Hiking Blue Ridge Mountain
Curtis Hikes Blue Ridge Mountain | Rutland, VT | April 2023
While Charlotte was resting and recuperating from surgery, Jess has graciously allowed me to go on hikes by myself in pursuit of my goal to hike 300, 300 meter prominence peaks by 2033.
Because of the possibility of rain in the afternoon, I opted for a shorter morning hike located near to where we were staying: Blue Ridge Mountain. Just as the day before on Camel’s Hump, I was concerned on my drive to the trailhead that the lower section of the trail would be a muddy mess, but I found the forest at the trailhead to still have a nice (if wet) layer of snow.
I initially started hiking in just microspikes, but quickly switched over to snowshoes after the snow started giving out under me. The warm days were definitely having an effect and I bet within a week, the first mile of trail will be an impassable mud-bog. The trail had about a mile approach followed by 1500 feet of elevation gain over a mile and change of distance. During the approach, the hardest part was the numerous stream crossings – rock hopping in snowshoes just isn’t easy. There was also the occasional boardwalk that would guide hikers across boggy areas during the summer; today they blended in with the surrounding snow, but if you stepped to either side, the snow would give way and down I would go. It was during one of these falls that I realized that I had forgotten a hiking pole.
After the approach, the trail goes steeply up the mountain following a steep slope high above a stream. This was easily the hardest section of the entire hike: with every step the snow would slide out and try to push me down the slope. But somehow I managed. At the top of the incline, the trail left the stream, but not before giving views of a few cascading waterfalls.
As I pushed further uphill, it became clear that most people just stop at the waterfall. Based on the footprints, in the past month only one person has been to the peak, and that person post-holed their entire way up before skiing back down. Coupled with the very wet snow from the recent warm days, it was like I was breaking in the last 3/4 mile of trail and very slow going. It was during this time that I really started getting tripped up on my own feet. On probably a half-dozen occasions I would lift up my foot, only to have the front half of the snowshoe catch on the tail of the other. I would then fall in what felt like comic slow motion onto my knees in deep snow. It was never painful, but I was really missing having a hiking pole.
Eventually, I reached the summit and its one vista to the west: nothing compared to yesterday’s views on Camel’s Hump. I spent a while stomping around, futilely looking for a letterbox in two feet of snow, but the promise of rain and the cold eventually pushed me back down the mountain. Or rather I slid back down. Even the warm weather that morning seemed to be melting the snow in front of me. Each step I took, I would slide an extra foot forward on the soft wet snow. But this is the fun part of snowshoeing and I was soon walking with reckless abandon, relying on my momentum to keep me vertical.
And I almost made it, but right at the end, right at the last stream crossing, my shoes got tangled up together, but this time there wasn’t any soft snow to go down in. I ended up sprawled out on my face in the cold water. Fortunately, I had less than a half mile to go and it wasn’t below freezing, so I powered through to the end, but in other circumstances that could have been a real problem.
Overall, this was not a very exciting hike and I did it almost entirely for the exercise and the statistics.
