Roaring Plains West Wilderness Area, Monongahela National Forest

                                       

I'd been eyeing a certain "wilderness area" adjacent to the famous Dolly Sods Wilderness in West Virginia.  It's called the Roaring Plains West Wilderness Area.  At 6,792 acres, it's no small place.  But Roaring Plains is dwarfed by its more popular neighbor to the north.  There are only a few trails in the RPW, but there are also views like this one, which is very far from the madding crowds of the Sods--and pretty hard to find.  A view like this is worth a four-hour hike on uncertain trails--unmapped and unmarked.  Fortunately, my companion downloaded the All Trails app, otherwise we might not have found the overgrown pathways leading out to this beautiful and unvisited quadrant of the forest.  I've rarely taken a photo that I loved as much as this one...

Of course, I'm always looking for uncrowded places.  I also frequently choose second best over the best--for the mere fact that I don't want to share.  That's to say, I like to find the beauty in things that I can have largely to myself.  Take Philadelphia for example.  It's a beautiful, modern city where historic buildings and old streets lie hidden in the shade of gleaming glass towers.  If it weren't 90 miles from New York City, it would be famous and noteworthy in its own right.  But people often push past Philly en route to its more glamorous neighbor, and they miss out on all it has to offer just because there's a city nearby that has more.  It's too bad.  I think of the Roaring Plains West Wilderness Area as the Philly to the Sods' New York.  You rarely see more than a handful of cars parked along the trailhead parking areas to get into the RPW.  The Sods?  They could build a parking garage on that side of the road!  There are three trails going into the Roaring Plains.  The South Prong Trail is like walking through a muddy, misty garden.

Lady slippers, pink mountain laurel, and spruce trees "flagged" by constant wind--these all stand over broad fields of gray boulders and mountain streams and pools.  The wind blows fast and hard out over this plateau, giving it the evil-sounding moniker "Roaring Plains."  There's also a Roaring Plains East and a Roaring Plains North, which are not within the bounds of the Wilderness Area.  Together with the adjacent Flatrock Plains, this is the highest plateau in the Eastern United States--ranging from 2,300 to 4,700 feet above sea level.

If you compare the RPW to the Sods, it's no wonder few people ever bother to venture into it.  The Sods is bigger, has a more diverse array of topographies and flora, and it has glorious sweeping vistas out over grassy meadows and distant hills.  In the Sods, Red Creek and its tributaries meander among enormous, scenic rocks.  By contrast, the RPW is mostly just laurel and rhododendron thickets with muddy, easy-to-lose trails.  It feels almost...monotonous in places.  But!  But...if you get out away from the official trails and onto the unofficial and unmarked trails, you get views like this--our first grand vista on the Hidden Passage Trail.  There's a dry campsite here.  You'd have to pack in a lot of water.

This is where the pipeline swath makes the leap out over the edge of the Allegheny Front.  I don't know why there are no official trails out to this most stunningly beautiful part of the wilderness area!  You have to find information on YouTube and outdated websites.  We left the South Prong Trail in the Monongahela National Forest and took a narrow little side trail, frequently overgrown and entirely unmarked, a few miles out here to this marvelous place.

If you stick only to the official trails that run through the Roaring Plains, you'll have a nice long walk among thickets and boulders.  You might see some handsome birds and hear woodthrushes in the evening.  If you come at the right time of year, there will be wildflowers, and the land will be fragrant and blooming in pink and white.  It'll be nice.  But better by far to find one of the unofficial trails that will take you to the undiscovered glories of the rim.  If nothing else, you could even just walk down Forest Road 70 to the place where it meets the pipeline swath.  Then turn left and walk southeast on the pipeline toward the great rim of the Allegheny Front.  You'll be rewarded with magnificent views of mountainous grandeur.

This is the pipeline swath where the Hidden Passage joins it.  See where it disappears over the lip of the valley's steep wall on the horizon?  That's where you wanna be!  We chose a series of unmapped paths because they follow the rim and provide excellent panoramas of the world below.  Actually, one of the trails we did not have time to discover in the RPW is called the Flatrock Run Trail.  It runs north down a very steep descent known as "the sliding board," where views out over the Sods are said to be excellent.  Maybe next time.

This and the photo at the top of this post are among the best I've ever taken.  See how the entire view lies in folds.  The clouds above are laid out in grand, dramatic folds.  The hills too appear almost like pleats in a skirt.  The furthest mountains are the bluest, and the shades of blue grow waterier as the distance increases.  Finally, the foreground too is folded in enormous rocks.  This is the view from the so-called Canyon Rim Trail--which you can find online but not on any maps.  We took the Canyon Rim Trail to a very overgrown connector trail known as the Tee Pee Trail, which led in turn to the official Roaring Plains Trail.  I loved having this vast wilderness to ourselves

The pipeline provides an easy roadway, though it is steep and acts as a sort of rain gully in places.  It runs perfectly straight through those dark, Appalachian evergreen forests, crowded down in the understory with wild flowering bushes.

