Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 4, 1990 TAG: 9007070144
SECTION: MOUNT ROGERS PAGE: 1-7 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: BILL COCHRAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
There is enough grade here, on the Appalachian Trail, that no one has to remind you it's an uphill grind, but if you anticipate a craggy, Alps-like peak towering snow-capped into the clouds, you could be disappointed. Mount Rogers is more like the rounded shoulders of an aging shopkeeper.
What counts isn't how steep the trail gets, but how far back it takes you - back to another era, another ecosystem, another part of the country. Every view, no matter what direction, harbors something lovely, even rare.
Early morning, when it still is dark, you could ride with a stranger into the high country on horseback through grasses and sedges and clumps of spruce trees stirred by the wind, and when the sun came up and turned everything into Montana or Wyoming he'd swear it wasn't Virginia.
Tom Heffernan likes to do that, guide people along the Virginia Highlands Horse Trail, which begins at the New River and climbs to the south face of Mount Rogers. He took a rider from Wyoming once.
"The first time he got up on that mountain, he couldn't believe it," Heffernan said. "A big grin came across his face. `I'm home!' he said."
Mount Rogers is like a loaf of homemade bread that didn't quite rise. Although it is over a mile high - 5,729 feet - one of the highest peaks east of the Mississippi, it fails to give that dramatic impression because the grassy foothills encompassing it often already are 4,500 feet or better. They have little chance to descend into distant valleys before they are asked to rise again toward new peaks.
Nearby, to the southwest, is Whitetop Mountain, 5,540 feet, and to the east, Pine Mountain, 5,526 feet, all part of the 154,000-acre Mount Rogers National Recreation Area. Most of it is set in the Jefferson National Forest, headquartered in Roanoke.
On a day when the clouds are low, hovering in the warmer valleys like a great sea, and the mountains project above them, bathed in the sun, the high country becomes an island in the sky.
In a sense, the region always has been that, isolated by altitude and climate and, some will say, the lack of highways and jobs. This has made it a refuge for the remnants of plants and animals and cultures that set the region apart.
"Every thousand feet you go up is like going 600 miles north," Doug Ogle said
An associate professor of biology at Virginia Highlands Community College, Ogle first visited Mount Rogers with his father 30 years ago. They traveled in an old Ford pickup and had to put chains on just to reach their jumping-off spot, Elk Garden Gap.
"Up on top, we had to get down and crawl. The limbs of the spruce and fir trees had grown all the way to the ground and they were dead. You couldn't see maybe but 15 or 20 feet."
You can see farther now, but not much. Some of the limbs have been trimmed for trails; still, there are no God-like vistas from the top. Go just below the spruce, however, and you will find plenty of that.
Ogle has been lured back every year since that first visit, his spirit heartened by the sight of so many rare plants and animals, and such space.
The region is so compelling that some who live there, or who visit, fight to preserve the solitude and serenity, caring little if no one else shows up. Others view it as a door waiting to be opened to tourism and development, an opportunity to share something special with the world and make a little money while doing it.
Those differences were creating a struggle even before May 31, 1966, when Congress passed the Mount Rogers Act, which established the national recreation area. It is an issue nowhere near being resolved. In fact, it has intensified recently with talks of widening, or even rebuilding, U.S. 58 - the Wilderness Trail - which corkscrews through the terrain like a sow's tail.
The Mount Rogers National Recreation Area is shaped like a 60-mile-long upright vacuum cleaner, the handle pointing eastward. It starts at the New River near Ivanhoe and parallels the south side of Interstate 81 to the Tennessee-North Carolina line west of Damascus. The 6,000-acre Grayson Highlands State Park is connected to the southwest end and is so much a part of the package that the casual visitor doesn't know where one begins and the other leaves off.
The scepter of the region is the high country south of Marion. You leave behind the northern hardwood ridges, climb past the 4,500-foot mark and enter a magical world unlike anywhere else in Virginia. Much of it is roadless and open only to the hiker, horseback rider or cross-country skier. A mile on a trail here will take you farther than 100 miles on an ordinary footpath.
When the Ice Age retreated, something over 10,000 years ago, it left behind a spruce-fir forest in the Mount Rogers-Whitetop-Pine Mountain region, a bit of a Canadian boreal clinging to some of the highest peaks of the Southern Appalachians.
