Last Adventure of the Year: The Dunkenbarger Loop

 

My relationship with Dolly Sods Wilderness Area, in the Monongahela National Forest of West Virginia, has gone a little something like this: 1) I can't wait to go discover that place!  I've heard so much about it.  2) That was great; I can't wait to go back.  3) Why's it always so wet, and why are there always so many people, and maybe I'll start going to lonelier spots--like Otter Creek.

But it's hard, in the end, to resist the call of the fall and the lure of those mountaintop meadows.  This time around, I decided to do another lesser-visited part of the Sods known as the Dunkenbarger Loop.  It has two merciless stream crossings that tend to cull the hiker herd.  And even on Thanksgiving weekend, I had to take off my boots, roll up my pant legs, and slog ever-so-slowly over slippery rocks and through the painfully frigid water.

Oh, but it was worth it to get to the other side, where at least I could be forgiven for believing that I had the entire planet to myself.  This is the hard-to-reach Dunkenbarger Run, a dark, silent, fast-moving stream with tea-colored water (from the hemlock tannins).  It was a perfect spot to aim for on that first night: exactly 3 miles from my car, solitary, and pretty.

I got to Dunkenbarger Run at 4:30pm, which in November, is just before dark.  I had to scuttle to collect firewood, hang the bear bag, and put up the tent before dark.  Ah, but look at the moon rising over my ephemeral woodland home.  

On the way toward another brutal stream crossing, the following day, I came across the large and lovely campsite that was described in my guidebook.  This one is on Big Stonecoal Run.  Look at all that flat terrain, that cushiony, pine-scented turf, the sandy brook in the near distance.

This is the view from under the pines at the large campsite on Big Stonecoal Run.  Sublime.

After another bitterly cold crossing of Red Creek, barefoot, I chanced upon this wonderful spot on a bluff overlooking the creek.  The rock formations on the distant ridgeline are the Rohrbaugh Overlook, described below in an earlier post.  This is the valley that was wrapped in gray mist when I was above.

Someone has put a lot of effort into making this campsite nice, and I imagine that they're regular visitors here.  Note the railing at the edge of the bluff--which guards against a 15 foot drop onto the rocky banks below.  Again, the moon is rising above my campsite.  See the reflection on the waters of the stream.

That night was COLD!  I've never been so cold at camp, not even when I woke up to 22 degrees in the Allegheny National Forest on my last birthday.  See how all things are covered in a thin layer of hard frost!  I woke up at about 3:30am and put on just about every piece of clothing I brought, and I still shivered in my bag.

It takes the sun a long time to reach these valleys, too.  The day got as warm as 52 degrees, but not until it had exacted its toll on the ill-prepared hiker.  In another sense, I was well prepared.  I remembered that the weekend of Thanksgiving is a very popular time for hunting deer, so I bought a fluorescent orange hoodie to make myself seen.  None of the other hikers I encountered were wearing orange, and I didn't hear a single gunshot.  Maybe because, although hunting is allowed at the Sods, motorized vehicles are not, and no one wants to drag a dead dear over this terrain.  Most hunters use those golf cart-like buggies known as "gators." 

This is ice in the Nalgene water bottle that I left outside the tent.

Churches of Rural West Virginia

 

The Rohrbaugh Overlook: The Uncrowded Dolly Sods

 

To tell the truth, I'd begun to get bored by the legendary Dolly Sods--with its boggy trails, its open meadows, its rocks, and its mud, mud, mud.  I don't think I've ever been to Dolly Sods when it didn't rain, and when the place was not crawling with people from DC.  But then I learned about the Rohrbaugh Overlook, and I decided to give Dolly Sods another chance--a solo trip this time.

Bonner Mountain Road is a far sight better to travel in on than Lanesville Road--which is little more than a glorified, 8-mile long driveway with blind curves and steep drops and no guardrails.  The scenery is prettier on Bonner Mountain Road, too.

This is an overlook that sits right beside Forest Road 75, the main route along the eastern edge of the Sods.  I'd always seen cars parked along this part of the forest road, but it never occurred to me to stop and investigate why.  But this time, I came armed with a hiking guide book for the Monongahela National Forest, and it said that there's an overlook here where you can see all the way into Virginia.  Funny the things you can miss with years of visits and revisits...

This time around, I left Pittsburgh on a Friday at about 1:00pm.  I knew that darkness would fall at about 5:30, so I scuttled as fast as I could and reached the Fisher Spring Run Trail by 4:05.  I had a little more than an hour of rapidly fading light to find a campsite, hang the bear bag, and get a fire going.  I didn't make it to the Rohrbaugh Overlook until Sunday...but look at the beauty of it!  