We arrived at about 11:00am on Sunday and planned to stay till Thursday morning, but my backpacking friend had a sharp pain in his shoulder that grew increasingly worse the longer we were here.  On top of that, he started to develop welts on the same shoulder and assumed it was from a bug bite.  This is the misty wilderness garden along the South Prong Trail as we headed home early--on Tuesday--after one full day and two half-days in the RPW.

Turned out he had BOTH shingles and a cervical sprain--aka, "whiplash"--the latter from mountain biking.  Poor guy was in so much pain we ditched our plans, and I took him straight to the ER as soon as we got back to Pittsburgh.

Take Forest Road 19 up the mountainside.  This road runs along the southern length of Dolly Sods.  You park at the trailhead for the South Prong Trail, which is shortly before the picnic area.  Take the South Prong through the misty gardens of the upland Monongahela National Forest.  You can camp anywhere here--it's public land--but you're supposed to stay out of view of the trail.  I saw only a single campsite along the South Prong, which was strange.  Just across the road in the Sods, you find them all over the place.  Here's the first view we got out over the Allegheny Front, from a dry campsite.  

To find the Hidden Passage Trail, I'd estimate that you go just short of two miles on the South Prong.  Then look for side trails off to your left.  If you arrive at Forest Road 70 you've gone too far; turn around.  There are two of them, and they lead to pleasant, remote campsites along the brook.  Beyond these campsites, the unmarked trails lead on further into the woods and to a confusing network of paths.  All of these paths end up converging (I think and hope) onto an overgrown and unmaintained "unofficial" trail commonly known as the Hidden Passage.  Some YouTubers call it the Jonathan Jessup Trail--after a photographer who came out this way to take pictures many years ago.

The Hidden Passage and many of the other unofficial trails are marked only by rock "cairns," little human-made stone piles which are meant to show the way.  But the cairns are inconsistent and frequently missing.  The Hidden Passage takes you to the pipeline beyond which lies the Roaring Plains West Wilderness Area.  This was the view from our campsite on Tuesday morning after a rainy start to the day.  It was such a joy to lie on my hammock with the rain coming down hard on the roof, napping into the late morning.

This is the kind of thing you see along the South Prong Trail.  It's pretty in a haunting sort of way.  Boulders, wildflowers, grand spruce trees, all veiled in a ghostly mist.  This trail has no vistas, really--aside from a very small one that looks off to your right, in the opposite direction away from the great rim that is obscured by trees to your left.  The marvelous views only start after you exit the South Prong and the Hidden Passage begins hugging the rim of the Allegheny Front.  

Then views like this are commonplace.

And this.  Just look at the beauty of this scene...

The flanks of the wooded hills in the foreground are also part of the Roaring Plains West Wilderness Area, but there are no trails of any kind there--official or unofficial, marked or unmarked.  Somewhere very far out in that direction there is a thing called the Mount Porte Crayon Nature Preserve.  It's the 6th highest mountain in the state.  Hikers are strongly cautioned not to go there unless they are skilled with a map and compass--which I am not.

This rocky meadow was just at the place where the pipeline swath goes over the steep edge of the Allegheny Front.  Click on this photo to enlarge it.  See the first mountain in the near distance?  It's got white, stony cliffs all along its crest.  That's a geographic feature known as North Fork Mountain, which has a 23-mile trail running along its ridgeline.  The problem with that trail is that there are no reliable water sources up there.  Otherwise it could be my next adventure!  On our way up Forest Road 19 in my little plastic Kia, we came across a lady and her teenage daughter trying to push their Cadillac SUV out of the ditch on the side of the road.  The lady was a pediatrician from Charleston, West Virginia, with the deepest southern accent.  She'd run the car off the road trying to avoid sharp rocks.  We only succeeded at pushing her deeper into the muddy ditch.  Another West Virginian--this one a medical doctor too, a PCP--happened along in a big Ram Truck, and he tried to pull her out with a cable.  Like us, he only succeeded at getting her more deeply stuck.  When we came back down the mountain on our way home, the Cadillac SUV was gone, but the muddied and torn up road bore witness to the events that took place there.  I love it when West Virginians speak with southern accents.  It makes me feel so right about things.... (I’ve been saying for years that it’s a southern state because of Stonewall Jackson and the presence of cornbread…and the usually-gentle southern drawl, like Jody Foster in “Silence of the Lambs.”)