This was the view from our campsite right on the Allegheny Front in the Roaring Plains West Wilderness, Monongahela National Forest, West Virginia. Apparently, there's also a Roaring Plains East, but even the Google can't tell you anything about it.
We spent three nights here, and let me tell you, Roaring Plains Wilderness has finally been discovered by the outside world! We must have come across 25 or 30 other backpackers and hikers in our time here. In previous visits, I've usually seen not a single stranger...one or two at most.
Ah, but it's October and a long weekend for many folks.
The spruce trees in this area are lovely and fragrant. Fall colors were well underway. Teaberries were ripe and minty on the forest floor.
To get here, we rode bikes 3 miles from Forest Road 19 to the entrance to the wilderness area. I've been to Roaring Plains 6 or 7 times already; it makes a nice alternative to the uber-crowded Dolly Sods Wilderness just immediately to the north. The 3-mile dirt road is mostly uphill from where we parked, but it was a joy to coast back down the same road on a rainy Sunday afternoon on the return trip to the car--entirely drenched! Everything in our backpacks was drenched, too.
As we were collecting firewood for our second night at Roaring Plains, my friend came across this desiccated tree trunk that he loved. I mean, he LOVED this thing. He set it up like a totem to preside over Appalachia from above. I thought it would make a nice addition to the evening blazes, but he was passionately opposed to burning it in the fire.
It grieves me that Roaring Plains is being discovered. It was always one of the places where I could usually count on total solitude. But its beauty is beyond compare, and it's no wonder people are starting to seek it out.
My little REI Camp Dome 2 tent is a trooper! I've had it for 15 years, and I've used it in all terrains and conditions. Torrential, sideways-flying rain pounded it hard from 9:00pm to 10:00am on Saturday evening and into Sunday morning, but it held firm and dry...unlike my friend's new hammock tent.
This is a view of Haystack Knob as seen from a certain campsite along the upper reaches of the Roaring Plains Trail. We hiked here just to drink coffee and talk about whether reality creates consciousness or vice versa. (We're real fun.)
There's an unofficial trail from the established Roaring Plains Trail to the edge or "rim." This secondary path is called the Tepee Trail, and it's a beast of a way. We traveled it 6 times in 3 days. Muddy, rocky, overgrown, and beset with many false or misleading routes, the Tepee Trail nonetheless leads to where we wanted to be: the cliffside edge of the world! Our first two days out there were so dry that we had to retrace our steps daily along the Tepee to collect water at a clear, deep pool right on the pathway. Little did we know that on our third day at Roaring Plains, every trail would be a 10" deep river of whitewater.
I'd love to bag the peak of Haystack Knob, which is as yet unclaimed in my peak-bagging club... But like many things out here, there are no known trails, and it's much easier to get lost than you might expect. In fact, on our second night, while camped out on the rim, we heard 2 hounds baying and baying all night and into the day. Someone in a valley below honked a car horn endlessly. I'm sure a hunter was out here training his hunting dogs; two of them got lost, and the hunter returned to his car to blare the horn at them in hopes that they'd come running. But they were nowhere near the car. Poor things. I'm glad they didn't find us and attach themselves to us, as lost dogs will do, but I hope they're okay.
This is what the forest looks like here. It seems to resemble Alaska more than West Virginia.
Our first two nights at Roaring Plains were calm and dry, and we camped along the rim with magnificent views. I played the pan flute out over the world below, we gazed at the stars or the fire and went to bed early. The third night, we relocated to a campsite a little further from the rim because my friend needed more mature trees to hang his hammock tent in the coming rainstorm. We decided to make that a movie night inside my tent, since it would be nasty outside--and it was. He requested "Moby Dick," the antique 1956 version with Orson Wells and Gregory Peck--which I downloaded on my phone beforehand, and which is very entertaining. That Saturday had been gloomy, chilly and gray. We were just finishing dinner by the fire when 2 women in their early 20s came out of the woods, clearly lost. They had no jackets, though it was cold, and no gear. They said they wanted to use the All Trails app to follow the rim back to their car. We warned them that it was only an hour and a half till nightfall, and they'd never get back to their car on time. Their best bet would be to go back the way they came and try at an earlier hour tomorrow. They dismissed our advice and continued along their merry way, following the rim...though we had to show them where the trail was. I hope they're not lost somewhere out there with the hunting dogs.
We got saturated on our way out, Sunday. The trails wound through implacable mountain laurels, dense to the right and to the left, which made footing treacherous. Mountain laurels will reach out and grab you, and slap you, and take hold of your clothing and refuse to let go. At our feet, fast-moving water coursed down the trails. Every path was now a raging brook. Finding footing in those wily laurels was impossible, so we eventually gave up and just walked in the water, which sometimes reached my knees. After the bike ride back to the car, we stopped at a new coffee shop-and-bookstore in the town of Thomas to get some coffee and to change our clothes in the restroom. But my change-of-clothes was drenched, despite being tucked deep into the driest part of my backpack.
Why do we spend our lives in ugly places?
