Wild Oak Trail, August 15, 2020

 A small COVID-sized group of hikers went out intending to hike the Flat Run Trail in the GWNF North River District, but after seeing the condition of the North River - likely at flood stage, decided any hike that crosses any water was not a good idea.

The water level chart shows that the water levels are huge on this day.

Note that the median water level is about 2 cubic feet per second.  On this day, it approached 900 feet per second!  It was flowing over one of the bridges we were going to walk over to the trailhead, though there was a dropoff to the river so it was not river flow going over the bridge.

The photo below is the parking lot for Elkhorn Lake.  We walked up that way to look at the lake, but this is the closest we got.

We decided to go to "Plan B," which meant driving over to the Leading Ridge Road and attacking the Flat Run Trail from upstream.  But FR 95 was also under water, just west of its intersection with the Braley Pond Road.  And our married couple hiker pair was having trouble with their Subaru and decided to head back to Staunton to have their vehicle looked at.

That left us with three hikers and one dog.  If we would do any hiking, it would have to be a high trail, so we parked at the Braley Pond Road parking lot for the Wild Oak Trail and headed uphill to the Dowell's Draft Trail, east of the road.  This turned out to be a great hike, as we took the old (pre-mountain bike) version of the trail on the way back.  

Over 5 miles, we ended up hiking only about 25 feet of trail twice.  And the old trail alignment, even though superseded about 5 years ago, was still in really nice shape.  The lack of use meant it was soft with pine needles.

Our exact route was the Wild Oak Trail to the Dowells Draft Trail, the DDT to the Betsy Trail, the Betsy Trail to the WOT, then just after that jump onto the old WOT alignment, and take that back to the parking lot.  There are times where the old and new alignments come so close I thought they were overlapping, but it turned out that never happens.  So the only real access is near the WOT/Betsy Trail intersection.  

For more on this trail, including a map, check out this link: 

http://www.wanderingvirginia.com/2020/08/short-wild-oak-trail-loop-from-braley.html