HIKING VIRGINIA

Dispense with the suspense right off: This 5,729-foot monolith of volcanic rock—third loftiest mountain in the Southern Appalachians—is not hard to climb. Yes, you must hike 9 miles to reach it from Grayson Highlands State Park and, yes, the elevation change hovers around 1,000 feet. This elevation gain-loss, however, ranks lower than climbing Flat Top Mountain at Peaks of Otter and Three Ridges near Lexington, both mountains 4,000 feet or smaller. In other words, there are tougher climbs out there. But what Mount Rogers lacks in mountaineering derring-do, it easily compensates for in sheer presence, the diversity of its plant and animal life, the breathtaking views across high-country meadows, and, of course, its wild ponies. And to those eager for bragging rights, it affords the modest claim: “I climbed the highest mountain in Virginia.”

THE RUNDOWN

Start: From the Massie Gap parking area on VA 362 in Grayson Highlands State Park

Distance: 9.0 miles out and back

Hiking time: About 5 hours

Difficulty: Moderate to easy due to open rock face and uneven footing along Wilburn Ridge

Trail surface: Dirt footpaths and open rock lead to Virginia’s highest peak, grassy highlands, cove forests, and wooded slopes.

Land status: Federal wilderness and national recreation area

Nearest town: Troutdale, VA

Other trail users: Equestrians

Accessibility: Grayson Highlands State Park has some accessible facilities.

Canine compatibility: Dogs permitted

Trail contacts: Mount Rogers National Recreation Area, Marion; (276) 783-5196 or (800) 628-7202, www.fs.usda.gov/gwj. Grayson Highlands State Park, (276) 579-7092, www.dcr.virginia.gov/state-parks/grayson-highlands

Schedule: Open year-round. Hunting permitted, with the busiest season between Nov and Jan.

Fees/permits: No permits required. Free backcountry camping and in AT shelters. Day-use fee to enter Grayson Highlands State Park, which has a campground near the trailhead with tent and RV hookups.

Facilities/features: Grayson Highlands State Park has restrooms, campground, visitor center/museum, picnic areas, and parking.

NatGeo TOPO! map: Whitetop Mountain

NatGeo Trails Illustrated map: Mount Rogers High Country; Mount Rogers National Recreation Area; Appalachian Trail, Damascus to Bailey Gap; New River Blueway

Other maps: Mount Rogers High Country & Wilderness map available at the Mount Rogers Visitor Center on VA 16 north of Troutdale; Appalachian Trail Map 1: Mount Rogers National Recreation Area available from Appalachian Trail Conference, Harpers Ferry, WV

From Troutdale: Drive south on VA 16. In 7 miles, turn right onto US 58. It is another 7.6 miles on US 58 to the Grayson Highlands State Park entrance road, VA 362. Turn right onto VA 362 and, in 3.3 miles, turn right into the Massie Gap parking area. There is parking for fifty cars, picnic tables, and interpretive signs. If you are backpacking in the High Country, park in a separate lot accessed via the campground road. GPS: N36 38.404′ / W81 30.541′. DeLorme: Virginia Atlas & Gazetteer: Page 23, D5.

You reach a point climbing Mount Rogers’s north slope where nature gets a little giddy. A relatively tame, wooded mountainside slips into a jumble of cliff and rock outcrops. In a short span of trail, large boulders appear. Down a steep grade on the right is a cliff and, at the base of the cliff, a shallow cave formed by the overhanging rocks. A birch tree grafts on exposed roots of another birch. A cleaved rock exposes the entire root system of a hemlock growing out its top side. The trail becomes more streambed than dirt footpath. On rainy days, runoff will trickle underfoot. All that’s missing, really, is a big sign: “Welcome to 5,000 Feet. Enjoy Your Stay.”

That’s a magic number, 5,000. In the whole Blue Ridge chain, from southern Pennsylvania to north Georgia, only seven peaks exceed that threshold. Two of them stand in Virginia. One, Whitetop Mountain, has a road leading to the top. It’s tempting to say the same about Mount Rogers, judging by the number of people who climb it every year. In truth, Mount Rogers, namesake for the 117,000-acre national recreation area, harbor for remnant boreal forests and threatened species, is in a class all its own.

