Chimney Top and North Fork Mountain, West Virginia

This place is magnificent.  I got there on a foggy, wet day.  I checked the forecast beforehand and knew that it would be rainy and cloudy, but I didn't care.  The moment was finally upon me to visit the wondrous North Fork Mountain, and I didn't care if I got wet doing it.  This is a view from the lower reaches of the ridgeline.  

Of course, that kind of resolve is fine when you're sitting in your living room in Pittsburgh and looking at photos of North Fork Mountain online.  Actually, I'd encourage you to do that!  My photos are all too misty to capture the real magic of this place.  

I got about halfway up the mountain and it began to sprinkle, so I set up camp before reaching the vistas, not knowing that this view out over the valley of the South Fork of the Potomac River was within a quarter mile.  My plan was to have a dry base camp from which I could spend the rest of the day and much of the next exploring the rocky ridge.

Seen from afar--as from Roaring Plains--North Fork Mountain is unique because it has a series of large stone cliffs all along its western summit.  Here I am on top of those cliffs, and they are worth the hike.  It's about three miles from the small parking area on Smoke Hole Road, up the North Fork Mountain Trail--with close to 2,000 foot elevation gain--to the summit at a place called Chimney Top.

Chimney Top is a popular destination because of its enormous and unusual rock formations.  It's accessed by an unmarked side trail that you can't miss because it's worn just about as much as the main trail that it branches off from.

See the little white forms in the misty valley far below?  Those are houses on a hillside just above the Potomac.

It's hard to tell in this photo just how large these rocks are.  They're gargantuan.  I can't be sure because of the clouds, but I think you'd be looking in the direction of Dolly Sods in this shot.

There were scary little tunnels among these great rocks, and narrow ledges, and slippery-looking places where I'm sure more adventurous folk than I might venture.

I met two hikers on the way back down to my camp who told me this place was called Chimney Top.  I've since claimed it on my Peakery page, but since climbing Mt. Columbia, none of these Eastern summits seems like much.  "Comparison is the thief of joy."

Now for the strange part of my story... You know I don't scare easy, right?  I mean, I've spent the night alone in some dark and eerie places and had myself a great old time.  The forest causes you to confront whatever you're carrying around with you, and if it's fear, then it's fear you'll find among the trees.  I don't find fear.  I find beauty, and solitude, and a spiritual haven.

But my camp on North Fork Mountain just felt spooky.  When I first got to the trailhead, there was a haunted-looking guy hanging out there.  Something about his demeanor and face just felt unsavory.  He wouldn't look at me, wouldn't reply when I greeted him, but then as I was leaving to go up the mountain, I saw him staring with a spooky, intense look on his face.  I set up camp and went on up to Chimney Top and never thought about the guy again...until I saw him coming down the mountain past my campsite.  (I almost always make camp in a place invisible from the trail, but like I said, it had started to rain, so I hastily set up in the first spot I saw.)

I don't know at what point he passed me on his way up the mountain, or if he went past silently as I was setting up camp.  But it made me a little uneasy to know that the guy who gave me that weird look knew where I was camping.  I tried to put it out of my mind and went about my nightly trail rituals.  I took some books and maps and went back to one of the nearer overlooks, but there was not much to see with all the fog.  I came back and built a beautiful fire despite the rain.  But I couldn't quiet the nagging unease about my campsite, and the feeling in the woods in that place, and the weird look that scary-looking guy had given me.  Then at about 9:00pm I got an overwhelming urge to break camp and get the hell out of there, which I did.  "Trust your instincts," I told myself.  "Unless you have good reason not to, you should always trust your instincts."  Never before in all my hiking life have I done such a thing.  I stamped out the fire, threw my wet tent and all supplies into the pack willy-nilly, strapped my headlamp on and hiked two miles in the pitch dark down the mountain and to the car.  Then!  Then as I was coming upon the parking area at about 10pm, I saw through the trees another car pull in and park.  A man got out.  He was alone.  As I drew nearer I saw that it was him.  The creepy guy who gave me a weird vibe and a spooky look, the one who knew where my campsite was, he had come back at 10:00pm in the pouring rain.  Why?

