SHENAND'OH!


As I mentioned in the previous post, I spent most of the daylight hours on Saturday in a late model Honda Civic heading to and from the Shenandoah National Park via I-66 (not the famous one) and hiking along trails on the eastern side of the mountain. My hiking companions were friends/co-workers, whom I'll refer to as A and E (everyone seems to use this initial thing except me; I'll give it a whirl).

The Blue Ridge Mountains, which partly run through the park, are more like large hills covered in deciduousness than, you know, mountains to anyone who's been up in the Rockies, or even the Cascades, but it sure beat yet another lazy afternoon in the District. I hadn't been outside the Beltway (and yet still in the area; NYC and Portland trips don't count) since my visit to Colonial Williamsburg almost exactly one year ago.


It was beautiful, all right. And — cue the foreboding tone — dangerous. The perfect weather and incredible vistas off Skyline Drive at the north entrance to the park lulled me into complacency. When we pulled into the visitor's center a few miles in, however, we received our first sign that the locals were restless. As we got out of the car, a large wasp flew in the open doors and stubbornly kept trying to exit through the non-opening read windshield. Not that we took it as any significant reminder that we were interlopers. We just needed to figure out where we were going.


We settled on one of the trails near (relatively speaking) Mathews Arm (warning: PDF) campground, about 20 miles in. And no sooner had we started down the trail than we spied a few elk galloping through the woods. I guess elk are potentially more dangerous than wasps, but they're cuter by several, nay, many orders of magnitude, and complacency returned.


For the most part the trails were well-worn, and though bugs constantly buzzed around our ears or clung to greenery nearby, the hike was pleasant and undemanding as we meandered through the wilderness. No spider webs impeded our progress, giving the impression that we hadn't been the first people down this stretch of trail that day. About a mile or so in, the grass grew a little taller and the insect life buzzed a little louder, and as I led the way for awhile, I was hoping to see the trail start to loop back and up. It seemed to go on and on, deeper into the park.

And then the trail came to a sharp end.

Vertigo-inducing precipice?

Impassible thicket?

Another parking lot?

I wish.


Rattler!

I probably came about three strides from a four-foot black rattlesnake (possibly the C. viridius cerberus, as pictured above, although that snake was photographed in California) when its rattle-tail shot up and started shaking its maracas of doom. Fight-or-flight kicked in, and I jump-stepped backward, saying something along the lines of "Hoo-oh-ho-holy shiiiiit!"

That was the end of our forward movement. With haste, we hiked back up about fifty feet before E suggested we try to get a picture of it. By this time I had already opened my one beer and wanted no part of it; I'll never cut it as a photojournalist. But I handed him my Canon and wished him luck. He headed back down the trail, leaving A and myself to stand there, her with a cigarette and I with the Red Hook, waiting for E to return or (as I half-expected) cry out in snake-bitten pain. Still on edge, A and I became all the more cognizant of the insects flying around and, intermittently, landing on us. I became momentarily convinced a large fly or bee had flown up my shirt, and in trying to shake it out, I accidentally spilled beer down the front of my shirt.

And of course, the rattlesnake had wandered off before E returned to the spot of our recent confrontation. Oh well.


The hike out was uneventful, allowing me to snap photographs of the pristine Virginia wilderness, along with its naturally-occurring electrical lines/telephone poles. Heading back down Skyline Drive toward the park entrance, we spotted another designation for the area on a sign: "Rattlesnake Point Overlook" — that might've been useful to know ahead of time.

We stopped for frozen custard in the nearby town of Fort Royal before heading back up 66 toward Washington. Back inside the Beltway, in Ballston, we stopped at Rocklands for barbecue. It was a big meal for a big day. Instead of being incapacitated by rattlesnake venom, I was incapacitated by beef brisket. That's how I prefer it.

P.S. — Here is just one of several panoramas I have slated for posting in the days ahead.

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posted by WWB at 2:01 PM |