I hiked both of these trails this week, in Shenandoah National Park.
They were about as different as two east-coast hikes spring hikes can get.
Each had its merits.
Little Devil’s Stairs circuit hike.
This is a difficult hike. And a popular one. And a spectacular one. It’s on the eastern slope of the northern portion of Shenandoah National Park. You can find dozens of on-line writeups of it, so let me offer you my spin on it, rather than the details.
The roughly 2.2 mile uphill portion — the Little Devils Stairs trail — is an hours-long hike, alongside, above, across, and sometimes in a rushing mountain stream.
There are no spectacular falls on this hike. Instead, what you get for your trouble is a walk next to a continuous series of cascades, as Keyser Run makes its way down the jumble boulders that fill the bottom of its canyon.
Roughly speaking, the first hour of the hike was nice. The second hour was the steep and sometimes difficult “rock scramble” portion. The last half-hour or so is on tame trail switchbacking out of Keyser Run’s canyon.
Beyond the stairs (below upper right) lies the hard part of the trail. You enter a canyon, in which you and the stream work your way over the rocks. In spots, the trail lacks markings, yet is easy to follow. That happens when there’s no place to put the trail, other than what you’re standing on.
I now understand why blog posts about this hike don’t show you the toughest bits of it. That’s because you’re clinging to rocks/trees with both hands, and the last thing you’re going to do is stop and whip out your cell phone.
I’m a 66-year-old man in decent shape. As a kid, trails like this were fun. As an old man, not so much.
If nothing else, now I need to use trekking poles for my own safety. But you need to use your hands to climb, for parts of this, which makes the otherwise-crucial trekking poles a dead nuisance for those parts. I ended up tossed the trekking poles up ahead of me, climbing up using hands and feet. And repeating. If nothing else, that beats messing around with trekking poles (on/off stow/unstow) while standing on a rocky ledge. Or climbing with them dangling from your wrists.
To be clear, for me, this was not a particularly tiring climb. It was a difficult climb. In many places, it was a challenge to work your way up, in places where a fall would have had major consequences. Not only did it demand some caution, there were a few places where it was just plain difficult just to find any way to hoist myself up. Let alone a safe way.
And what, if anything, did I learn from this experience? I wasn’t flexible enough to do some of the maneuvers I’d like to have done, getting up the toughest bits of the “rock scrambles” on this trail. This was mostly due to stiff joints, but also due to tight jeans (permethrin-treated, see prior post on ticks). Muscle wasn’t the issue. For one boulder, I gave up and did what you’re not supposed to do, I turned my back to the rock. And sat on it. Then swung my legs up, rolled over, and stood up. That was the only feasible way up, for me. Getting from prone to standing, in a tight space, above a steep rocky drop, was not quite white-knuckle, but not quite not, either. It was a slow, careful, and thought-through maneuver, for sure. I leaned on the rocks now above me. And, obviously, I did not fall and die. So, what did I learn? At the minimum, wear shorts. And I need to work on my flexibility. Maybe. I hate working on flexibility.)
In particular, I think the only way to hike this circuit is counter-clockwise, as shown. Many people say that, including the U.S. Park Service’s published guide to this hike. It was hard enough going up the Little Devil’s Stairs trail. I don’t think I could descend that trail safely.
There is one tiny overlook, just past where you turn left and walk downhill on the Keyser Run fire road. The interesting thing about this overlook is that you can hear Little Devil’s Stairs from a mile away. It does not surprise me to learn that this name — Little Devils Stairs — is on maps that pre-date the creation of Shenandoah National Park in 1935, although a trail at that location does not appear on maps until the 1960s. From what I could tell.
The downhill return is easy. At a trail crossing marked “Fourway” on the map, turn left on Keyser Run fire road, and stroll down that broad, gently-sloped fire road, back to the trail head parking lot. If nothing else, it gives you time to decompress, after the hairier parts of the hike. That part of the walk is about 3.3 miles, and took maybe 1.5 hours, including a break to enjoy the overlook.
The Little Devils Stairs trail head is about an an hour-and-a-half’s drive west of Vienna VA. If you know where Washington, VA is, you can find it. My car was the only car in the trail-head parking lot when I started on the trail around 6:45 AM. The lot was not-quite-full when I returned there around 11:30 AM. This, on a Wednesday before schools around here let out for summer.
