A Lovely Hike

Walking is something very simple – it’s something most of us do, yet frequently fail to appreciate. It is such a remarkable milestone when we first learn it, and then it becomes a forgettable expectation and even a nuisance when we become old enough to use alternative forms of locomotion. 

Yet we have evolved to be walkers. One of the key morphological characteristics that defines Homo sapiens is the ability to walk upright. For centuries we walked upwards of twenty miles a day to discover new people and places – an unfathomably longer period of time than since we’ve had boats, trains, planes, and cars. For the majority of our existence, we have lived to walk and walked to live.

It is no surprise then, that one sweltering day in June I inevitably found myself walking on a trail leading to the peak of Old Rag Mountain in rural Virginia – chosen to impress someone I was falling in love with, someone who is now my husband.

From a distance, Old Rag is both a special but unassuming mountain. As part of the Blue Ridge mountains, it is unique as it shows its exposed granite face to the world, instead of being covered by green trees that give a hazy blue, inviting and majestic tint at dusk and dawn.  About a billion years ago, earthquakes and volcanoes formed a layer of basaltic magma on what was part of Pangea. Seven hundred million years ago, sandstone and quartzite deposits missed with skeletons of eukaryotic plants to form a layer of limestone.  Finally, around 260 million years ago, a series of mountain-forming earthquakes and tectonic plates smashing against one another created the Blue Ridge mountains, including Old Rag, a 3,284-foot-tall, not-so prominent mountain. Just as humans evolved to walk, so too did this mountain evolve to be hiked.

My husband-to-be had previously hiked Old Rag ten years before we undertook the hike and told me it was challenging but attainable.  At the time, I hadn’t hiked a true trail at all, ever - and wasn’t particularly fit, as I was infected with the Netflix virus, whose symptoms included slack-jawed happiness caused by minimal movement while watching entire seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. However, I had given the impression that I had experience hiking to my husband-to-be.

We arrived at the trailhead for Old Rag on a clear, vibrant June morning. At the trailhead, there was a poster board with a trail map and other information. I read one particular pamphlet that was wrinkled and frayed, a victim of summertime humidity. It said:

Old Rag is Shenandoah's most popular and most dangerous hike. The number of blogs and websites about this hike attests to its popularity. The number of search and rescue missions each year attests to its danger. There's no doubt that the scramble is great fun and the views are spectacular. A day on Old Rag is one of Shenandoah's premier experiences. We want to be sure that your experience is not marred by an accident or health issue that could be prevented with good planning. 

     My first thought upon reading this was that the only planning I had done was to buy a pair of hiking boots, having never owned a pair before. I had visions of search and rescue coming to retrieve my broken body, putting me on one of those orange stretchers attached to a rope, being carried off by a helicopter. And my husband-to-be breaking up with me out of embarrassment, my forehead tattooed with the words “hiking failure,” and my picture posted in every single REI with a warning of “do not let this customer get near anything hiking related, ever again.”

     “You ready to do the scramble? It’s going to be a lot of fun,” my husband to be said.

     “I sure am,” I said. I didn’t know what a scramble was. 

***

The beginning of the hike at Old Rag belies the unique features of its granite rock face, as it begins in beautiful old growth forest. Densely packed rhododendron and tulip poplar gave a bright green glow as we started going through switchbacks, increasing our elevation quite significantly over short distances. Though I huffed my way up the very base of the mountain, the beauty simply enthralled me. My husband-to-be was in a similar serene state. The sound of rustling leaves during cooling breezes tickled our ears and guided us upward.  I even found a heart-shaped oak leaf that seemed to solidify the feelings I was having for my husband-to-be, who, at the time, I was dating for about a year. I took it as a sign to keep going on the trail and to keep going with this relationship.

For two miles, we traversed slowly yet continually upward, until we finally reached the tree line that sharply transformed into a series of granite boulders, crevices, peaks and valleys.  This was the scramble. In order to hike to the summit of Old Rag, you have to hop, skip, jump, crawl, balance and pirouette amongst the half-billion-year-old granite formations, a stark difference between the relatively congenial old growth forest that began the trail. This required significant upper body strength and a keen sense of placement – something I was not prepared for, and which was made known no more than several steps among the scramble by a completely embarrassing accident.

