Wandering in the Mountains of West Virginia

After the idyllic River Farm perched on Virginia’s Clinch River, we felt ready to tackle the mountains of West Virginia – or as Jim said, West “God Damn” Virginia. West Virginia has the distinction of being the only state to switch from the Confederacy to the Union during the Civil War, breaking away from Virginia to do so. One of the many state parks we visited was a testimony to the battles at Droop Mountain where the Confederates were expelled from the new state, at the cost of many hundreds of lives.

Our first stop was at Pipestem State Park, more a resort and major conference center than most of the state parks we have visited. Set on the edge of the Bluestone Gorge, we were attracted by the lovely woodsy cabins and the miles of hiking trails. For some strange reason April is emphatically off-season, and we felt like we had this enormous park to ourselves.

One of the major attractions of this park is tramway that takes people from the rim to the Bluestone River at the bottom of the Gorge. But the tramway doesn’t even begin to run until the middle of May. When we told the folks at the front desk that we intended to take the four-mile to the bottom, they reacted with horror and disbelief. Apparently this sort of excursion is not something that locals consider, and the rates of obesity and diabetes in these remote West Virginia hollows tend to validate that conclusion. Nonetheless we had a splendid day exploring the trail and its various spurs, and emerged from the gorge a little tuckered but unscathed.

After several days exploring the southern slice of West Virginia, we ventured into the “real” mountains of the Monongehela National Forest, traveling on sketchy roads that vied with each other in packing in the most hairpin turns per mile, while going steeply up and over mountains before plunging into improbably remote valleys. Cell phone coverage was non-existent, and we even passed that most extreme test s of true rurality: we could put both the FM and the AM dial in seek mode, and never come up with a radio station.

The other thing we discovered was that there were very few places to stay, and even fewer to eat. After rejecting a few motels that came right out of Deliverance, we ended up at Yokum’s, which had the advantage of being opposite some magnificent quartzite cliffs called Seneca Rocks. The only problems with this solution were that a number of very large men burst into our room several times since the owner had booked more than one party into the same room – the itinerant workmen were kind enough to move to the room next door; and the one restaurant we visited was so bad that the rib’ eye steak I ordered would have made a better shoe than a meal. It was an experience.

But the next day we got to climb to the top of Seneca Rock. Unlike the climbers from the mountaineering guide service next door, we donned neither helmet nor harness as we chose to take the trail to near the top. An easy scramble put us on top of the northern peak (on the left below), while cries of “belay on!) echoed from around the corner.

With Seneca Rocks under our belts, as it were, we spent our last night in the mountains at another delightful state park, high in expansive mountain valley (Canaan) that even had a ski area with a little snow left. Our main impression of the mountains was their soft beauty, and their relative isolation. It seems inconceivable that as I write this we are only 3 ½ hours by car from Washington, D.C. We have traveled into a dramatic fold in the landscape, and a major warp in the fabric of time.