Peak Otter

Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia

Last week I talked about visiting Harper’s Ferry, a place to which I know I’ll return. Those two scorching days limited our enjoyment of the area, and my stubbornness at refusing to not take a hike and a bike ride wore me out the next day, when we headed for Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park. So we only stopped for scenic vistas, and took no hikes on that road. Which means I’ll be returning there, too.

Which is a good thing, because the winery we stayed at in Front Royal was lovely. Veritas has beautiful grounds, and a great kitchen with rotating chefs. We arrived in time for a wine tasting on the verandah, and nibbled house-cured olives while Eastern Bluebirds sang their hearts out. It was the one evening they don’t serve dinner, so we left for a local brewpub, Blue Mountain Brewery, who brew a few fine beers, and serve good food. There’s a former railroad tunnel turned hiking trail nearby, which leads you underground for a full mile. Another reason to return.

Front Royal, Virginia is where the Blue Ridge Parkway begins in the southern end of Shenandoah Park. Nothing against Skyline Drive, but as West Virginia says: Our Mountains Are Bigger. Which also works for North Carolina. The Blue Ridge Parkway has some beautiful vistas in Virginia, but the mountains get more impressive the further south you go, so I have more photos to share once we get to Carolina. We did skip the stretch of the BRP from Floyd, Virginia all the way to Boone, North Carolina, thanks to a thunderstorm, so I missed the intriguing Meadows of Dan, Puckett Cabin, and Angel Overlook. Next time.

The Blue Ridge Parkway was begun in 1935 and not fully completed until 1987, when the Linville Viaduct was built. The road is two lanes, with scenic overlooks every few miles, and winds its way 469 miles from Afton, Virginia to Cherokee, North Carolina. The speed limit is never higher than 45 and usually is 35 miles per hour, a leisurely pace where you’ll meet thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail, cyclists, vacationers, picnickers, and sportscar drivers there to enjoy its curves. We were passed by a Porsche club early on, and saw a classic convertible or two enjoying the sun—an MG roadster and something with fins from the ‘50s that I passed too quickly to identify—but most of the people we saw were like us; there to see what we could see. While it is a monument to the automobile, seeing it by car—where it often feels that there’s a mountain every minute, or a fork, a valley, a cascade, or a gap—makes you contemplate the immensity of the country and its natural features. There’s no way to see it all. There are 63 National Parks in the United States. There is beauty beyond comprehension, if you take it slow and stop to look.

One place we stopped was Peaks of Otter, specifically because of the name, and to climb Sharp Top Mountain.¹ We saw no otters, but I’ll be honest, we didn’t inspect the lake near the lodge. If you call yourself Peaks of Otter, I expect PEAK OTTER. I want to be greeted by otters galumphing through the entryway of your lodge, bearing chains of water lilies, or perhaps balancing platters of freshwater sashimi on their pudgy snouts. Instead, we had good local beer and a decent fried green tomato sandwich with pimento cheese. I suppose that will have to do.

On Fenwick Island in Delaware, a so-called “wildlife refuge” will allow you to swim with their river otters for a cool three hundred semolians. (As in the champagne room, you are not allowed to touch the performers.) I confess that I was tempted, but knowing that to their prey, otters are violent yard-long aquatic murder weasels, I felt that willingly submerging myself into their element, armored only in swim trunks, was perhaps unwise.

Peaks of Otter may not have delivered in the otter department but it did not disappoint in its peak purview. Sharp Top is an aptly named peak of 3875 feet, and is visible from Lake Abbott below. The bus ride to the top is terrifying for anyone afraid of heights, as the narrow, curvy, single-lane road makes it seem like you are about to careen off the edge at every turn. It was not nearly as harrowing as the bus ride to Obersalzberg in the Austrian alps, but you may want to look at your phone and not out the windows if you might get weak in the knees or bladder.