All it took was a step up – a sharp step up, but not an impossible step up.  All that was required was to heave your body upward onto a rock platform using the strength of one of your legs. I did manage to thrust myself upward, but at the expense of my gluteus maximus.  I had literally ripped my ass climbing the beginning of this damn scramble and this damn mountain.

The pain was manageable but awkward, so awkward that at first I didn’t know what to do. My husband-to-be noticed something amiss.

“Are you OK?  You look pained,” he said, wiping sweat off of my forehead.

“I think I just broke my ass!” I exclaimed, right in front of a Sweedish family that was following us up.

We diagnosed my injury quickly and decided to stop for lunch on one of the larger rock faces. We still had three miles to go to the summit, and another three miles back to the trailhead, taking the circuit route on a fire road. I had doubts I could continue, as did my husband-to-be. The more doubtful I became, the angrier I became. Any time I bent my right leg, a spasm would occur in my rear end. It felt as if I had defective springs inside of my ass that would recoil and jump any time I put significant weight on my right leg.

I wanted to continue. I wanted to continue more than anything – I thought that I needed to complete this hike to move my relationship with my husband-to-be forward, and I felt that I had spent significant energy appreciating nature; the first couple of miles injected me with a sense of awe and beauty that I had not experienced previously and reminded me of the beauty around me, the beauty of my husband-to-be, the beauty of my inner self, the beauty of love.

In order to quell my semi-saccharine thoughts and to bring myself back to the task at hand, I did what I thought was necessary to continue. I started vigorously rubbing my ass and massaging it, while more fit hikers passed me on the rock scramble. I rubbed my ass like it was a bottle full of an army of genii, all my wishes focused on continuing this hike. Some hikers leered at me and my husband-to-be tried containing his laughter, but I did start feeling a little better – the springs started calming down.

“Let’s finish this,” I said to myself and my husband-to-be. “I can do it.”

***

The scramble continued. It was otherworldly, it was punishing; not only did I hop from rock to rock along  precipitously stark edges, but I squeezed in between boulders; shimmied in between exposed rock walls with sharp drop-offs; carefully wriggled down a 15 foot crevasse perilously slick with yesterday’s rain; crawled on all fours beneath a hanging boulder I was convinced would fall and crush me – all while trying to nurse a broken, panged buttock. Eventually, though, after six and a half hours of hiking, we reached the summit.

Punishing as it may have been, the summit views of the Blue Ridge mountains from the top of Old Rag were intensely beautiful, variegated slopes of green and hazy blue tipped with frosty gray and white clouds, ethereal and majestic, a vantage point of divine royalty. Seeing both the clouds and their shadows on the valley and hills below gave a sense of being somewhere between the Earth I know and the Earth I was coming to know, an Earth that put me on equal footing with clouds and let me see large swaths of beautiful nature below, an Earth that allowed me into the halls of divinity.

For much of my life, depression and anxiety have limited my ability to enjoy things like this hike. Ten years ago, I would have never considered setting my foot on a trail, let alone outdoors, period. Ten years ago, I had recently lost my job and ended a relationship back-to-back and was forced to move back home.  For six months I was bedridden, convinced I had failed at life and feeling that I was completely worthless. It took a lot of love to get me out of that bed and I was fortunate to have that love, to lap it up and soak it up and use it for the betterment of myself and those around me. And to learn to love and accept the love of my husband-to-be and learn to go out in the world with an open heart, to take a step on new trails and challenges with a sense of worth.

I don’t remember much about the hike down Old Rag. I know I was still beaming from reaching the summit after injuring myself. I remember giggling wildly with my husband-to-be – I was probably being self-deprecating about injuring myself, commenting on my aging body. But that hike was part of a larger trip we were taking.  It was just the beginning of a road trip going up the eastern part of the United States. And it was one of the first of many road trips with my husband-to-be. It was the beginning of a lovely hike.

The view from the summit of Old Rag, which is magesterial in scope.