Alpine Illusion

Sometimes when I show people some of the photos I've taken here in the east, they think the pictures were made in western states. This is because of the practice of clear-cutting and fire in our eastern mountains during the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Although it's hard to understand, if you'd come to the southern Appalachians around 1920 or so, you would have found almost no mature forests. Instead, from horizon to horizon all you would have found were shattered lands--all of the forests had been felled. And when I say "all", that's what I mean. Rare were the spots where the timber companies had not been. And when they passed, they left nothing but stumps, poorly cut roads, and rail beds for the ever-present narrow gauge steam engines that were invaluable for the harvest of timber.

Often, when the timber companies had left, the land was allowed to fester. Summers would come, often with drought. The acreage would become tinder-dry and all it would take is a single spark or a lightning strike and fire would be set. Since what had been forest was now just a litter of shattered stumps and broken limbs and underbrush, the fires would rage unopposed across the landscape. If the droughts were severe enough--and they often were--then even the top soil would burn away, all the way down to bare rock and mineral soil. When rains finally did come--and they often did so in sudden cloudbursts to break the droughts--what little soil remained was washed down into the creeks and rivers to briefly foul the waterways before being carried along to the lowlands.

After all of this destruction, the forests would struggle to recover. On the tallest peaks and in the highest valleys the young trees had to contend with little in the way of organic soil and with the cold winters and harsh winds that rake the southern high country. Some shrubs and grasses would take root, but trees struggled to regain lost territory.

This is why, more than 100 years after the rape of the southern high country by the timber and land companies the forests are still fighting for restoration. This is why those places appear to be alpine environments, which they resemble but do not match ecologically.

One of the best examples of the false alpine environment in the South is the area known as Grayson Highlands in southwest Virginia. 5,000-foot peaks covered in mainly rocks, scrub, and grasslands.

I need to head back to this area. It offers great terrain for hiking.

Not far from Grayson Highlands (and considered part of it) is First Peak. Almost all grass and shrubs and heavily eroded because of its popularity with the horseback riding crowd. Steer clear of this particular spot unless you enjoy hiking in muck.

One of my favorite false alpine peaks--Sam Knob.

In West Virginia the best example of this setting is in the Dolly Sods Wilderness. What looks to be at this point a field is, in fact, a vast wetland. Impossible to hike, it's actually a sea of soggy peat and rare plants.

Another view in Dolly Sods. You can understand why it's so very popular with hikers and backpackers.

Happy Trails!

Various photos from some of my hiking and backpacking trips. Just the trails, thanks. If I can recall where I took each one, I'll list it. (Let's see how well the old memory works.)

The Big Butt Trail, Black Mountains.

Trail in Big Ivy, Pisgah National Forest, Black Mountains.

Birkhead Mountains Wilderness.

Dolly Sods Wilderness, West Virginia.

Dolly Sods Wilderness.

Panthertown Valley, North Carolina.

Mount Rogers area, Virginia.

Kubrabow State Forest, West Virginia.

Appalachian Trail, Round Bald, Tennessee.

Avalanche Peak, Yellowstone National Park.

Mount Washburn, Yellowstone National Park.

Blue Lakes Trail, Mount Sneffels Wilderness, Colorado.

Weminuche Wilderness, Colorado.

Weminuche Wilderness, Colorado.

Switchbacks leading up to the Continental Divide, San Juan Mountains, Colorado.

Dolly Sods, Part II

After I'd bagged Blackbird Knob, I headed back toward the trailhead to pick out another hike. What I was hoping to do was do some bushwhacking just straight across country in the really high section of the Wilderness. I'd seen this area before, during summer, and figured that it would be very simple and relatively easy to just set off across the heath and make a beeline for whatever point I wanted to hit.

With that tactic in mind I drove to the part of the area called Bear Rocks to park my truck, gather my stuff, and make off for another hike.