The taller peak of Flat top (4001 feet) is your view once you get to the top of the trail. I just found out through Wikipedia that the wreckage of a B-25 bomber remains on the mountainside, and I would have hiked to the memorial if I’d known. I guess I’ll have to return to Peaks of Otter, as well. On the bus ride up the mountain, we met a fellow who had hiked to the top many times with his wife, but they are both too frail to make the hike this year. It was bittersweet and romantic, and helped me assure myself that while I may hike and mountain bike, I am not really outdoorsy.

I thought I was outdoorsy, because I knew I wasn’t an outdoorsman. I’ve camped before, but not for enjoyment. Because I had no other choice. I survived a week in the woods at Tom Brown’s Tracker School, which had port-a-potties, a well, and a camp kitchen; I’ve slept in a cot in a Scout shelter, slapping spiders and mosquitos all night; and I’ve slept in a tent with a queen size air mattress on a campground next to my cousin’s RV. Oh, and I slept on a ratty old mattress dumped in a pasture near a fire made with cow patties, picking ticks off my nuts and throwing them into said fire, because that’s the hospitality you get from a rural Minnesotan when you’re there to move their daughter’s shit into a huge U-Haul truck.

Each and every night was the worst sleep of my life. A whipporwill sang above my tent at Tracker Camp, from dark until dawn; the other sites were quieter, but infested with insects. Oddly enough, I didn’t get a single tick bite in the cow pasture, thanks to sleep apnea, which kept me alert enough to feel their legs crawling on my skin. A tick got me in the sealed tent at the Delaware Water Gap campground, somehow. And these weren’t even wild places. We tracked coyote prints through the Pine Barrens camp, but I didn’t have to worry that a grizzly bear would hear my CPAP machine and decide that I, wrapped in my sleeping bag, resemble a large, humming breakfast burrito. And I don’t ever want to! Glamping maybe, preferably in a cabin. With a bidet.

We made it to Sharp Top, which did not have a bidet, and after a few more miles of curves on the Blue Ridge Parkway I needed to gas up, so we exited in Floyd and meandered on farm roads to a nice little station named G.J. Ingram & Son, where they had cured ham sitting on the counter, and old gas pumps with analog numbers. I felt smug that I knew how to power on the pump using the lever, because my great-uncle operated an Esso station that had similar models. I went inside to pre-pay—decked out in short-shorts and what I call my “fruit salad camo” hiking shirt, about as out of place as a peacock in a mining camp—and the owner (G.J. Ingram I presume) told me he trusted me, and I didn’t need to leave my card.²

We didn’t encounter anyone unfriendly in our travels, in a Subaru festooned with pride stickers and cartoon devils, and a bicycle on the back, looking as city-folk as can be. I’m a friendly sort, and not a smug metropolitan type, so maybe they were just reflecting my own attitude. Maybe it helps that whatever I dress in, I’m built like a brick shithouse, so it’s like putting a feather boa on a Sherman tank.³ No matter, it was surprising, given the political climate. All the way to Tennessee and back, we only saw one place flying loser flags⁴, and we have people like that at home. It was good to get outside and offline.

Not long after we gassed up, the sky opened up and the rain turned afternoon into early night. I had booked a room in Boone, not far from a mountain bike park, so we avoided the next hundred miles or so of the BRP and its curves and took the interstate instead, which felt like faster-than-light travel in comparison. The rain cleared by the time we got there, and we had a good burger and jalapeno hush puppies at a joint called The Cardinal. That will be the only bird content, except for this hawk that I photographed on Skyline Drive, early into the trip. I think it’s a Red-tailed.

If you know what kind of hawk that is, please tell me in the comments. Also feel free to share the worst night you ever had camping.

Next week: Up old mountain roads, down mountain bike hills, and along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina!

1. … in a shuttle bus. The climb would have taken hours, and rain was threatening.

2. I’m still wondering if it was out of friendliness, or because I’d be easy to shoot at range in that get-up.

3. And obviously, I am a white dude.

4. Confederate, and the guy who lost the last election. They usually come in pairs.