Following up on our New River trip in the fall, my friends and I planned a trip in early summer back to West Virginia, this time staying near the town of Davis, right by the Dolly Sods Wilderness. Dolly Sods is the highest plateau on the eastern part of the country with miles of hiking paths.

On June 10th, Jim, Allen, and I left the Richmond area in Virginia and headed to our home rental on Timberline Mountain, just west of the Dolly Sods Wilderness. We were meeting up with Jason, who was coming from Arlington, and Jerry and John, coming from the Prince George area. We all converged that afternoon on Blackwater Falls State Park, home of West Virginia’s most famous waterfall, which was an easy stroll down stairs and a walkway.

Navigating back up the stairs, we headed to a second waterfall, Elakala Falls, but could not figure out where the trailhead was. We managed to wander around and get just enough of an internet signal for our crack research team to uncover the trailhead’s location, by the lodge for the park.

As we approached the lodge, a group of older people, even older than us, emerged walking angrily from the lodge, with one lady yelling, “I hope you aren’t hungry, it’s a FORTY-FIVE MINUTE WAIT!!!” Fortunately, we were not yet hungry. Unfortunately, our crack research team’s earlier research had failed to uncover the fact that Elakala Falls are actually underneath a walkway on the hiking trail, and to see, the falls, we would have had to go off the main trail and down what appeared to be trail drainage. Needless to say, we missed the falls.

After our walk past the one thing we had come to see, we now were hungry. We were saved from having to wait nearly an hour for lodge food by going to the nearby town of Thomas for great pizza at Riverfront Wood Fired Pizza before returning to the house to plan the hikes for the next two days. The forecast for the next day was bleak, calling for rain all day, leading us to push our Dolly Sods hike back to Sunday. When we woke up on Saturday, the weather was far more promising, with the rain ending for good by about noon. Jim and Allen decided to hang out at the house while the rest of us charted a course that started at Spruce Knob.

We had jumped the gun with our departure from the house just a bit, not giving the rain enough time to clear all the way out by the time we reached Spruce Knob. At Spruce Knob’s elevation, we were pretty much up in the remaining rain clouds.

There was a short walk to the tower through the spruces that were still visible with a giant cloud hanging over the mountain, and by the time we reached the last overlook, the clouds were clearing out.

Leaving the Spruce Knob cloud, we left to go on a hike. Knowing that we would be going on a longer hike through Dolly Sods the next day, we ruled out most of the more scenic short hikes in the area like Chimney Top, because they involved walking straight up a mountain. We settled instead on the pleasantly level but much less scenic Seneca Creek.

The Seneca Creek trail is part of a larger network of trails that hikers use to put together backbacking trips or long day hikes. It suited our purposes because we could break it off at any time, and when the trail intersected the creek at three miles, we turned around.

Returning to the car and heading north, we stopped at Seneca Rocks, which, in keeping with our plan of avoiding elevation gain for the day, we viewed from the bottom.

Next on our list was Bear Rocks, on the northeast edge of Dolly Sods, which was only 20 miles or so away from Seneca Rocks. One of the things that was difficult for my brain to process was that in this part of West Virginia’s mountains, a 20 mile drive could take up to an hour. To get to the rocks, we would leave the main road, driving on unpaved roads with hair-pin turns. The switchback road often involved a steep drop on one side, leaving us to speculate if the trees would have been strong enough to stop the car from tumbling to the bottom.

The road to Dolly Sods is gravel and mostly smooth. Mostly. Unpredictably, there are potholes that materialize out of nowhere, like obstacles in a bad video game, requiring intense concentration from the driver.

Potholes that uncloak three feet in front of the car and sheer drops with trees too small to stop falling cars would make these roads bad enough. Adding to the degree of difficulty of the drive is the suicidal wildlife in the region.

Dealing with this wildlife was particularly traumatic for Jason, as he has a long history of crashing cars into deer.

On this trip to West Virginia, Jason successfully avoided the deer, but one snake in the region wasn’t as fortunate.

After an eternity on winding roads, we made it to Bear Rocks. This is an amazing area, with a boulder scramble surrounded by wildflowers, mountains, and open ridgelines.