Strangely, this part of the Sods--unlike the more visited reaches to the north--had very few places to camp.  When I entered the forest at the trailhead, I assumed I'd reach a campsite within minutes.  That's just the way things are up in the northern parts--campsites lining every creek, under the eaves of every evergreen grove, on the edge of every meadow.  But there weren't any established campsites for a very long time on that trail.  (Forest etiquette in the Sods is to use existing sites rather than building new fire rings.)  I finally found a suitable spot on the far side of Fisher Spring Run--maybe a mile from my car, maybe a little further.

This is another view of the valley of Red Creek from the Rohrbaugh Overlook.  Even here, there are very few campsites--but note to future self: there are some sweet ones, and a nice little creek 7 minutes away.  If this view were located two miles further north, it would be crawling with hipsters from Arlington and Bethesda.  Here, in the lesser-visited parts of the Sods, I only encountered two other hikers in two days, a couple who camped together near the overlook.

The upland meadows here are manmade.  They were carved out of the forest decades ago to provide places for deer and bear and other woodland creatures to graze and find pasture.

The fog was so thick that I feared there would be no view at all from the overlook.  But in the end the mists added to the beauty of the place.

Under less hurried circumstances, I'd have searched longer for a campsite that I liked better--though I discovered the next day that I was fortunate to get the one I got, since there were no others for a very long time.  The first night was perfect.  It fell fast all around me.  The gloaming faded quickly to the west and a lovely quarter moon rose to replace it.  It was Dolly Sods in a way that I had never experienced it before: alone both at camp and on the trails and without all the signature moors that make the place so popular.  There was plenty of rain, but a rainy day in the woods is better than a sunny day under fluorescent lights. 

Sites Homestead, Seneca Rocks

This mountain homestead dates back to 1839, when all this land was still called Virginia.

Seneca Rocks, Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia

Seneca Rocks is a lovely spot, to be sure.  This is the Potomac River!  It's little more than a trickle up here, close to its source in the West Virginia mountains.

Seneca Rocks is well worth a visit, and it's a bit of trudge getting to the top, but it's not exactly what I'd call a hike.  The trail is wide and groomed.  There's a parking lot and a visitors' center at the trailhead.  Innumerable throngs of non-outdoorsy-types make the ascent.  The view is the well-deserved reward. 

From the observation deck at the top of the mountain.

The Potomac again.

These are Seneca Rocks as seen from the parking lot.  They look more like something you'd find out west than in West Virginia.

Otter Creek Wilderness, Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia

In the Monongahela National Forest, in West Virginia (my new haven), there's a famous "wild area" known as Dolly Sods.  It's a great place with lots of upland meadows and striking views out across the nearby highlands.  Most wildlands in the East are pretty but obscured by trees, and that's what makes the Sods so special.  But Dolly Sods can be crowded, and it's always very wet.  Nearby, there's another wilderness area known as Otter Creek.

I did the southern loop in the Otter Creek Wilderness back in October.  It was lovely, though unlike Dolly Sods, much beauty was concealed by the rapidly disrobing trees.  Here's a view from Shavers Mountain looking more or less east.

Long views are rare here, but so are other hikers!  This is a larger wilderness area than the Sods, much more wooded, and far less visited.  The guy who originally told me about Otter Creek said that it's got a bad reputation because people get lost there.  I didn't find the trails too confusing because I purchased Johnny Molloy's hiking book about the Mon NF.  Without that, I'd have gotten so lost...

My friend and I set up camp right on the banks of Otter Creek, and though we did see a few day hikers on Sunday afternoon when we arrived, we encountered not another soul for the next two days.  It was really beautiful

Strangely, we didn't hear any birds at Otter Creek either.  The place was almost eerie in its silences.  You could sometimes hear trucks grinding through their gears on the hilly, distant roadway.  But no owls at night, no thrushes in the evening, no birds at all.

Coyotes there were aplenty!  They howled like a legion of unclean spirits in the ink-black night.  My friend--despite being from Texas--had never heard coyotes before...and I admit that these ones sounded especially vicious.  It gave him a bit of a fright.

A View From the Top of the Adena Mound, Moundsville, West Virginia

Grave Creek Mound, in Moundsville, West Virginia, is a perfectly circular hill that is almost seven stories high.  The last time I was in town, I didn't take the time to stop in at the visitor's center or to climb the mound itself.  This time I did.

Actually, I had intended to go to the Archive of the Afterlife: the National Museum of the Paranormal, which is also here in Moundsville, but they were closed due to a mold issue in their building.

Nothing is known about the people who built this enormous mound 2,250 years ago.  It's thought that the mound was only one part of a much larger ceremonial sacred site.  Only a few bodies were found interred here.  The small museum that gives access to the mound also has artifacts from Moundsville's other minor claims to fame--the Marx Toy Factory (long since defunct) and some company that manufactured china.