The place was really crowded. By the time I got to Bear Rocks there was probably a hundred people at that spot. Everyone from Japanese tourists with multi-thousand dollar camera rigs to locals out for a jaunt in the sun after three solid days of rain. But one thing about the Sods--it might be crowded on the road, but just walk off that track a hundred yards and you might as well be on the Moon. So it was that easy for me to escape the crowds by turning my back on the road, finding a rough path through the blueberry bushes and just striking out.

The point I'd picked out by sight was a mass of rocks off to the northwest. I'd seen them before when I'd been there years earlier and figured they'd be a great spot to take some photos. The thing was, it was hard to gauge the distance because it's hard to get a feel when there are so few trees growing near your goal. So I decided to head off and see if I could make it.

Right away, I discovered that this was going to be a whole lot tougher than I'd figured. First of all, the low-growing shrubs are made of very tough stuff. They grab at your boots and legs and put a stop to much forward motion. I was just going to have to slow down. And then, I discovered another, more difficult barrier:

I'd have to cross the feature for which the entire wilderness is named, and that is pretty much not a good idea.


Dolly Sods Wilderness is actually a vast, shallow valley situated on one of the widest, highest, and most uniform plateaus in eastern North America. The ridges that surround it rise to over 4400 feet, but the valley itself lies anywhere from 3500 to 4000 feet. And that makes it the biggest high elevation valley in the East. And in that valley are many bogs, called "sods" by the locals. And at the high end of the valley is the biggest bog of all:
Dolly Sods.

When you try to walk out onto it, you see it for what it really is. And that's a very shallow lake overlain with a soaking carpet of living plant matter. You can make your way around the edges of it--it's something like what it would be like to walk across a water bed. I'd experienced the same sensation before when walking on some of the floating islands in the Okefenokee Swamp in south Georgia. But I saw right off that there was absolutely no way I could walk across Dolly Sods. First of all, you'd get soaking wet, and as the winds were howling at what I estimate to be around 40 t0 50 miles per hour, that was not a good idea. In addition, the sods are a very fragile environment and I did not want to plant my footprints all over it.

I did, however, want to get some good photos of the bog. So I rock hopped to a big boulder that lay out in the bog itself and got down on my knees, and then my stomach, to take some unique shots.

After that, I made my way carefully back onto the heath and once more tried to make it to the jumble of boulders far away on the horizon.

And soon after that I realized there was no way I was going to be able to make that hike and return to my truck in a reasonable amount of time. The going was just way the hell too rough. In that case, I decided, I'd head for the cliff edge where the mountain plunged down into the deeper valley to the east and see how much progress I could make by going that way. As I did, I realized that trying to push through the heath was a no-win situation, so I opted for finding ribs of talus and jutting boulders and using those as my thoroughfare. It was, it turned out, the best way to move, and I was able to reach the cliff edge in short order.

By that time I was pretty tired and was--for the first time that day--hungry. I found a secluded spot on the cliffs behind a stand of red spruce trees that shielded me from the wind and I had a banana nut muffin and a container of water. It was a good lunch and I just sat there for a long time enjoying the views. Far to the north I could see a big wind farm on the Allegheney Front. Some people complain about the big turbines on the ridges, but while they do break the natural pattern of the mountains, I see them as a possible cure to the burning of fossil fuels that is poisoning the Earth to death. Thus, I don't mind the wind farms. Let them do their work.

After heading up and down the cliff for a while, taking photos, I realized that there was no way I'd make my original goal. And, anyway, I was missing Carole and decided that I'd rather spend the rest of the day in her company than struggling to reach that jumbled pile of bleached rock in the distance. Gathering up my stuff, I turned and headed back toward the truck, back toward the crowds, back toward the road that would take me to my wife.

I arrive at the edge of the Sods. It's not a field. It's more like a lake. Don't try to hike across it.

I got down on my belly on the big boulder out in the bog and nabbed this shot.

You can see the water pooling up all through the bog.

The wind was really roaring.

This was one of the "trails" I tried to follow cross country. It didn't work that well.

This, however, was a far better way to move. I could pretty much move at a good speed across these massive talus fields that appear all over the high country.