Mount Rogers hasn’t always enjoyed fame. For two centuries after colonial settlement in Virginia, it was just another obstacle to westward travel. During his 1728 survey of the “dividing line” between Virginia and North Carolina, Colonel William Byrd never reached the peak, thwarted as he was by the Blue Ridge Mountains, which he described from afar as “ranges of blue clouds.” Byrd’s group turned for home, frustrated by slow progress through “troublesome thickets and underwood,” and the Southern Appalachians remained the “back of the beyond,” as Horace Kephart described them, until a series of scientific explorations in the early 1800s. Not that the mountains remained unsettled. Pioneers were followed by mining and logging, but the region as a whole remained a place where people in neighboring hollows could pass a lifetime meeting only once or twice.

As it happens, the honor for mapping Mount Rogers goes to William Barton Rogers, Virginia’s first state geologist. Rogers climbed the mountain during his geologic survey of Virginia in 1836, a mission ordered by the state legislature. These first decades of the 1800s were a busy time for scientists. States up and down the East Coast were interested in exploiting their mineral, plant, and animal resources. Rogers’s brother, Henry Darwin Rogers, had conducted a geologic survey for Pennsylvania. Based on information gathered, the Rogers brothers published their famous theory on the Appalachian Mountains, a theory that generated some controversy for its assumption that the earth was at least several million years old. It’s a notion few question today, but in the 1800s, the scientists who believed in creationism—that God created the world in a single moment—condemned Rogers’s work. As it turns out, the criticism proved merely a warm-up for Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, published in 1859, and the work of biologist Asa Grey, who wrote of similarities between plants found in East Asia and North America.

Rogers didn’t need to span continents in search of similar flora among regions far-removed from one another. Atop Mount Rogers, the fir-spruce forest indicates a mixing of temperate and cold-weather plants. At its highest points grow northern hardwoods, red spruce, and mountain wood sorrel wildflower. There are northern flying squirrels and birds such as the chestnut-sided warbler (its call: a slow please, please, pleased to meet you) and Swainson’s thrush (its call: a whit and a heep). These species, normally associated with northern forests, arrived with the last ice age in North America, when encroaching ice and cold weather pushed habitats south into Virginia. Eventually, the ice receded and so did the flora and fauna—except on high peaks such as Mount Rogers. Naturalists like to describe this peak as a southern sentinel for plants and animals more common to America’s Northeast. The summit also supports stands of Fraser fir, an evergreen that grows no farther north than the crest zone of Mount Rogers.

Mount Rogers, then, stands as a link in a north—south chain of ecosystems, those typically found on cool, moist mountaintops such as Mount Mitchell in North Carolina and the 6,000-foot-plus peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains. It’s a stepping-stone, especially for such birds as the magnolia warbler (its call: weetee weetee weeteo), which has extended its range out of New York and Pennsylvania and into North Carolina and Tennessee.

Mount Rogers is a threatened ecosystem. Many people worry about air pollution, which weakens a tree’s resistance to disease. Survival of Mount Rogers’s spruce-fir trees is fiercely debated, given the almost total obliteration of Fraser fir on Mount Mitchell, 75 miles to the south. The firs on Mount Rogers show resistance to the balsam woolly adelgid, a microscopic pest that coats the crowns of fir trees, leading to defoliation and eventually death. Nonetheless, eerie parallels exist between the trees on Mount Rogers and the hemlocks in Ramsey’s Draft Wilderness and Shenandoah National Park, where the hemlock woolly adelgid is defoliating eastern hemlock at such a rate that park rangers predict virgin stands will soon disappear.

It’s worth looking back over your shoulder as you hike up the Appalachian Trail (AT) toward Wilburn Ridge, savoring another view of a special mountain. Colonel Byrd, the surveyor who never made it this far west, couldn’t help but do so. His reaction rings true today.

