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  And the old trail alignment, even though superseded about 5 years ago, was still in really nice shape.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

Sinks of Gandy, WV 8/1/2020

On August first, several PATC-Charlottesville members traveled several hours to West Virginia to take an unusual hike.  They hiked along a stream that cut under a mountain for over a mile before exiting from under the other side of the mountain. 

The Sinks of Gandy is known as West Virginia's most popular "wild cave," meaning one that is not a tour-driven tourist cave.  It is located a few miles west of Spruce Knob, the highest point in West Virginia.  Although surrounded by lands encompassing the Monongahela National Forest, the cave itself is on private land.  That land is for sale, so the hike leader wanted to get back out there in case it sold and the new owners refused access.  Fortunately, the land is not cheap, so it has been on the market for several months as of this writing. 

The cave itself is flat - no ropes needed - and high.  There were only a couple of spots requiring hikers to duck their heads.  It was like walking through a stream bed in the dark.

Several in the group had hiked much of this cave before, but could not complete it because they could not find how to proceed after hiking deep into the cave.  This time, they started from the downstream end and headed back to the main entrance, figuring that might provide the answer.  But after exploring several side rooms, the group did not find a connection to the rest of the cave.  So they exited and went back around to the main entrance.

Most of the group made it back to the spot where some had turned around a couple of years previously, still without an answer about how to connect to the downstream end.  Unfortunately, the answer did not come until after we all exited, in the form of a New York-based doctor we met at the parking lot who claimed to have grown up in the area and hiked the cave annually since age 10.   He described the connection and where we had gone wrong.  He said many people get stuck at that same spot. We were too spent to go back in and try again to see if his description was correct.  Maybe someday.

The cave actually made it very easy to be socially distant from other hikers.