Around the turn of the century, much of the deep-green sea of tangled conifers fell to the bite of crosscut saws when loggers came with smoke-billowing Shay engines to haul away 300-year-old spruce that were 4 feet in diameter. It was well before the era of public quarrels over trees of great antiquity.
After the high country was denuded, fires burned the slashings and scorched the shallow earth. In time, the crest zone reverted to green balds and grasslands where livestock grazed amid rhododendron gardens, rock outcroppings and isolated clumps of spruce trees.
The chunk of Canada gone astray became something of a windy prairie crest, with big-sky views in every direction. It is about as close as you can get to Montana or Wyoming, short of a 1,400-mile trip.
"I think that particular part of Southwest Virginia is of exceptional value to the nation: the social and cultural aspects, the history of the area, the beauty of it," said Charlie Blankenship, 56, of Roanoke.
The high point of Blankenship's 34-year career with the U.S. Forest Service was serving as chief planner of the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area. He reflected on that recently during a stay in Port Charlotte, Fla.
"Here I am sitting down here in Florida in some of the prettiest country you ever saw, with snook fishing starting in two weeks, but I'd be back there in a heartbeat," he said.
Similar feelings have been expressed by a multitude of people, from Wilburn Waters, a pioneer bear hunter and wolf trapper who roamed the region in the mid-1800s, to W. Pat Jennings, the six-term congressman from the 9th District who introduced legislation in the mid-'60s to establish the national recreation area.
Jennings first tried to preserve the region, where he grew up, through legislation called the Mount Rogers Wonderland Act. That failed, but when President Johnson's Recreation Advisory Council recommended a system of national recreation areas to meet mounting demands for camping and hiking, Jennings' dream suddenly had wings.
When he retired to Marion in the early '80s, Jennings said his only regret was he hadn't made the recreation area even bigger.
The Mount Rogers high country is always the same, yet ever-changing. Winter, spring, summer and fall each is distinct, and uncommonly cool and wet for Virginia. The landscape drips as if the last glacier is little more than out of sight.
Moisture forms as dew that rolls down wide, waxy rhododendron leaves like tears on a baby's face.
It rides the winds of fronts that send angry-looking clouds galloping across the horizon at treetop level to take captive what has been a sun-splashed day. It can hang around as a wet sponge of summit fog for a week at a time.
It comes bubbling out of the rocky crevices to become rills that trickle through lush ferns. It forms pools large enough to hold brightly marked native brook trout.
In the winter, it falls as snow - often deep, lingering snow. It can encase the landscape quickly, backpackers such as Jeff Coleman of Roanoke discover.
"When we got up on top Friday and got the tent pitched, it was just beautiful," he said following a late February outing.
Then it snowed.
"It kept snowing and snowing and before long it was burying our tent," Coleman said.
The wide, trackless expanses, far from lift lines and lodges, are ideal for cross-country skiing. When fresh out of nature's snow gun, the cold, puffy powder is so fine it dissipates in a smokelike wake as skinny skis squeak across it.
One of the most impressive cold-weather moods of the high country occurs when cloud vapors freeze and every tree branch, every shrub, every stem of grass is glazed in a caress of ice. It is correctly termed rime, but some mountain people call it hoarfrost - those times glazed trees become crystal chandeliers that sparkle in the sun and tinkle in the breeze.
When rime spreads swaths of fragile and delicate beauty in every direction, it is a time for pausing long enough to smell the icicles, but visitors always must be aware that nature weaves beauty and compassionless treachery as one.
Too often hikers will leave their car in the warmer foothills and, wearing lightweight jackets, jeans and tennis shoes, climb into the high country. Fog or cold rain or darkness can fall on them with the suddenness of a steel trap, and they are lost.
"It happens several times a year," said Larry Grimes, the U.S. Forest Service ranger who is the administrator of the national recreation area.
In the high country, hard luck has a way of making a swift turn toward tragedy any season, but those odds increase during the winter when wet boots can become blocks of ice at night. Most of the disoriented make it out, but there have been exceptions.
A couple of third-year students from the Medical College of Virginia left their car at the edge of the crest zone in mid-December 1982, expecting to be back from their hike before dark.
In the fog and rain, they made the wrong turn. Snow obscured reference points.