The thing to do is to go out on the Bear Rocks overhang and have someone take a picture from the other rocks. The key, we found, in taking these pictures was to stick to the rocks that did not hang over certain death while not looking like you were sticking to the rocks that did not hang over certain death.

We saw a lady and her daughter at Bear Rocks having a full-blown Instagram photo shoot on the outcropping. They were considerably bolder in moving toward the edge than we were. We eventually moved on to the kind of rocks we prefer: those that stand on firm ground.

We successfully returned to the house without blowing out a tire on a stealth pothole, and we needed to figure out the next day’s longer hike through Dolly Sods. Dolly Sods is normally hiked by backpackers who navigate the trails over two or three days, which makes developing a day hike a challenge. The hiking and trail sites that discuss Dolly Sods make three things very clear about the trails: they are very rocky, they are wet with a lot of standing water, and some of the trails are poorly marked. Those factors, combined with the fact that most of us were either close to 50 years old or actually 50, would certainly slow us down. Complicating our plans, we discovered that the trailhead we had intended to use was located in a gated community, and people in that community were hostile to interlopers infiltrating their neighborhood.

The trailhead for non-gated community peasant folk to use was farther to the south, with an extension that would push the total milage of the hike close to 11 miles. Factoring in the amount of time we would spend getting lost or struggling to navigate rocks and puddles, and 11 miles was probably too much. No amount of reworking the hiking loop seemed to get the milage much lower. Then we came up with a solution: parking one of our cars at the trailhead we would end at, then driving the other car to the Bear Rocks trailhead and starting there. That cut the milage down to a bit over 8.

The next day, we dropped off Jason’s car at the western trailhead, then hopped in Jim’s SUV and avoided potholes and suicidal deer to make it to the Bear Rocks trailhead.

Back during World War II, Dolly Sods was used for artillery practice, and there are still unexploded shells there today.

While it was cloudy, aside for a few sprinkles, the rain held off, and the clouds made the temperature almost perfect for hiking. The Dolly Sods trails are a treasure. The relatively level trails, the rock formations, the elevation, and the changes in vegetation are like nothing I have seen on the East Coast.

Most East Coast trails involve substantial elevation gain to get up to a ridgeline, but the Dolly Sods elevation change was minimal, without the arbitrary ups and downs you often get in the Appalachian Mountains. The southern Dolly Sods trail runs along the Red Creek, and, after it rains, reports made it sound almost impossible to avoid walking through water. That was not the case with the northern trail we were on, where creeks could be avoided.

While not as watery as the southern loop, these trails were as muddy as advertised. Figuring out how to navigate the standing water using the rocks on the path turned into a puzzle game.

At one point, we were wondering about the possibility of running into snakes in the underbrush as we tried to avoid a large puddle. Suddenly, a voice came directly behind me: “I almost stepped on a rattlesnake this morning.” We turned around to find the Dolly Sods equivalent of Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings.

You might be thinking, “Hey, I’ve seen all of the Lord of the Rings movies and I don’t remember this Tom Bombadil guy at all.” Right! It turns out that the story of the Lord of the Rings is actually improved when you remove the random “older than old” guy who sings things like, “Hey! Come derry dol! Hop along, my hearties! Hobbits! Ponies all! We are fond of parties.” Good call, Peter Jackson. At any rate, Dolly Sods Tom Bombadil raced through two of the of puddles and then disappeared – using his ancient magic!

Shortly after this, we ran into one of those parts of the path where there was a fork but no sign or blaze indicating which of the forks was THE fork. The main path seemed to go directly south rather than more westward, and there were lots of bootprints in the mud to support our conclusion that this was the real trail. We headed down this path, ignoring the accumulating evidence that we had made the wrong call.

Jim was able to spot our divergence from the trail using his hiking GPS app before we got too far off track. We were probably just a few hundred feet to the east of the actual trail, making it tempting to just try to bushwack through the forest to get back on course. But then we remembered that that’s how people die, and we opted to backtrack.

The Dolly Sods terrain constantly changed as we hiked across the northern and western edges. We had mountain views, rock scrambles, woodsy areas, and fields of wildflowers. Many of the plants in Dolly Sods typically grow much farther north, growing in this area due to the elevation.

When all was said and done, we ended up hiking 9 miles. And no one died and/or was hospitalized!