I'm not saying he's the North Fork Mountain serial killer or that he had come back to murder me in my sleep...but I was sure glad to put a locked door between myself and the night.  I had seen two little motels on the outskirts of Petersburg, West Virginia, just 7 miles to the east.  Both of those were fully booked, but the kind old lady at the smaller one sent me to the Park Motel in the center of town--a very old hotel with narrow halls, rickety stairs, and bare bulbs overhead.  From the outside at night it looked kind of inviting, with hanging baskets of flowers on a broad front porch with many chairs.  Of 32 rooms, they had only six vacancies.  The motel business in Petersburg is hopping.  The eccentric old fellow at the front desk told me, "It's nothing fancy, but you'll get a clean room with a comfortable bed."  Not a bad deal for $60.

He was exactly right.  I almost thought I'd stepped into a broom closet.  A bare room with a bare bulb and no other light.  No reading lamps, no coffee pot, no carpet, no bedside table, no telephone, no internet, no curtain in the window--just a worn out venetian blind with three broken slats.  There was a small TV on a table, which I did not turn on, an old entertainment unit with a refrigerator in it, and an old kitchen chair.  The Park Motel in Petersburg, West Virginia, is basic at best.  But it was a fun discovery, and it was so much better than my campsite on North Fork Mountain.

Stonewall Jackson Monument in Clarksburg, WV

How has this statue escaped public scrutiny?  I’d long heard that it was here, in front of the Harrison County Courthouse in Clarksburg, West Virginia—exactly 100 miles south of Pittsburgh.  But I found myself in the area recently and decided to see for myself.  Jackson was a native of this area and died shortly before this part of old Virginia seceded  from Eastern Virginia to join the Union.  Not only is the Confederate general unapologetically celebrated in the precincts of a government building, but someone has recently placed a wreath of flowers at the foot of the monument.  Clarksburg was a strange place.  They’ve also got the slogan “In God We Trust” on their police cruisers and marble tablets made to look like the Ten Commandments on the steps of the courthouse.  But it’s open to interpretation because the written text of the commandments is not included, just the Latin numerals 1 - 5 on one side and 6 - 10 on the other.  Just as well.  Most people who clamor to have the Ten Commandments on our public spaces couldn’t name three of them.

 

More Scenes from Mt. Columbia, Colorado

As it turns out, Mt. Columbia will remain my only 14er--at least for the foreseeable future.  Though my time here in Colorado has been spectacular, I've met fewer goals here than I'd anticipated.  It was always meant to be a writing retreat more than a hiking retreat, and now it draws to a close.  Here are the rest of the photos I took from the top of Mt. Columbia and a few from below.

Here is Mt. Columbia from afar--from the Collegiate Peaks Overlook in the San Isabel National Forest.  Mt. Harvard and Mt. Yale do indeed cut finer forms, it's true.  Still, it's a hell of a mountain.

The wildflowers on the mountainsides were so delicate and fragrant beneath the summer sun.

There are alpine biomes up there that change rapidly as you ascend and descend.  

I think these are the little plants that smelled so strongly like cannabis.

I believe this is the shoulder--or "the traverse"--that connects Mt. Harvard with Mt. Columbia, making it possible and appealing to most peakbaggers to collect both mountaintops in one long trek.

Click on this photo to enlarge it.  Here you see Amy & Austin--which is the young couple with whom I shared much of the ascent--as well as another fellow who approached on "the traverse" from Mt. Harvard and claimed both peaks in one long hike.  The friend he was traveling with is not visible in this photo, but the mountaintop marmot is!  See him and all the others gazing down at my slow ascent.

I like the way the trail in the foreground of this photo runs along the edge of a nasty drop.  This is the long descent, which took me far longer than it took all my young fellow climbers.  As I recovered from this descent, I told myself, "No more 14ers!"  The very next day, I was busy researching 14ers I could do with my somewhat unadventurous teenage daughters.  I even preemptively purchased postcards of Mt. Sherman, Huron Peak, and Mt. Belford--thinking I'd do the first with my kids and the other two by myself.  But alas.  Now I've got some expensive postcards of mountains I've never laid eye or foot on.  Where does the time go?

Lower down on the mountainside, the trail runs like this through vast fields of stones.  See how the same trail that appears in the foreground also snakes along the shaded mountainside in the center of the photo?  Such a joy it's been to explore a bit of these mountains.