And of course, the mound is directly across the street from Moundsville's other great tourist attraction, the West Virginia Penitentiary.  It really gives an otherwise typical Ohio Valley town a gothic and almost sinister appeal.

Meditations on the Northern Panhandle

The neglected country roads, barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass, and all in varying stages of disrepair--like this one, scarred, and re-tarred, and scabbed with potholes.  The vast green pastures that descend down from the rounded hillsides almost like elegant parkland.  The tall trees still just barely touched with the colors of the fall.  Summer is past, but not as far past down there as it is up here in Pittsburgh.  The cattle gathering by a stream in the golden autumn light.  The little white churches on hilltops surrounded by eroded memorials to the dead.  It's a charming place, and I've even looked at the price of land down there.  It's not my place, I know, and I'd never fit in with all the Trump chumps.  But I'm glad to know it's there.  I'm glad to know that I can always jump in the car and be there in less than an hour.  Besides, there's not much acreage for sale till you get as far south as Wetzel County, below the Mason Dixon.  I'd like to own some cheap, wooded land and try my hand at cob architecture.

There comes a time when you must grieve the lives you never got to live.  It's not that you're unhappy with the one you did get, only that you wonder what other things might have been.

The Mexico of Pittsburgh

Have you ever read a Cormac McCarthy novel?  His stuff is either maddeningly hard to understand, because he makes up words and never tells you what exactly he's talking about, or else it's brutally clear and written in sweet poetic prose.  It's got a dreamlike quality, but those dreams can become night terrors.  In his Border Trilogy, the main characters are always escaping across the border into the wild lands of Mexico, where they get chased by bandits, get into knife fights, shiver in the craggy mountain heights, and occasionally fall in love.  Mexico is nearby but so far away from the world they know.  I've decided that West Virginia is to Pittsburgh what Mexico is to a Cormac McCarthy novel: close-by but little-known, kind of foreign, a little dangerous, and adventurous, and romantic.  I mean, just look at this lonely farm sitting in its deep Appalachian valley.

Today I drove the back roads of Marshall County, the county at the base of the Northern Panhandle.  It was my destination of choice last week, too.  Actually, I do tend to obsess over things, and the question that's been holding my interest lately is whether someplace as close to Pittsburgh as Marshall County, West Virginia, can have a truly Southern feel to it.  Why?  Well, it's all because I visited a web site that treated that old 1955 film, The Night of the Hunter, as the quintessential "Southern Gothic Movie."  

The Night of the Hunter is set in Marshall County, West Virginia, and like a lot of Southern Gothic, it deals with religious hysteria and hypocrisy.  Another film from the 1970s that's based on a different novel by the same author, Davis Grubb, is Fools' Parade.  It was also set in Marshall County and filmed entirely on location.  I watched it for free on YouTube last night and decided to spend today wandering among the hollers of the place...again.

This is Graysville Calvary Methodist Church, a way out among the winding lanes and pastures of this place.  I have to say, it has a distinctly Southern appearance, doesn't it?  Even in far-flung places, most Northern country churches have a bit more decoration about the belfry, a bit more in the way of cornices, and capitals, and arches.  But more than that, there's an undefinable Appalachian quality to the scene.

The architecture is more Virginian than Pennsylvanian.

Fools' Parade  isn't a great movie, which is probably why you can watch it free and nobody cares.  It is Jimmy Stewart's last major motion picture (1971), and it also stars a 20-year old Kurt Russell.  It's mildly entertaining, especially after the first half hour or so, but it doesn't wrestle with any big issues or the questions of life.  It does, however, include a few glorious old farmhouses like this place--which sits just above the sensibly-named Fish Run.

Fracking?  Oh, there's fracking here aplenty.  Makes me CRAZY.

Another old Methodist church that has a Virginian air about it.

Fish Run is beautiful, shaded by sycamores, deep here, shallow there.  I wanted to sped a lot more time here than I had available to me. 

One of the stream's deeper pools.  In places it was just a rocky trickle.  In other place, like this, it looked deep enough to sink a car.  

What about Marshall County feels "Southern"?  The roads are narrow and without guardrails.  The roads have no shoulders, and in many, many places they're eroded away to almost nothing.  The buildings are mainly white clapboard with broad porches and a simpler kind of ornamentation than you see further north.  The barns are smaller and shaped differently from ours.  Whereas northern barns tend to have "mansard" style roofs, barns down here--and further south--are roughly shaped like chalets.  The churches, definitely the churches.  I have to say, the few folks I heard speaking did not sound like Southerners.  And I don't know whether they eat fried chicken livers.