If you click on this photo you can see the huge jumble of rock on the horizon that was initially my goal.

Instead, though, I ended up on the cliff wall to the north of Bear Rocks.

This is a telephoto shot of the wind farm off in the distance.

And this was my lunch spot. I had those spruce trees to shield me from the wind (which was coming in from the west).

Tortured terrain.

These were not really trails, but they served the same purpose.

When you look closely at the boulders you can see that they're a conglomerate and not solid, at all. When they break down, the rocks form into a mass of the tiny particles that are here cemented together.

This was the direction I had to move to return to my truck. Be sure to click on this image to see it in a much larger format.

And the road that forms the the eastern border of Dolly Sods Wilderness. Since it lies at the top edge of the plateau, it's one of the straightest roads you'll see in the high country.

Dolly Sods, Part I

I decided after a bit of deliberation to take a hike into the Dolly Sods Wilderness. Carole and I had been there once before, but I didn't get to hike much on that trip. And it was in the summertime. Also, I wanted to bag at least one named peak in the wilderness and picked out the one I wanted from my map of Dolly Sods. Decision made, I left Carole at the Seneca Shadows Campground one fine, bright morning and headed off on my own to do some dayhiking.

I arrived at Dolly Sods early after a 30-minute drive from the Seneca Shadows Campground where we were staying. It was good to get an early start. The wilderness was fairly crowded around the Forest Service access road, but mainly with the parked cars of backpackers who were all well into the wilderness from the day before.

I parked at the Blackbird Knob trailhead and pushed on into the wilderness, my main goal of the hike to find and bushwhack to the summit of Blackbird Knob.


One of the roadside signs marking a border of the Dolly Sods Wilderness Area.

This sign is serious. Back in the day, the Sods were a major firing range for the US military. Many rounds were fired here because the land was so open. However, lots of mortars landed and did not detonate and merely buried themselves in the often soft muck on the terrain. And to this day they sometimes emerge from the earth, some of them still live. If you see one, mark its location and back away. DO NOT TOUCH them! They can go off.

The first part of the trail is a boardwalk that crosses a very boggy area. Boggy areas are common in Dolly Sods which is one of the highest large valleys in the eastern United States.

Newly fallen birch leaves on the trail.

Vistas are almost always near at hand. This one was on a side trail that bypasses the main trail and heads upslope.

I'd seen photos of this campsite on the Internet and recognized it immediately. Some enterprising backpackers had made some serviceable chairs out of flat stones here.

There are lots of talus fields in the Sods.

Just because something looks like a trail doesn't necessarily make it one. It's easy to go off route if you don't pay attention out in this open country.

I've been in Dolly Sods Wilderness in summer and now in Fall. I think I prefer the Fall. It just makes for striking scenery in every direction when you have this kind of color all around you.

This photo doesn't convey it very well, but the trail was pretty much nothing but swamp and stream. The area had received quite a lot of rainfall the previous three days, and so it was like marching in muck most of the time.

This temporary pond was beside the trail in a particularly boggy area.

Some of the creeks have a red tint to them from the influence of tannins in the soil from the drop of thousands of years worth of evergreen needles.

At last, I find Blackbird Knob and begin to buswhack off trail toward the summit.

The broad summit area of Blackbird Knob. The views were so gorgeous that I literally stood around whooping. Who the hell cared? I was alone and full of joy.

The wind was horrible on the top. I managed to get a few self-portraits with my camera and tripod, but later a really vicious gust of wind knocked the whole thing down and so I packed the tripod away.

There go my ideas that no one else had ever been here. I found this old campsite situated behind some spruce trees.

I didn't know what these were. Little mounds here and there in open areas. Later, my go-to guys for all things natural told me that they were anthills. I'd poked them to see if any ants would emerge, but none did. Probably all dormant by this time of year.

And just before I got back to the Red Creek Campground area, I turned around to snap a parting shot on the Blackbird Knob Trail. Now I was ready to head over to the Bear Rocks area and see what I could find.

Part II tomorrow...