The woman began complaining of dizziness. She tripped over obstacles and became delirious.
Her companion told her to stay put while he looked for a way out.
Night fell.
The next morning, he heard rescue party members calling over a loudspeaker. Three hours later they located the woman. She was dead.
Thomas Waters III, 42, lives three miles due north of Whitetop. He is the great-great-nephew of Wilburn Waters, and he likes being hooked up that way with the old mountain man.
"I guess I have Wilburn's genes in me," he said.
Thomas is a trapper who raises silver and red foxes that grow thick pelts in the bracing altitude. Prices for hides have been down this year. "I am coming out poor on that end." So he drives 30 minutes or so most days to work as a carpenter. "It is up and down, back and forth."
He is happiest those times when he can defy the cult of haste to leisurely roam the crest zone.
"I love to get out and walk it and think about how it was years ago. I may have been born too late."
His famous ancestor, Wilburn, was born Nov. 20, 1812, in Wilkes County, N.C. At age 20, he ventured into the vicinity of Whitetop Mountain, named for the fine grass that grows on a rare natural bald to glisten like a glacier in the distance.
Wilburn's feats as a wolf trapper and bear hunter, and battler of snakes and sometimes society, still are legendary in the area. Some say that with equal press he would have been as famous as Daniel Boone.
Wilburn Ridge, east of Mount Rogers, bears his name and secures him a niche in history. The ridge affords one of the most spectacular views of natural beauty on the East Coast.
Thomas' favorite spot is Rhododendron Gap, between Mount Rogers and Pine Mountain. In June, acres of deep-pink rhododendron blooms run riot across a horizon shaped by the wind.
"There may be some places in the country equal to this, but there is none more beautiful," Larry Grimes said.
A number of rock outcroppings offer convenient, grandstand views where hikers and horseback riders gather to sit in hushed reverence as if in a stained-glass cathedral.
It can appear that anyone who's ever constructed a trail in the region has purposely guided it through Rhododendron Gap. There is the Appalachian Trail, horse trails, new trails, old trails, blue-blaze trails, white-blaze trails. These can become a maze of confusion.
"Everyone I met was either lost or had recently been lost or, like me, was about to become lost. But, I found, it's a wondrous place for being lost," said Ron Fisher, who explored and wrote about the area for the National Geographic Society.
The elitists of the Appalachian Trail trudge through the Mount Rogers area April through June. These are 2,000-milers who begin their laborious journey in late winter in Georgia and end it in early winter in Maine.
As many as 150 end-to-enders gather at Damascus in mid-May to pig out and party during the town's Appalachian Trail Days Celebration. They join in a parade with the townspeople, eat barbecued chicken at the firehouse, and square dance on the post office parking lot.
"There is not a town on the trail where the people are so giving and so friendly and who are so truly happy to see you than they are here in Damascus," said Greg Key, a four-time through hiker from Troutville.
The Monday after the weekend celebration, hikers shoulder their packs and hit the trail. The climb out of Damascus to the Mount Rogers crest zone is 1,000 feet in altitude. It quickly jolts the hikers back to the reality of their undertaking.
"The toughest part of the trail is leaving Damascus," says a new trail guide published for this season. Those making the journey know it isn't referring to physical challenges.
Only the survivors press on toward Rhododendron Gap, Key said. The first quarter of the journey is over. The quitters have caught the bus home. Those still on the trail have matured. They have fine-tuned their equipment. They have discarded items from their pack that they thought they couldn't live without. Their muscles have hardened, their waists narrowed, their lungs expanded. They will leave the region with Mount Katahdin, Maine, on their mind, but Mount Rogers will be in their memory.
Just a small percentage of the hikers on the 60 miles of the Appalachian Trail winding across the Mount Rogers Area are end-to-enders. Most are day hikers, or weekend backpackers. In addition to the white-blazed AT, there are many blue-blazed footpaths. When the mood hits, the hiker-backpacker can leave trails behind and bushwhack across the open country, letting the setting sun decide where he will peg his tent. There is freedom here, and wilderness.
"Lewis Fork Wilderness Area is, in my opinion, the most spectacular of the wilderness areas in Virginia, and one of the most spectacular in the South," Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, said.
Boucher speaks from firsthand knowledge. He is the co-author of legislation that established the 5,730-acre Lewis Fork region as wilderness, one of three wilderness designations in the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area. He also is a backpacker.
