The Roanoker - May/June 2014 - 8

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Wilderness:
The Key to a Great Weekend?
As the Wilderness Act celebrates its 50th anniversary, there's no better time to explore
one of Virginia's 24 areas, all along the I-81 corridor from Harrisonburg south.
WHAT YOU CAN DO, if you're of a mind
and you have a free weekend this warm season, is trio up: the outdoors, the live music/
dining and the place to stay.
The keys? Not too far away, a compelling
reason/destination to go outside, equally
luring music and dinner, and a place you
don't mind paying to sleep when you could
be back home in your own bed for free.
And while the primary lure may well
be getting to watch the likes of Jesse Winchester or Fred Eaglesmith right there a few
feet in front of you, the most-lasting memory may well be the place you went into
the woods and felt nearly lost a few times;

wondered how you'd get across the stream;
felt like you were out in a wilderness.
Because, up there around Staunton/Harrisonburg where I'm talking about, you were
in a Wilderness.
And why go into a Wilderness? Well, according to celebratory site wilderness50th.
org: Hunt, fish, hike, camp, canoe, kayak,
swim, picnic, backpack, bird watch, take
wildflower walks, ride horses, cross-country
ski, snowshoe, go spelunking or rock-climbing, conduct ecological research, lead educational trips. Enjoy the solitude.
In our case, pretty much hiking, with the
wildflowers, picnic and solitude thrown in.

The reward for walking up the rough-and-tumble St. Mary's River in the Wilderness of the same
name is modest St. Mary's Falls, about two miles into the largest of Virginia's official Wildernesses.

8 MAY/JUNE 2014

The first time we walked into Ramsey's
Draft was not long after a hurricane remnant, and where there'd been no real trails
before the big rain and wind, there were
really no trails afterward. To the extent that
we knew we were supposed to follow the
river upward, but found there was no way
to do so other than trying to stay along the
bank till you couldn't anymore on that side,
then crossing this big log or that set of rocks
to the other side for another slow 100 yards
of semi-progress.
After a day of that, you've earned the
short drive into Harrisonburg to the Clementine (or, until it closed, the Mockingbird in Staunton) for dinner and the live
show. Plus a nice room at the historic Joshua
Wilton House, say, where the breakfast was
mighty good.
We're just a little beyond halfway, in such
excursions, to touching all 24 Virginia Wildernesses, but in this 50th anniversary year
of the congressional act that has allowed
them to come into existence, we're hoping
to pick off a few more.
Among those we have taken on, St. Mary's
(near Staunton), has been the second-most
rugged, with a wild river providing the signature identity here as well.
And a few - Three Ridges, The Priest,
James River Face, Thunder Ridge, Mountain Lake, Peters Mountain, Beartown,
Little Wilson Creek and Lewis Fork - you
get to visit simply by walking the Appalachian Trail. And a day hike on the AT can
always get paired up with a night on some
town or other, not least Roanoke, Virginia,
where the dining and live music scenes are
better than anywhere else up and down that
81 corridor.
THE

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