Shenandoah National Park

2019-06-26
Shenandoah National Park, VA

I took a few months off after my previous road trip, but I'm finally traveling again to places worth talking about. Shenandoah is the closest National Park, a mere 5 hours from my home. Thus it is a bit hard to explain why it's the thirty-third park I've visited, after parks that are up to 5000 miles away. It's just sort of the way it happened. And even after deciding it would be the next park, it was still quite challenging. I booked a camp site twice only to see the weather forecast degrade into a series of thunderstorms. I gladly spent the $10 to cancel the reservations; you couldn't pay me that much to walk in thunderstorms by my house, much less on a mountain. For the third attempt I kept my eye on the weather, and when the week looked good four days in advance I took advantage. It's not too difficult to book a campsite on a Wednesday and Thursday night.

Shenandoah was designed from the beginning around automobiles, and Skyline Drive is the key feature of the park. It is a wonderful 105 mile road that traverses through the park along the tops of the mountains with a number of places to stop and enjoy the views. Also, everything you want to visit is based on the mile markers; for example, I stayed at the Big Meadows Campground which is at mile 51.

The travel was uneventful which is great for the traveler, but doesn't make for any good stories for the blog reader. We'll see if I can do better next time.

The campground itself was very nice. I was able to get a site in the "no generator" area, which is a huge plus (unless you happen to have a generator, of course.) The campground was also on the Appalachian Trail so a number of through-hikers grabbed sites for the night as well. If you're not familiar with the Appalachian Trail (or AT), it runs through 14 states from Georgia to Maine and generally takes the hard way through any local terrain, cresting mountains and fording rivers for thousands of miles. Every year hundreds of people tackle the trail, with only a about 20% completing it, and for them it consumes roughly 5-6 months.

I'm sure the through-hikers have amazing tales to tell, but my campsite was next to Roger and Karen. They are doing a local practice camping excursion to prepare for their trip to Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. They have an amazing amount of gear stuffed into the back of their Acura SUV (floor to ceiling) and are cooking fine cuisine for supper. Their tent is six feet tall and includes a two-foot-tall air bed. It is, all in all, exactly what I would expect a Sheikh to have. I think it will make for great stories if they can continue this standard of living for the duration of the trip. (My one suggestion to them was to check out plastic bins!)

The wildlife is as indifferent as any I've seen. There is a deer grazing four feet off the road, hardly looking up as people walk their dogs past. The birds seem to stake out different camp sites, and the ones assigned to my site do not care in the least that I'm using it as well. They will be very disappointed with the haul here since I follow the rules and don't leave scraps. Now a deer is wandering through my camp site; I have no idea why the grass here was better than across the road where there are no tents.