Oh what a beautiful weekend this was! But not only the weekend... I give you a brief summary: on Thursday we attended our first climbing gym lesson in Timonium and climbed our first routes on the walls. On Friday our boss gave us tickets for the Baltimore Symphony, and on Saturday we headed down south to Virginia again, under a wonderful blue sky, to climb Old Rag Mountain on Sunday.
Well, I have to say... I did expect a lot of traffic and lots of people in Shenandoah National Park and on the so-called Skyline Drive which is a street atop of the mountain ridges. But soooo many people and cars...! Wow! Okay, Shenandoah is famous for the fall colors, and people from everywhere come here, at least, the big cities of the east coast aren't that far. We expected to camp, but all campgrounds off Skyland Drive were full, so we drove a little farther and camped wild somewhere. Under the most, most, most impressive sky I've seen for months. The Milky Way was so clear as you will seldom see it. A fantastic night.
Next day we came quite early to the parking space for the trailhead for Old Rag Mountain, but again: lots of people were there even earlier. But we started the hike, and it was worth it, although we rather prefer less crowded trails. The problem began a bit underneath the first 'false summit' of Old Rag: there the trail continues into a field of boulders, and you have to scramble over large granite rocks, crawl underneath or jump over small cracks. Nothing of a problem, and the rocks have good grip, but some people are just not the right ones to go up there. So on the few cruxes on the 'climb' (forgive me the word 'climb'), it soon gets crowded. There is one crux where you have to make quite a big step on a in this case really slippery rock, and there are no decent grips for your hand, which is really tricky, especially with a backpack. When we came there, there was already a huge line of hikers waiting to ascend this rock, and even a researcher was there investigating the question of overcrowding on Old Rag. The day before he counted 1500 hikers. And as you can imagine, there are always some that aren't reasonable fit enough to do the hike, so they slow down the whole line of hikers on the cruxes, making the line even longer.
But despite this 'waiting inconvenience', it soon gets social up there and you get to know the other hikers. Anyway, the hike itself was great, as was the weather and the view from the top. Now let me show you a few pictures of this great trip...
Fall colors in Shenandoah, seen from an overview on Skyland Drive.
Fall colors on the hike to Old Rag mountain.
On the summit of Old Rag.
Just a comment to the photographers: the bright red and yellow colors are 'as is'. They are difficult to photograph and to capture it it's nearly impossible to do it without color calibration tool. In this case I used a Spyder Cube, and I have to add I have the Lenovo W520 with colorimeter, optimized for photography.
Well, I have to say... I did expect a lot of traffic and lots of people in Shenandoah National Park and on the so-called Skyline Drive which is a street atop of the mountain ridges. But soooo many people and cars...! Wow! Okay, Shenandoah is famous for the fall colors, and people from everywhere come here, at least, the big cities of the east coast aren't that far. We expected to camp, but all campgrounds off Skyland Drive were full, so we drove a little farther and camped wild somewhere. Under the most, most, most impressive sky I've seen for months. The Milky Way was so clear as you will seldom see it. A fantastic night.
Next day we came quite early to the parking space for the trailhead for Old Rag Mountain, but again: lots of people were there even earlier. But we started the hike, and it was worth it, although we rather prefer less crowded trails. The problem began a bit underneath the first 'false summit' of Old Rag: there the trail continues into a field of boulders, and you have to scramble over large granite rocks, crawl underneath or jump over small cracks. Nothing of a problem, and the rocks have good grip, but some people are just not the right ones to go up there. So on the few cruxes on the 'climb' (forgive me the word 'climb'), it soon gets crowded. There is one crux where you have to make quite a big step on a in this case really slippery rock, and there are no decent grips for your hand, which is really tricky, especially with a backpack. When we came there, there was already a huge line of hikers waiting to ascend this rock, and even a researcher was there investigating the question of overcrowding on Old Rag. The day before he counted 1500 hikers. And as you can imagine, there are always some that aren't reasonable fit enough to do the hike, so they slow down the whole line of hikers on the cruxes, making the line even longer.
But despite this 'waiting inconvenience', it soon gets social up there and you get to know the other hikers. Anyway, the hike itself was great, as was the weather and the view from the top. Now let me show you a few pictures of this great trip...
Fall colors in Shenandoah, seen from an overview on Skyland Drive.
Fall colors on the hike to Old Rag mountain.
On the summit of Old Rag.
Just a comment to the photographers: the bright red and yellow colors are 'as is'. They are difficult to photograph and to capture it it's nearly impossible to do it without color calibration tool. In this case I used a Spyder Cube, and I have to add I have the Lenovo W520 with colorimeter, optimized for photography.
No comments:
Post a Comment