We could not forbear now and then facing about to survey them (the mountains), as if unwilling to part with a prospect which at the same time . . . was very wild and very agreeable.

MILES AND DIRECTIONS

0.0Start at Massie Gap parking area in Grayson Highlands State Park. Follow the blue-blazed Rhododendron Trail through an open field. The route is initially a mowed grass path. Within a few hundred yards, cross straight over a graded dirt and gravel path, which is the Virginia Highlands Horse Trail, pass through a gate in a fence, and continue walking north on the Rhododendron Trail. Note: For the first 1.2 miles, this route crosses the horse trail and, very briefly, merges with it.

0.4Veer left onto the Virginia Highlands Horse Trail, which remains a wide dirt and gravel trail.

0.6Turn left onto the white-blazed Appalachian Trail. Note: There is a wooden trail sign with mileage for Mount Rogers summit, Rhododendron Gap, and Thomas Knob Shelter.

1.2Cross a fence stile and enter the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area. Immediately, cross straight over the Virginia Highlands Horse Trail and continue north on the Appalachian Trail. There is a primitive campsite in this area.

1.5Turn left onto Wilburn Ridge Trail. Note: The AT continues straight and both trails will merge in 0.8 mile, just prior to Rhododendron Gap.

1.8Cross over Rhododendron Gap Trail and continue north on Wilburn Ridge Trail.

2.3Wilburn Ridge Trail merges with the AT. Continue straight on white-blazed AT. Note: Between here and Rhododendron Gap, there are numerous primitive campsites.

2.7Cross over Crest Trail and continue straight on the AT. Within a few hundred feet, reach Rhododendron Gap, a trails crossroads marked by a house-size rock outcrop. Bear left and continue following the AT. Note: Keep a sharp eye out for white blazes marking the AT; avoid the Crest Trail and Pine Mountain Trail.

3.2Cross a fence that marks the boundary of the Lewis Fork Wilderness Area.

3.8 Cross another fence and approach Thomas Knob shelter on the left. Note: A blue-blazed trail leads 0.1 mile to a spring.

4.2Turn right onto the Mount Rogers Spur Trail.

4.7Reach the tree-shrouded summit of Mount Rogers, Virginia’s highest point (5,729 feet elevation). Turn around and retrace the trail to Massie Gap.

6.9Option: Continue straight on the AT to cross Wilburn Ridge for an alternate return route to Massie Gap.

9.0Hike ends at Massie Gap parking area.

Appalachian Trail Days, third week in May, Damascus, (276) 475-3831, www.traildays.us. Annual gathering of AT thru-hikers in the town dubbed “friendliest town on the AT”

Virginia Creeper Trail is a 34-mile rail-to-trail from Abingdon to Damascus. Outfitters will transport you and their rental bikes (or yours) to the top of Whitetop for a 17-mile downhill ride to Damascus. www.vacreepertrail.org

The Mt. Rogers Volunteer Fire Department holds three great festivals each year: Maple Festival in Mar, Ramp Festival in May (ramp is a wild onion), Molasses Festival in Oct. www.mtrogersvfd-rs.com

Damascus Old Mill, Damascus, has dining and lodging overlooking a beautiful stream. (276) 475-3745, www.damascusinn.com

More than a half-dozen Damascus residents have turned their homes into bed-and-breakfasts to accommodate the many hikers and bikers who frequent the small town. www.visitdamascus.org.

Damascus Old Mill, (276) 475-3745, www.damascusinn.com. A recently renovated 1912 mill turned restaurant and sports bar with outdoor seating on the banks of Laurel Creek.

Cowboys deli, Damascus, (276) 475-5444. Great southern breakfast located inside a service station.

Mount Rogers Outfitters, Damascus. (276) 475-5416, www.mtrogersoutfitters.com. Located “on the AT” on Laurel Avenue, Damascus’s main street. Great gear, hostel and shuttle services.

Appalachian Trail Guide to Southwest Virginia, Appalachian Trail Conference, Harpers Ferry, WV, (304) 535-6331, www.appalachiantrail.org

40. MOUNT ROGERS SUMMIT