Earlier this week, my parents and I took a trip to southwest Virginia to hike Mount Rogers and bike on the Virginia Creeper Trail. We stayed in a cabin in Abingdon, Virginia that my mom found through AirBnB. It’s called the Blair Cabin, and it was built by the Keller family back in the early 20th century. The Keller family still lives on the same road as the original cabin (named Keller road), along with their cattle farm.
From the cabin, It was about an hour drive to Grayson Highlands State Park, where we were going to start our hike to Mount Rogers, so we left the cabin Monday morning around 7:30 am. We got onto the Rhododendron Trail by 9 am, and it was going well. The trail isn’t too strenuous, and it’s beautiful. The views are unobstructed by trees at least when it's not foggy, and there are lots of rocks that you can climb on top of to get even higher. Overall, the landscape reminded me of the English countryside, just higher above sea-level. This section of Grayson Highlands is known for its wild horses, and we were lucky to see two groups of them. There was a baby and it’s pregnant mama right on the trail, and then the further along there was a larger male, another baby, and likely two females grazing. Once we got past the ponies, we switched onto the Appalachian Trail, heading towards Mount Rogers.
Fairly early on into our hike, it started to thunder in the distance. We figured we’d keep pressing on and hoped it wouldn’t get worse. We were probably around 1 mile into the Appalachian Trail portion of the hike when it started to sprinkle. Soon after it started to pour. We decided to keep pressing on. It kept pouring, and it was still thundering. Then of course there was lightning. We were pretty high up on the mountain, especially considering Mount Rogers is the tallest point in Virginia, so it was a bit nerve-racking seeing the flashes of light and hearing the cracks of thunder so close us. When we were a little less than two miles from the peak, we made the decision to turn around and head back down. It was probably a good decision seeing that, as my dad said, Thor seemed pretty angry with the amount of lightning coming down.
It really seems like Mother Nature enjoys storming on me and my parents when we’re traveling. It rained like crazy on us when we went to Saint Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, when we went to Stonehenge, and now when we were hiking.
As we were heading back down the mountain, driving on route 58, we saw a dog jogging on the side of the road. Now, route 58 is a winding highway at 55 miles per hour on straight aways, so that dog should not have been wandering on the side of it. We slowed down, and it started following us. My mom decided to check the dogs for tags, which it didn’t have, so she decided to get him in the car out of the road. We then spent the rest of the afternoon checking a couple local vets to see if he had a chip, or if anyone had reported a missing dog. In the end, we kept him overnight at the cabin, and then took him to a no kill shelter in Abingdon once it opened Tuesday morning. My dad dubbed the wandering dog Waldo because he didn’t know where he was when we found him. Thankfully, his owners got him back, and it turned out his name is actually Forrest.
Since we took Waldo to the shelter in the morning, we had to take an afternoon shuttle from Damascus up to the top of the Virginia Creeper Trail at Whitetop Station in the Mount Rogers Recreation Area. There are multiple companies in both Damascus and Abingdon that provide shuttles to Whitetop Station, so you can leave your car in town and bike down to it. If you start from the top, it’s a really easy ride because it’s a gradual downhill for most of it and then flat for the rest. The entire trail is about 34 miles from Whitetop Station to Abingdon, and around 18 miles from Whitetop Station to Damascus.
Hiking Mount Rogers, when it's safe of course, and biking the Virginia Creeper Trail are great activities for people of all ages. I highly recommend taking a trip to southwest Virginia to check them out!
If you're looking for other fun activities or weekend trips in Virginia, check out my posts on Chesapeake, Virginia and Bealeton, Virginia!
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