture as to how this husband-wife team makes decisions regarding the upcoming weekend plans... Unless it's a long weekend (which thankfully involves pre-planning), Friday afternoon or sometimes Saturday morning will roll around and we haven't even contemplated what our Saturday will hold. Call us procrastinators a spontaneous bunch... Living life on the edge here folks.

Well several weekends back, husband discovered that the upcoming weekend was one of the rare get-past-the-guards-free-of-charge days in the Shenandoah National Park, so it seemed only natural that we would spend our Saturday in the great outdoors. We settled upon the Whiteoak Canyon Falls trail, and as usual the trail did not disappoint when it came to beauty. The leaves were at the beginning stages of changing colors, and everything was just beautiful! I can't imagine how pretty it must be now that the leaves have changed around here...

As if you couldn't guess, husband is the outdoors enthusiast of the two of us, and I'm fairly new to the whole hiking thing, so I can occasionally get bored on a trail (I have to be honest). But this trail followed a babbling brook the whole time (and for some reason I found that to be entertaining?), so I was as happy as a lark. That and I can't stand doing outdoorsy things when it's hot as blue blazes outside, so I thoroughly enjoyed the fall temperatures in the 50's that day. Ah, fall. Thank you for understanding me.

Oh, and the view? I'd say it was worth it. We chose to see the smaller of the two falls that day since we were crunched for time after visiting the Luray Caverns. And in case you were wondering, I did actually say "aww, look it's a heart!" without any sense of sarcasm in my voice or in my thoughts. See, I'm maturing a little. There's hope for us all.