Last week, we had a great week hiking the AT through West Virginia and Maryland. Our goal for the week was to hike the entirety of the Maryland AT and also the part of the trail that is "officially" in West Virginia. The trail actually weaves in and out of Virginia and West Virginia for a couple hundred miles, much like the NC/TN border, but as with NC and TN, there are parts that are solidly in either VA or WV.
Anyway, I planned five day hikes that would get us to that goal; we booked a couple of AirBnBs along the way; and I booked a couple of shuttles for midweek. We also got some excellent organizational help and some local tips from our friend Kevin FitzGerald, who used to be on the park staff at the C&O Canal, and his brother Brion (now a friend of ours as well), who lives near the trail in PA and who is also a pretty decorated National Parks alum. Brion actually wanted to hike with us on our first leg, as that was a section of the trail he hadn't yet done, and he very generously agreed to shuttle us for that leg and for two other legs the following weekend.
At Kevin's suggestion, I booked an AirBnB in Harpers Ferry, WV, to use as our home base for our first four nights. We then moved to Frederick, MD, for the last three nights. Harpers Ferry is a quaint little town with a lot of history, and it was interesting to stay there. Its downside is that it doesn't have a ton of restaurants (and of what restaurants were there, most of them were closed while we were there - not sure whether that's due to Covid or something else). And when I'm hiking lots of miles, the thing I look forward to all day is food! So that was a little disappointing, but we did manage to forage around for some scraps here and there. 😄
 The living room of our Harpers Ferry house  |
| Tigger quickly claimed this chair as his own. |
Frederick, on the other hand, is a bustling town, also with a lot of history and some pretty cool stuff to see. AND they have a ton of really good restaurants, of which we took full advantage.
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| Our cute house in Frederick - it used to be a museum (and, according to Kevin, apparently a candy store). |
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| Tigger also tried to claim a chair as his own here, but it wasn't quite big enough. |
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This house reminded me a lot of the house where I grew up, which was my great-grandparents' farmhouse. We had these same doorknob mechanism things. We did not, however, have the evil slide lock that claimed a piece of my right index finger. Some of my people living nearby! |
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| When in MD, go with the crab. |
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| Or the lobster grilled cheese is also delicious. |
But back to the hiking! Our first day (last Sunday) was from Snickers Gap to Keys Gap, running along the VA/WV border. Brion hiked with us that day, and we probably hiked a little slower than usual because we were just enjoying the company and conversation (not that Ben and I don't enjoy each other's company and conversation, but we pretty much get to enjoy that all the time, so sometimes we're pretty quiet when we're hiking).
Our second day was from Keys Gap to the Weverton Cliffs parking lot, and that day took us through the town of Harpers Ferry and along the C&O Canal towpath. We had planned to do this hike on Monday and take Tuesday off, but the remnants of Hurricane Delta were coming through the area on Monday and the weather was pretty nasty, so we decided to take Monday off and hike Tuesday instead. And when I say take Monday "off," I mean that I was working from our home base instead of being on the trail. Womp womp. It was a little damp when we started out on Tuesday, but by the end of the day, the weather was great.
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| Rhonda, our shuttle driver, took this photo before we got started Tuesday morning. |
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| The trail crosses the Shenandoah River on the Hwy. 340 bridge, which is pretty long. I was afraid of how Tigger would react, as he's not a big fan of traffic, but he handled it like a champ! |
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The Shenandoah, as seen from the bridge. If you look closely, you can see the top of a church steeple on the left side of the river, between the little ridge in the foreground and the one behind it. We'll see more of it later.
 Us on the footbridge (which was beside a railroad bridge, obviously). Actually, the footbridge was damaged by a train derailment and just reopened earlier this year.  Cool Harpers Ferry train tunnel  The C&O Canal towpath. Has to be the easiest 2.6 miles of the entire AT.  Brion told us that if the sun came out, we'd see a ton of turtles lounging on rocks, etc., in the canal. The sun was in and out, so we didn't see a ton, but we did see 3 or 4.  We didn't take the side trail to the ATC when we came through Harpers Ferry, but we stopped there on our way back to our house to get the obligatory front porch pic. Unfortunately, the ATC is still closed due to Covid, so we didn't get to see all the cool stuff inside. |
Our third hike, on Wednesday, was from Weverton to Fox Gap, which took us through Gathland State Park past the War Correspondents Memorial.
It also took us over Lambs Knoll, on which there is a huge communications tower that, according to Brion, is connected to Camp David and the White House's underground bunker in this area. That makes sense because, on our way back down the knoll to Fox Gap, we crossed the strangest one-lane road. It was freshly-paved and extremely well-maintained, and we were wondering what the heck it was. When we got to Fox Gap, we saw the end of it, and it was marked only "Private Road." We thought it was pretty fancy for a private road.
We took Thursday off (again, I worked all day). Friday, we hiked from Fox Gap to Wolfsville Road (MD-17), which took us past the Washington Monument (not the one in D.C., of course, but the first monument built to honor Washington's memory) and also across I-70.
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| Footbridge across I-70 |
The final day was from Wolfsville Road to the MA/PD line (otherwise known as the Mason-Dixon line).
We hiked all the way through Maryland!
Here's the mileage sign at Pen Mar Park that I mentioned earlier.
