Post #2146: Front Royal to Skyline Drive hike

If you have a hankering for walking uphill, this hike should satisfy it.

This is a twelve-and-a-half-mile out-and-back. This is mostly just walking uphill to the ridge, then walking flat trail along the ridge, until you get to Skyline Drive. No views. No unique features. Just a nice steady climb. For me, this was a bit over six hours of walking, with a car-door-to-car-door time of 6 hours 45 minutes.

You start from Route 522 outside Front Royal, VA, and gain about 1600 feet of elevation as you hike up the Appalachian Trail to Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park.

Then return, and so get your fill of downhill on the way back.

It’s a nice hike.

Warning

There was one spot where I genuinely had one of those “I probably should not be here” moments. This was half-way up a tough passage, where the Appalachian Trail switchbacks steeply up what is, for want of a better term, an ancient and eroded cliff-face.

Three crossings of that boulder field? Four? I lost count, as I zig-zagged from bad to worse, in short order.

The fun came in two parts, for this stretch of the trail.

First, at some point, taking a breather on the uphill, I looked back, and said … that’s going to be dangerous, on the downhill. Then I realized there was absolutely no way to get back to my car unaided except by going back down that trail. And that looked unappealing.

If I’d known I’d be here, I wouldn’t be here. That’s certainly the crux of the “oh shit” moment, where your thoughts turn from “I wouldn’t choose to be here” to “I really don’t want to be carried off the mountain.”

But in addition, you don’t get to see what’s ahead, on the trail, until you’re there. That is, at the next bend in the trail — the next switchback. Only then can you see around the corner, to see what’s up next.

And one of those corners was, I think, the ictus of my brief “oh shit” moment.

Up was unappealing. Down was unappealing. It was not an appealing situation.

I stuck with “up”. Obviously, I got up that brief cliff-climb.

After that, except for the rain, it was a lovely two-mile stroll in the woods. During which I kept worrying about my ability to get back down that rocky passage.

I did, no surprise.

Just outside of Shenandoah National Park itself, the AT more-or-less climbs a little cliff face. And you’d best be prepared to do that, or don’t do this hike.

Figuring that out, halfway through, was less than optimal.

In the end, it wasn’t a stopper. But if I’d been in the shape I was in my earliest hikes this year, that could have been a real problem.

And I got to hike in the rain.

Not a complaint. I am fond of hiking in the rain. I don’t know why.

The rain was scheduled to move in slowly around 2 PM. By which time, I should have been home. But the rain showed up a few hours early.

The slow onset of the rain was pleasant, while hiking through National Park forest land. It starts with the sound of it. Maybe I was hearing raindrops, maybe it’s just gusts of wind through the leaves. Whatever it is, it’s faint enough to ignore.

Wishful thinking evaporated when I finally got hit squarely by a raindrop. I got to my destination — a parking lot on Skyline Drive — and pulled on a cheap rain parka. After snapping a pic of the mile marker, I sat down to eat my last PB&J, only to think better of it, stow my poles, and start walking down the trail, sandwich in hand.

I don’t mind walking in the rain, but I’d prefer to go down that rocky passage before it’s all wet.

Which brings me to the critical subject of trekking pole tips.

Do you choose rubber tips or (native) carbide tips, for your trekking poles?

To test this, I deedled my trekking poles on my most recent prior hike. (That is, one shoe off and one shoe on.) One pole with the carbide tip exposed, the other with small rubber “crutch tip” on the end.

Near as I can tell, there’s no law against doing that.

I conclude that main advantage of the “crutch tips” is that that the poles don’t dig up the trail, when the trail is dirt. That’s about it, around here. The tips don’t seem to make the poles quieter, because the tips themselves are made out of hard rubber.

The main disadvantage, in practice, is that that “crutch tips” will slip on dirt when pushed at extreme angles. Whereas, at that same angle, the native carbide tips stab holes into the dirt, and hold.

Which is, in a nutshell, also the problem with the carbide tips. You end up poking 2″ deep, 1/2″ diameter holes in whatever soil is on the trail. And those holes tend to cluster (e.g., at places where you step up or down).

For this hike, I put the “crutch tips” on. I didn’t see a need to dig up the trail. This wasn’t supposed to be that hard of a hike.

I took the crutch tips off — and went with carbide — on the descent of the rock passage just outside Shenandoah National Park, noted above. Carbide seems to stick unambiguously better on rock, than do rubber crutch tips.

In any case, the climb down was far easier in real life, than it had been in my imagination. I didn’t feel the least bit unsafe. That said, safe passage here requires good ability to balance. In hindsight, if I encountered something like this on my earliest hikes, it would have been dangerous.

Google Maps sometimes grossly understates hike distances.

Just putting this in, for the record, as it has been noted elsewhere on the internet.

Here, per Google Maps, this hike is 4.4 miles, one way. The hike distance, per the AT marker at Skyline Drive, is actually 6.3 miles, one way, or 12.6 for the round-trip.

That’s a material discrepancy.

The commonly-offered explanation of that (Google Maps shows you point-to-point distance) is obviously wrong, and easily shown to be wrong. People will say that Google simply gives you straight-line point-to-point mileage for trails on its maps. Here, the point-to-point was a little under 4 miles. So that’s obviously not how Google arrived at 4.4 miles.

I suspect that Google shows you a sum of point-to-point distances the string of straight-line segments that, for Google Maps, is the trail. It just skips over any small-scale side-to-side variation in the trail, as walked.

In particular, the set of switchbacks belabored above does not show up on Google Maps’ version of this trail. Nor do any of the many sets of switchbacks on this trail show up as wiggles in Google Map’s version of this trail.

In hindsight, I think Google so grossly understated the length of this section of trail because this trail has a lot of switchbacks. There are many nicely-done sections of switchbacks, keeping the slope of the trail down. I think Google’s distance calculation more-or-less draws a straight line through features of that scale. Would not surprise me a bit to think that the length of all those switchbacks adds up to more-or-less the discrepancy between the Google Maps estimate of hike length, and the actual on-the-trail distance as stated by the AT marker.