"I have a couple of [backpack] camping sites in the Lewis Fork Wilderness that I don't think anybody else knows about. One of them is at the intersection of two creeks, a slightly raised plateau. At night, when you are going to sleep, you can hear the creeks babbling along and you have a nice view of the stars. It is just about the most serene place I've been able to find."
Lewis Fork Wilderness harbors some of the nation's finest growths of Fraser fir trees, nurturing them on carpets of lacy ferns where salamanders crawl along the moist, black soil and lichen-covered rocks.
A child of the Appalachian high country, the Fraser is one of those plants endemic to the isolated peaks of Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee, places that tower skyward 4,500 feet or more. It has the look of the balsam fir of New England and Canada. Some even call it the Southern balsam.
There are tree farmers in the Mount Rogers area who call it money in the bank. Kenny Sexton is one.
"At one time, the Fraser fir was an undesirable kind of plant. It growed so slow it wasn't good for timber and it growed at such high elevation it was hard to get to it," he said. "It was not a very desirable tree to have."
That changed when a man by the name of George West began clearing unwanted Frasers from his Cabin Ridge property, and some people were taking them home for Christmas trees, "just cutting the tops out of them," Sexton said.
Sexton's father, Barm, got the idea of gathering seeds, which mature about every four years, and cultivating Fraser firs for Christmas trees.
"A lot of people thought the old man was crazy, planting his pasture land into trees," Sexton said.
Now Sexton estimates there are 200 to 300 Fraser growers in the Smyth-Grayson-Washington county area, most of them using the crest zone as a seed source for the transplants that they send stretching across the horizon in thin, green lines.
Considered a Cadillac of Christmas trees, the Frasers grow deep green and aromatic in a habitat of bountiful moisture and cool temperatures. A 7-footer will sell for more than $100 in Chicago or Miami or Northern Virginia. Growing them is a multimillion-dollar business.
"It is replacing raising cattle," Sexton said. "It already has replaced raising tobacco. It has been a real blessing. This has come in and helped me and some of the others make a living."
Several thousand acres of the high country are open, alpine meadows. State and federal officials want to keep it that way for aesthetic values and diversity of recreation. To do so, nature, always on a succession binge, must be beaten back.
That explains the 150 ponies that freely graze the area: blacks, bays and dapple grays. Paints and pintos. Even some with the looks of an appaloosa.
Before the ponies, there were sheep, a thousand of them, along with a genuine shepherd and two woolly sheep dogs, hauled in from Wyoming in 1969 by a group of local residents with an eye toward a new business venture. It was a disaster.
"Those sheep weren't accustomed to Eastern vegetation. When they unloaded them, they started eating almost immediately on rhododendron and mountain laurel and it was toxic to them," Larry Grimes said. "A large portion of the herd died right off the bat."
The ponies aren't as proficient at consuming brush as are the prescribed burns used by the Forest Service, but they are more lovable. The sight of a mare and a tag-along colt peering shyly from behind her wind-blown tail can make the day for some visitors.
In the early fall, the ponies are rounded up and the surplus auctioned off the last weekend of September during a celebration at Grayson Highlands State Park. The auction-roundup has none of the notoriety that is lavished on the pony penning of Assateague-Chincoteague on the Eastern Shore, which can draw nearly 50,000 people. Mention Misty at Mount Rogers and most likely it is a reference to the weather, but that doesn't mean the pony affair isn't a class act.
"We think we definitely have a better roundup and we think we have a better-quality pony," Tom Heffernan said.
A Forest Service real estate agent who works out of Wytheville, Heffernan delights in putting on his chaps and spurs and mounting a quarterhorse to ride herd on the ponies or to simply explore the high country.
The crest zone is so wild and spacious that it can make riding elsewhere appear as anemic as a child's bridle path.
"I would say unequivocally it is the best in the East," Heffernan said.
The Wilburn Ridge Horse Association, composed of men and women from several horse clubs, agreed to take care of the ponies not long after they were set loose in the mid-'70s.
The roundups have a distinct Western flair, with riders sleeping on bedrolls under the stars. Plump blueberries are plunked from dew-washed bushes and mixed into pancake batter that is browned in iron skillets over a crackling campfire.