Browntown Trail
This hike is the complete opposite of Little Devil’s Stairs. It’s an easy six-mile out-and-back on a seemingly nondescript trail. But it holds an interesting secret. It’s the remains of a very good, very old road.
This is an easy hike. You walk a gentle slope down an overgrown, disused road. Walk about three miles, downhill, until you reach a paved road at the other end. And walk back. I don’t think it took me four hours including breaks.
This hike is extremely not popular. Odds are excellent that you’ll have the woods to yourself. Near as I can tell, nobody takes this trail. In one spot, you walk on moss-covered rocks. But moss is fragile and grows slowly. A trail does not stay moss-covered if even few people walk on it. Ergo, few have walked here in recent years.
Perhaps that’s because there’s nothing much to see. It’s just a pleasant trail through the woods, to nowhere. Or, to Browntown, which from my viewpoint, is close enough.
This is on the western slope of the northern portion of Shenandoah National Park. It starts at Gravel Springs Gap on Skyline Drive. You must start at the top, and return walking uphill, because there’s no legit place to park where this trail ends on VA 631, Gooney Manor Loop.
If you park anywhere near where the pavement ends, at the bottom of the trail, you’ll screw up access for the heavy equipment company located up that gravel road. As I was reminded, by the truck operator who stopped, rolled down his window, and told me that. (I think. It was too loud, next to that truck, to catch what he said, but that’s the gist of it. As soon as I said “I’m parked on Skyline Drive”, it was all good, he rolled up his window, and we both moved on.
Also of note, in the past, running events were held using this trail, and in that case, parking was arranged up the road in Browntown, not at the (nominal) trail head.) So don’t park there.
here’s what’s weird about this hike.
The walking was good, despite a seriously overgrown trail with a lot of blowdowns on it. But at some point, it struck me that it was too good. Extremely even slope and grade. A nicely crowned road. No low muddy spots.
Way too good for a typical Park Service fire road. This was a nicely-graded road bed. Seemed no worse than some of the gravel roads I’d driven lately. Pretty sure that if you brush-hogged it, I could drive my car up it.
Eventually I saw what I hope is clear, above. This nice, level walk was courtesy of a series of massive dry (un-mortared) stone retaining walls. So large and so old that they blend into the rocky landscape. Only when the precise arch of the top of the wall catches your eye do you realize you’re walking on top of them. And have been, off and on, for quite some time.
This is a very old road.
For sure, this road has been here since at least the time of the Civil War. A map from that era marks this road as “very rough” and shows no switchbacks on it. This tells me the road had not yet been improved to its current state. In the context of 1860’s-era roads, nobody would consider the current Browntown trail to be a rough road.
Source: Library of Congress, this reference, “Sketch of parts of Warren, Rappahannock, and Culpeper counties, Virginia, …”, dated 1860s.
But just a decade later, this road appears on an 1875 U.S. Army map of the area, switchbacks meticulously noted. Again courtesy of the Library of Congress, at this link.
That 1875 era coincides with a boom in tanning, logging, and lumber industries around Browntown (per the Browntown Community Center website, as well as the National Park Service). And by that point, the switchbacks must have been there, as they are depicted in detail on the map 1875 above. (Note that the same map depicts the nearby (and long-gone) “Dapps Gap? Dades?” route as a crude road (broken lines), with no switchbacks. So this road was, at that time, known to be some sort of well-improved road.
In any case, from the look of the dry-stone retaining walls, and the map above, I’m betting this road was in place, in more-or-less its present form, by 1875 or so. For what purpose, I can’t say. I’m guessing the road improvements had to do with the logging/tanning industries that had recently developed around Browntown. At the minimum, all sources agree that the road was already there when Shenandoah National Park was made in 1935. (And that all the old-growth forest had been clear-cut.) In any case, somebody went to a lot of trouble to make this road, more than a century ago.
That well-constructed road bed endures, but now, it’s just fading away. On late 20th century maps, the full length of the trail was noted, as shown below. But modern maps, starting with the current US topo map, no longer even note the presence of the trail outside of the National Park boundary. That, even though that trail is still there, and is as passable as the part inside the National Park.
Source: A 1975 topo map of the area, Library of Congress, this link.
In the end, it turned out to be an interesting hike. But not for anything I’d have known about ahead of time.
