Purple Lines

Top of BearFence, giving me the local landmarks

Aaron and I have the goal of hiking every trail in Shenandoah National Park. I am not sure how this goal got started, but we are making serious headway. We have six maps of the park, there are three and we have two of each. One set is hanging on the walls in our bedroom and the other set is on the shelf, ready to go in the packs when we need them. The ones on the walls are the ones that get the purple lines.

Oh yeah, my camera has a timer so we can take photos together!

After we hike a trail, Aaron carefully traces over it with a purple sharpie so we know what we have done and what we have left. It is extremely satisfying to hike a long one and come home to a huge purple loop. And that's the thing, Aaron must be super excited about it because it is already traced by the time I think about it. We have lots of purple lines. Some of them are all bunched together where trails overlap and some are the lone purple in a huge swath of topographic lines either because we haven't hiked anything else in that area or there are no other trails in that area.

A little rock scramble

In some ways we have a lot left and in some ways we are nearly done. Just about everything from 5 to 10 miles is done. We haven't done a lot less than 5 miles because we saved those for snowy winter days when I might not be up for much (I hate snow and tolerate cold), plus we often hike so much further than 5 miles its hard to get excited for a 2 mile loop. What we do have left are trails that do not make good loops, do not make loops at all, do not make loops less than 12 miles, and the trails around the campgrounds. We saved the ones around the campgrounds with the thoughts of going to camp and enjoying a mini-vacation. It hasn't happened yet, but hopefully it will.... or we'll hike them anyway.

No good place to hop across

Now when we go hiking, the trail books are not much help. They are marked too and most of them have checks next to them. Now we stand in front of the maps and scrutinize. What if we park here and do this? How long do you think this will be? We're often not sure how many miles it is going to be and don't have a guide of what the trail will look like and just how many stream crossings there will be.

I have no legs!

The advantage of the purple lines and trying to hike everything is variety and solitude. A lot of the time we see less than six people on the trails (part of this has to do with the remoteness and length of some of the trails we have been hiking). Recently we have been "wading" through shin to knee high plants because trails less traveled are less maintained by rangers and the constant trampling of feet (picture right). Shenandoah is really beautiful in places and I feel that I definitely get to see the better parts, the parts less often seen, the parts that take more effort to get to.

All of these photos are from a recent 12ish mile loop down the Conway Fire Road to the Conway River Trail, to Slaughter Horse Trail, to the Appalachian Trail, to BearFence Rocks. BearFence is a cool rock scramble-y bit, not a long trail, that we recommend to you. We hadn't done it yet because it was so short, but it fit into this loop nicely.

Fashionistas

These lovely folks to the left were leaving the parking lot as we arrived and we made fun of them endlessly for their fanny pack, hats with face nets, and pants tucked into socks, but admittedly there were several times on the trail when Aaron & I were ready to kill because of the buzzing gnats and flies. Not so much though that I am going to purchase a hat with a net. ;)