If you live relatively close to the AT (like we do) and spend any time on the trail near your home, you form a certain opinion of what the AT "looks like." But the thing about the AT is that, depending on where you live, that opinion may be very different from the opinions of others who live near the trail in different parts of the country. Our view of the AT from North Georgia, the Fontana area, the Smokies, and the Roan Mountain area is that the AT is a relentless string of ups and downs with killer elevation changes, sometimes climbing (or descending) steeply for several miles at a time. Looking at the elevation profile for the trail in WV and MD, I was thinking we'd have some relatively easy hiking because, compared with our area, the trail is more even-keeled. There are some ups and downs, sure, but they're generally not very steep. Or if they're steep, they're not very long. We did a couple of steep climbs that only lasted for a half mile or so (whereas we've done some down here that last for 4-6 miles). We were very well-equipped for that muscle-wise. We were not, however, well-equipped for how rocky the trail is in the WV/MD area. I've heard tons of stories about how rocky the trail is when you get up into PA, but I've never heard that it really starts in MD (and to a certain extent in WV). A rocky trail is murder on the bottoms of your feet (think beating your feet with a hammer, and sometimes the back end of a claw hammer if you happen to step on a pointy rock, all day). It's also really rough on the ankles because they're constantly flexing and bending, conforming to the crazy surface below and trying to keep you upright. I've never had problems with my ankles while hiking, but my ankles were on fire after a couple of these hikes (Wednesday's and Saturday's hikes, especially).
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| A slightly rocky section in WV. I'm sure I took this picture because I was surprised at how rocky the trail was, but looking back it makes me laugh that I thought this was rocky. |
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Rocks with pretty fall leaves          |
In some of these big boulder fields (seriously, some were several acres), it can be a "your guess is as good as mine" situation as to where the trail actually goes. Thankfully, the AT clubs in these areas have some amazing volunteer trail maintainers, and the trails were blazed like crazy (and by that, I mean lots of blazes on rocks themselves because that's all that was there to mark!).
We were really impressed with the trail maintenance in this area overall, especially the artful chainsaw work of one (maybe more than one?) volunteer who carved AT symbols while he/she was carving traction notches in the water bars crossing the trail.
They had also built some really nice stairsteps/erosion breaks in the steeper sections, and a nice boardwalk through some areas that are probably a little boggy in wetter weather (although this area has had a drought recently, so it wasn't very boggy while we were there).
I will say that we had really outstanding weather for this trip. We did have to switch days up while heavy rain moved through one day, but the next day (Tuesday) was supposed to be rainy most of the day as well, and it turned out to be beautiful. We got drizzled on a little bit on the morning, but that was it. Temperatures were very moderate, except they turned colder on Friday night and our hike Saturday was a bit chilly (we did a lot of climbing and rock crawling to keep ourselves warm, though). We also had perfect timing for the fall leaves. We had some great views pretty much every day we hiked, and you can look through the pictures and see a progression of the leaf color. If they weren't at peak by the time we left, they were very, very close.
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| A little bit of color from Raven Rocks on Day 1 |
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Little more color from White Rock Cliff on Day 3 Tons of color from the Washington Monument on Day 4  Color as seen from underneath on Day 4 |
View from Black Rock Cliff on Day 4
View from an unnamed pile of rocks on Day 4
We also saw a few animals (but fewer than we expected, really) over the course of the week. This deer popped its head up and watched us as we walked into Harpers Ferry.
And this longhorn cattle farm was an interesting surprise on our last day. Tigger didn't really know what to think about the cows, which is ironic considering he's a cattle dog.
When we finished our last hike, we headed over to New Market, MD, to meet up with my friend Angie and her family, who live in D.C. Angie and I have been friends since we were babies but haven't lived in the same state since 6th grade. It's always so much fun and so spirit-lifting to get together with her, and I'm so glad we could make it work out on this trip.
After we closed down the winery (and hung around for about another hour after that - ha!), we headed towards home. The drive took us back through Harpers Ferry and along the same route that we took coming into town. It was pretty amazing driving along that ridge for about an hour and thinking we had hiked the whole thing in the past week.
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| One more view of the Shenandoah as we crossed the Sandy Hook bridge |
After such a perfect day, it was really disappointing that, on our way home, we had a hotel snafu on our final night. I hadn't made a hotel reservation earlier because we weren't sure what time we would be leaving town and, thus, where we would want to stop for the night. If you know me, you know this stresses me out, as I typically need to have a plan well in advance. When we stopped for dinner, we decided we'd head on to Roanoke and stop there, so I got on the Hilton app and made a reservation at a pet-friendly Hampton Inn. We drove for a couple more hours and rolled into the Hampton Inn at about 10:30 that night, when they told us they don't have any rooms available. Apparently, their housekeeping department had failed to clean six rooms that day, so they had six rooms that were unavailable but that they had failed to block out in the corporate reservations system. And they, along with the other hotels in town, were completely full due to some softball tournament. Again, if you know me well, you know that I'm usually asleep long before 10:30 PM, especially after a hiking day. I was exhausted; my feet were killing me; and we had been in the car for four hours already. Scrambling to find another pet-friendly hotel without having to drive a significant extra distance was not going to be easy. I was starting to lose it a little bit, but level-headed Ben went back in the hotel and got the front desk guy to help us find a room at another Hilton property down the road. So we had to drive another half-hour and ended up in Christiansburg instead of Roanoke, but we ended up at a nice, newly-renovated Hampton Inn that was very clean and comfortable, so all's well that ends well. I already can't wait for our next week-long adventure, whenever that may be.
304.4 down; 1885.6 to go!
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