Getting to know Shenandoah National Park

Our first full day at Shenandoah National Park. 

The wind was constantly blowing through the night and into the morning. You could hear it coming, building up through the trees as it came closer, until finally our tent is enveloped by a breeze. Its not really loud but just a constant sound. I pay a lot for sleep machine apps to get the same white noise experience.

It was a little chilly in the morning too. I mean we are at 3,200 ft elevation basically tucked along the ridge line that makes up Shenandoah. Cold and windy seem like they should be expected.

We puttered around with our breakfast, packing lunches and finally left the campsite around 10am towards the Big Meadow area just north of our campground. We wanted to check out the Visitor Center and get some information about short hikes we could do.

The Visitor Center was really nice. It had interesting exhibits about how the park came to be. Hundreds of homesteader families that resided within the new park boundary were relocated to communities outside the park. This was justified by the park achieving a "greater good" for the public and deeming that the mountain folk were too simple-minded to function without intervention by the government. It made me want to go back and watch the Ken Burns series on National Parks that I love. 

The visitor center overlooks a beautiful meadow, but the ranger said if we wanted to hike the meadow we would need to take "extra" tick precautions. Instead we opted for a short out and back trail that the ranger said had lots of blooming mountain laurel.

We got to the Limberlost Trail and it was really beautiful. Lots of mountain laurel just starting to bloom. It was supposed to be a short trail out and back because the bridge that would make it a loop was closed. I spotted my first Eastern Towhee on a nearby branch. We walked for maybe 15 minutes before someone in our party decided that they needed to go #2. I won't embarrass anyone by calling them out by name. We turned back around. And said person who had to go #2 dawdled her way back, collecting flowers and moss, watching butterflies. There was no bathroom at the trail head so we hightailed it back to the visitor center.

Hikers are ready!

This beautiful mountain laurel lined the entire trail on both sides.

After our bathroom detour it was getting close to lunch so we decided to drive a little ways north to a picnic site at Pinnacles. We had our picnic, relaxed and then decided to drive a little ways more. Well sure enough Lucia fell asleep, so we kept driving until we got to the Dickey Ridge Visitor Center at the north entrance of the park. 

Paul and I were both exhausted, so we all took a nap in our car in the shade. Apparently while we were napping we missed a black bear on one of the nearby trails. We were so tired we didn't care.

Our cell phone reception was cutting in and out the whole time we were at Shenandoah. It would come in just enough to notify us of messages, but not enough to load services or send anything out. After we came to from our nap in the car Paul awoke to a series of weather warnings on his phone including thunderstorm and tornado warnings. So we ran into the visitor center to go to the bathroom and drove the 50 miles back to the campground. We were hoping to outrun any weather, save our camp chairs from being drenched and avoid being in the car during a possible tornado. Well we didn't outrun the first round of rain and hit a heavy downpour on Skyline Drive. However, when we made it back to camp and it hadn't rained there!

Things actually looked pretty clear in the sky and we were feeling a little antsy from being in the car all afternoon after our mostly failed morning hike, so we decided to do a short hike on a trail by our campsite. We crossed the Appalachian Trail and hiked up the Lewis Mountain trail. It was a nice hike up but as we rounded the top it looked like more rain clouds were forming, so we hiked quickly back to the campsite.

This girl is a hiking machine!

Not much of a view, but still felt good to get to the top

Our rain plan was to eat dinner in the car or hang out in the tent, depending on what time it hit. So we scrambled to put away our camp chairs and dig some food out of the cooler in the trunk. And sure enough it started to rain, so we hopped in the car and had snacks and sandwiches for dinner. The rain didn't last long and it must have been the edge of the storm, it didn't rain too heavily. So after our dinner in the car we had a window where we could get ready for bed and clean up. Just as it was getting dark we climbed into the tent for the night as it started sprinkling again. We got in the tent feeling like we dodged the rain pretty well...until Paul felt a big drop of rain on his head IN THE TENT. We looked up and the "rain fly" on our ten year old Coleman tent was pretty much weeping water onto our tent, which was then dropping into the tent. We had an extra blue tarp in the car somewhere but Paul thought he could mitigate the situation a little by tightening up the rain fly. So he went out in the rain and tightened it so it wasn't touching the tent. He came back in and it had seemed to help a little but it didn't change the fact that the seams of the rain fly, which had already been taped once, were just no longer waterproof. Paul's sleeping bag was wet, mine was a little as well. Lucia's in the middle was ok, so we just accepted our fate and went to bed.

Here's a few more photos from the day in slideshow format with a bonus video clip at the end: