Roaring Plains Wilderness

The Roaring Plains Wilderness is so named because the winds are forever roaring over its boulder fields, which definitely do not pass as "plains" in my world.  Come to think of it, while we were there, the wind did more murmuring than roaring.  But the only name worse than "Whispering Plains" is "Murmuring Plains," so "Roaring Plains" it is--even if both "roaring" and "plains" are misnomers.  This is the view from our first campsite, far, far off the trails in the Roaring Plains Wilderness and along the Allegheny Front.

The Allegheny Front is a long cliff or "escarpment" that divides two separate provinces of the Appalachian Mountains in this part of the country.  It is very much a sheer cliff here in West Virginia, where the topography is so much more dramatic than in Maryland or Pennsylvania.

My backpacking companion is a school teacher, and he was returning to school the day after we returned from the backpacking trip.  For that reason, he was unusually distracted and silent on this otherwise excellent trek, where we covered exactly 21 very difficult miles in three days.  

I'm not sure how many times I've been to Roaring Plains.  At least three.  In June of 2022, I came with this same guy, and we had to cut the trip short because he got shingles.  (Wimp!)  Then I came back alone in August of 2022 for a few days of misty solitude.  Then there was this trip.  But wasn't there another one?  Each time here offered a very different experience of the exact same place.  This time around, the Roaring Plains were...ominous, lonely, desiccated and more beautiful than ever.  It was very strange to see this place under a full-blown drought.

No official trails lead to the loveliest parts of this wilderness area.  I suppose the Forest Service is trying to protect this place from the same kind of traffic that Dolly Sods Wilderness experiences.  The Sods are very nearby and so overrun with visitors that I'm loath to go back.  But in three days here at the Roaring Plains, we saw not another soul.  

It is truly an odd place.  You almost never hear the birds singing here.  You see birds, but they're likely to hold their tongues.  (Birds DO have tongues, don't they?)  This time around there were clouds of black flies, which swarmed during the day.  The trees were losing their leaves from the dryness and the scorching heat.  Water was hard to come by.  Distances were hard to gauge.  And--believe this or not--Forest Road 70, which leads 3.4 miles from Forest Road 19 out to this remote wilderness, was uphill both ways.  Yeah, that's right.  I know it doesn't make sense, but it was uphill both ways.  Go walk it and tell me if I'm wrong.

The spruce trees, the gray rocks, the moody skies.  It's much like Dolly Sods except woodsier.

Don't go off-trail here without a trail app.  In fact, you might need a trail app even if you stay on the officially-designated trails, which are hard to find in places, and of which there are only two: The Roaring Plains Trail and the Flatrock Run Trail.  This pic and the one just below were taken from the boulder field along the old, unmarked and disused Rim Trail, which runs along the edge of the Allegheny Front escarpment.

Look at that view.  Scrambling over these rocks for a quarter mile or more was real work with 40 pound packs on our backs.  But you can't get these views from the officially-designated trails.  You've got to look for the old paths to this place--which I originally discovered years ago on an outdated website that called the abandoned trail system the "Jonathan Jessup Hidden Passage."

Occasional rock cairns mark the way as the neglected trail runs along the cliff's edge.  In many places, there's no other way to know if you're anywhere near the trail, which is invisible to the eye.

I took a photo from this spot back in June of 2022, which is how I knew that we were deeper into the wilderness area than either of us expected.  See how the spruce tree is "flagged" by the wind?  Winds come down so hard over these upland boulder fields that branches cannot grow on the southwest side of the trees.

The search for water became serious out here on the rim.  Water rarely springs from the ground along ridges in the Appalachians--or probably in any mountains, for that matter.  And there was a drought in full swing, to boot.  We ended up filling our water bottles from a suspicious-looking puddle that stood six tenths of a mile from our campsite.  We double-treated the water for bacteria and parasites.

It did rain hard the first night, but there was no way to capture the rain.  Wild blueberries and raspberries were ready for picking.  We came across a few apples, but they were not quite ripe, which didn't stop me.  See the rainbow with blueberries in the foreground?

On our second night, we camped at a spot where we had camped the last time we were here together.  Here's the view from that place.  It was a long trek back to the car on our last day, over five miles, during which my friend grew gloomier and gloomier.  That's probably why people don't really come to Roaring Plains.  It's just so remote.  Then?  Then it was back to the city for us, back to the lives we were trying to forget, if only briefly, back to the places we call home, back to the duties and demands of suburban, professional life.  The end of summer loomed large over this trek, suffusing it with a kind of gloom--which is too bad.  All seasons are beautiful and good--even the ones that come around too soon.  And though there's much in our lives that we did not choose and never would choose, still we do choose to keep going back to the things we were escaping.  I'm glad there are places like Roaring Plains where we can take vacations away from those other selves we become.  We carry the silence and the beauty of this place with us back to our quotidian lives, and it makes them better, slower, kinder, less callous.  It gifts them with the grace of wild things.