Evolution's clock ticks slowly, but Heffernan believes the ponies already are beginning to show signs of becoming a distinct breed.
"In other words, they adapt to the conditions up there, and they get those real heavy coats. Their feet stay in great shape. The rocks up there are like taking a rasp to their hooves."
Attracted to the auctions are the kind of buyers that the horse association desires.
"The far majority of them are parents, who will have a little girl perched up on their shoulder, or a little boy with them," said Heffernan.
About 25 ponies are sold annually for an average of $70 apiece.
Shortly after the maples and other Northern hardwoods send brilliant streaks and splashes of autumn colors along the fringes of the alpine meadows, the deer season opens.
A favorite spot of hunters is the Scales, reached after a three-mile, tooth-jarring, 5-mph drive up the north side of Pine Mountain to the crest zone. The Jeep trail penetrates a green tunnel and has a tough time deciding whether it wants to be a road or Opossum Creek.
The names of many of the hunters who camp at the Scales are the same as those once on the deeds of the property that stretches across the mountain geography. Both the land and the easy access were given up to the national recreation area.
If you want to hunt beyond the Scales, and most who gather there do, you walk. For two weeks during the deer season, the Scales become a Hooverville. A dozen or more shanty-type camps are corralled by a rail-fence boundary, each hunting group attempting to outwit the other and Mother Nature while teetering between civilization and wilderness.
Few accept that challenge with more ingenuity than an outfit that calls itself 7MA&H. The initials represent the last names of the families who are its members: McGrady, Mitchell, Anderson and Hollingsworth.
For more than 20 years they have come here, their camp growing a bit more elaborate with the passing seasons. A newspaper delivery box with "Mount Rogers Grit and Grunt" painted on it is erected outside the camp door, along with a Mason jar. The jar is not for measuring the frequent precipitation, but for placing nightly bets on the morning temperature. It once hit 10 below.
Deer hunters also have been bringing their own privies, some with gas lanterns hanging inside that give a soft, buttery light through a quarter-moon cut in the door. They are strapped down, like circus tents, with ropes and wires pegged into the soil to keep the fierce winds from sending them sprawling.
The privies have been a querulous subject, because the hunters have said the Forest Service provides them for everyone else, the horseback riders and family campers, but not for them.
"We would try to get them to put some up there," said William Mitchell of Troutdale. "Believe it or not, they did last year."
The privies aren't the real sore spot, of course. What sticks in the craw of the hunters is the fact they were forced off their land in the first place. The prefab camps that go up mid-November to early December are annual reminders that while the men could not hold on to the land, the land always would hold on to them.
The eastern timber wolves that Wilburn Waters trapped are gone, and for a time, so were the black bears he hunted, but they are coming back.
The Department of Game and Inland Fisheries has stocked about 70 of the big animals on the recreation area the past two years.
Most had been trapped and transported from the periphery of Virginia's overflowing bear reservoir, the 300-square-mile Shenandoah National Park north of Waynesboro. They had gotten themselves in trouble with landowners there by trampling cornfields, raiding beehives, and breaking into mountain meat houses. For them, Mount Rogers is a second chance.
"We are moving them into an area where they don't have to be outlaws," said Mack Walls, a biologist from Marion who heads the project for the department.
Mount Rogers offers the bears what they need most - remoteness. Old laws that established lengthy hunting seasons have been purged from the books, and new ones have been set to protect these raven-black animals.
Peregrine falcons also have been reintroduced, and volunteers are poised to see if birds hacked in the region will return to rock outcroppings for nesting.
While bears and falcons are enticing to those drawn to large size and flamboyance, the serious observer is attracted to the region's rich community of more subtle animals and plants - those endemic to the high country or isolated from their kind well to the north.
Some are rare and endangered: among them, the round leaf birch, reported to be the rarest tree species in North America; the northern flying squirrel, on the state's endangered list; the sharp-shinned hawk, the American kestrel and the Bewick's wren, birds listed as threatened.
"Probably the one I like best is the pygmy salamander," Doug Ogle said. "As far as I know, it is the smallest salamander in this country. It is about an inch and a quarter long.
"A lot of them are golden-bronze in color. It is like you have found gold when you roll a rock up and there goes a pygmy salamander."
For Ogle, and others, there is much that glitters about the Mount Rogers area.
by CNB