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Nadge, the hiking dog, with his pal, Larry Gross, enjoys the view at Great Falls. |
IF YOU WANT to see this state, want to meet its sights and people, the very best way to do it is also the slowest: You have to walk it. And if you want to walk it, you need a guidebook, and I have discovered the best of the best of those guides.
"Hiking Virginia: A Guide to Virginia's Greatest Hiking Adventures," by Bill and Mary Burnham, picks the finest of the hundreds (probably thousands) of places to hoof it in the Old Dominion. From northernmost Potomac to far southwest, the Burnhams take readers to a select few dozen of the best footpaths to discover the state's tremendous diversity, awesome beauty and meet some of its kind and gentle folk.
But I get ahead of my story.
Growing up in Northern Virginia long before it became a metropolis of its own, I often drove out to the Great Falls of the Potomac River, one of the most spectacular vistas in Virginia (even if it is shared with Maryland).
For the past year, I have intended to revisit Great Falls but--as these things go--hadn't gotten around to it.
But things converge. A few weeks ago, someone gave me a copy of the Burnhams' meaty hiking guide. I perused its pages and came to an abrupt halt atthe trail following the Potomac River gorge alongside and past Great Falls, down the racing waters of Mather Gorge, then looping back past the 19th-century ruins of the Patowmack Canal. If there is a trail that has it all, this is it: scenery, history, nature, accessibility.
So why not walk it? Larry Gross and I had kicked around that notion, so I called. "Do you think I can bring Nadge?" he asked. Nadge (say "Naj") is Gross' sturdy Lab and where one goes, so goes the other.
"Well," I said, "The guidebook I'm trail-testing for this outing says leashed dogs are allowed, so let's do it."
As trails go, this one is not physically demanding. For those who feel they haven't hiked without greater physical challenge, the Billy Goat Trail, a rock scramble on the opposite side of the river in Maryland, should fill the bill.
The first half of our trail essentially runs downstream from the visitors center of Great Falls Park. At several spots, short spur trails take visitors to rocky promontories with beautiful views of the Potomac and its most famous falls. Here, in a short distance, the Potomac drops 77 feet through a boulder-filled gorge, generating a roaring spectacle of white water.
Gross, a veteran paddler with wide experience in Virginia white water, said Great Falls provides challenge enough to satisfy almost any white-water enthusiast. As he told me about the dangers of the river here, two kayakers were having fun in eddies just downstream from the main falls, on the Virginia side.
At a point some 1.5 miles downstream of the visitor center, the trail offers a dip down a short paved road to the water's edge. Here Nadge, true to breed, simply could not resist a swim in a quiet backwater of the Potomac's main stem.
We left the river and headed up, and into the history of Colonial America, when canal boats reigned. George Washington had high hopes for the Patowmack Canal when construction began in 1785. The canal, cut through solid rock in key spots, enabled freight-carrying barges to bypass the impassable waters of the falls.
The canal opened in 1802 and for the next 26 years carried great quantities of agricultural products and raw materials to Washington.
Ruins of the canal here at Great Falls are some of the best preserved that I have seen from such an early period. And the V-shaped cut blasted down through rock to the river is an engineering marvel for its time--well before the invention of dynamite.
There are several trails to choose from for the walk west to the visitors center and parking lot. We picked one that ran along a parallel inland ridgetop.
By the time we reached the truck, I estimated we had walked three miles. Nadge slept all the way back to Fredericksburg. The trail outlined in the Burnhams' book covers 3.4 miles, but there are numerous trails in the park, making it possible to put together a number of different routes both shorter and longer than that. It would take real effort and planning to get lost here, with the river such an obvious and dominating feature of the landscape.
As for the guidebook, "Hiking Virginia," anyone with an interest in the subject should take a serious look at it. I haven't found a better guidebook that covered both manageable day hikes as well as longer backpacking trips in the state. The authors have included a wealth of practical information, including detailed maps, driving directions, elevation profiles and more.
I phoned Bill Burnham last week at his winter quarters in Key Largo, Fla., and asked his favorite Virginia trail. He named three, all of them downstate in the southwest. They are, in the James River Face Wilderness, Rock Castle Gorge and heading north on the Appalachian Trail as it traverses High Cock Knob. That gave me some future targets to shoot for.
A practical note about visiting Great Falls. The place is everything I said, but as with so many other places I have written about, the only time to go is weekdays or in cold weather (and who wants to do that?). This is less than 20 miles from the Big City, and, as such, weekends will find crowds here. You don't want that. Take the day off; call in for a mental health day!
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On a sad side note, you may or may not have noticed that a Montana legislator slipped a nasty piece of legislation into a much larger bill (the budget), removing legal protections from large numbers of America's 37,000 mustangs. These are the fabled wild, free-ranging horses of the West, descendants of the horses of Spanish explorers and an inspiration to millions. Sad and disgraceful.
PAUL SULLIVAN, a former reporter with The Free Lance-Star, is a freelance writer living in Spotsylvania County. Contact him by mail at The Free Lance-Star, 616 Amelia St., Fredericksburg, Va. 22401; by fax at 373-8455; or by e-mail at PBSullivan2@cs.com.
