Snow and ice have changed 4 hikes this year, so I was determined to choose a hike that would be hard to stop, and chose Furnace Mountain from the park boundary. Instead of snow covered Skyline Drive disrupting our plans, we had snow fall on us at the trailhead. However it was light, and the climb kept us warm.
One of our group was from Richmond, where the flat land left him unprepared for the mountain part of Furnace Mountain Trail, but Howard Davis and John Brandt stayed with him, and made sporadic radio contact with me by two way radios, which we found cannot be relied on. More reliable communication was John Brandt loping up and down the trail between the two parts of the group. Most of us went out to the summit and its magnificent overlook of Madison Run. I had mentioned an option of walking further (something missed by some when they saw “less than 5 miles”, but most, perhaps all, were happy to turn around to get out of the cold. Fourteen humans and one dog were happy to have today’s short walk up a mountain and see the Shenandoah Valley.
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