A View from The Top at Seneca Rocks

Hello readers!

     A few weeks ago, my partner and I spent a week traveling The Mountain State and taking some of the coolest selfies ever. I plan to make a blog post about each of them, and I wanted to start with the one that had affected me most. This journey certainly tested me physically, but it especially tried me mentally. If you called me foolish, I would be inclined to agree with you, but this experience left me feeling braver and more empowered than any other tango I've had with Mother Nature. Here is my tale of ascending Seneca Rocks.

     Seneca Rocks is a big craggy formation of Tuscarora quartzite looming over the town that shares its name in Pendleton County of the Eastern panhandle of West Virginia. It stands 900 feet above stream level and is a very popular site for rock climbers on the East Coast. It's an object of geological and historical interest. I will include the Wikipedia link at the bottom of the page for those of you interested in the sand that was deposited 440 million years ago at the edge of the Iapetus Ocean and the training of soldiers for action in the mountains of Italy in the 1940s. Seneca Rocks was also a significant landmark to Native Americans of the Algonquian, Tuscarora, and Seneca nations who traveled the Seneca area near the Potomac River for purposes of trade and war as far back as the 1400s and 1500s. It is also believed that the Native Americans were the first to scale Seneca Rocks. The officially documented climbing history begins in 1935.

    My ascent did not involve scaling the cliffs with ropes and spikes, as I am the equivalent of a fat housecat on my best day, but I'm going to attribute my inability to fearlessly scale it with my bare hands to the fact that I broke my shoulder in my childhood and my right arm can't lift anything over thirty pounds for more than three seconds. Otherwise, I would have climbed that thing like Spiderman.

    We reached the top of Seneca Rocks via switchbacks and stairs. It's only 1.5 miles each way, which seems simple enough, but if you're a human goldfish like me, 1.5 miles uphill with a 1000 feet gain in elevation is quite the battle. I spent the better half of the day panting on various boulders along the trail, and fending of the hundreds of...centipedes?...millipedes?...some sort of revolting "pede."

What is this thing?

      Finally, I made it to the overlook, which is a deck built into the hillside right where the tree-line ends. You can imagine, we were pretty high up. Insanely high up. I could feel the wind off the wings of the buzzards who had inevitably come to feast on my ample, post-asthmatic flesh. But our journey didn't end here.

View from the overlook.

      A few feet beyond the end of the trail and the observation deck, there was a sign discouraging hikers from going any further. It explained that 15 people have died in falls at Seneca Rocks since the 1970s and proceed at your own risk. These have largely been falling accidents involved in traditional rock climbing, though hikers have also been killed. As you're reading this, you may be asking yourself what kind of lunatic traipses past that sign for any reason? You may feel the need to send me the meme of Sam Elliott calling me a special kind of stupid.

Maybe. 

I was up there. 

      My logic? I had just spent hours of my life pushing my body to the limit. Granted, I'm very out of shape and that limit isn't much, but I'm not sure if I'll ever have the chance to hike that trail again. I'm not getting any younger, and I'm kind of at a pre-pivotal point in my life where I don't know where I'll even be living three months from now (see college graduate tries to overcome the West Virginia budget crisis without much luck). It all came down to being a once in a lifetime opportunity and a view that I could not possibly get otherwise. So I took a deep breath and started scrambling on my hands and knees up the rocky formation. It was steep, it was not a trail, there were no barriers, and it was only ten feet wide in some places.

     By the time I reached the top, I was shaking like a leaf, but the view was like nothing else I'd ever seen. The cows in the surrounding fields looked like proverbial ants. I was eye level with the vultures. A helmet-clad head popped up out of nowhere, and an exalted climber scrambled onto the summit. Up there, the worries of my daily life floated away. My exasperating hunt for a job suited to my degree, student loans, my frustrations with everything on the news and the hateful state of society, the stagnation of the last six months; these things were as small as the cows grazing 900 feet below me. There was life where I was standing, and there was oblivion only five feet away in any direction. I was aware of every respiring cell. I knew that I was breathing and all my frustrations were the result of nothing more than human constructs, intangible human ideals that only mattered if I believed them and gave them life. My problems are as real as I make them. My life is as good as I make it. When I was up there, joy was simple because it was nothing more than jagged Tuscarora quartzite beneath my feet. I learned my joy in my daily life should be derived from the same simplicity, the things keeping me alive. My health, my sustenance, myself. Thanks for reading.

On top of the world!

Seneca Rocks Wikipedia

If you would like to share your existential revolutions or awesome selfies, feel free to get in touch at mountainbloodwv@gmail.com or like me on MountainBlood WV Facebook.

Story Time: The Windmill Disaster of 2016

Hello folks!

     I have been having some really interesting adventures this spring, and I thought I would share with you a humorous anecdote of my last trip home. For the new readers, I grew up in Nicholas County, which is nearly smackdab in the center of West Virginia. Lots of mountains, questionable cell phone service, you get about one stoplight per town.

     I had been at my parents' house on our WV "staycation" for less than 24 hours, when my boyfriend (a city boy) asked if we could go see the windmills I had talked so much about. This particular windmill farm is accessed by a dirt road starting in Fenwick, WV (near Richwood), and more than once a wrong turn has led me to Rupert. The windmill farm, like many windmill farms, is located on the top of a mountain, and in my first several trips, a truck or SUV was required to reach it because of the rough roads. I've been scooting around in a Grand Am for the last few years, so I couldn't go visit them myself. My teen brother volunteered to take us in his truck, which was my first questionable choice of the day.

     After a lot of winding roads and driving that will eventually require legal (if not medical) intervention, we got to the windmill farm. Like I said, I've been there many times before, usually with my father when we went on a Sunday drive. There are usually lots of other people up there. In my neck of the woods, wind turbines are a site worth seeing. There are probably a hundred different twists and turns up there, and we drove around for nearly two hours. We were just seeing what views each hill had to offer (we believe Cottle Knob, the hill behind my house, is visible).

     In the course of all our twists and turns, we somehow ended up behind a gate. When we tried to exit the windmill farm, the gate was LOCKED! My heart sank. We were miles away from civilization, with little to no cell phone service, and we were trapped on a windmill farm. The forecast called for thunder and lightning, we only had a few bottles of water and a few bags of chips, this was not a good start to our vacation. There were a few signs hanging around, and I called the numbers on the signs from my one bar of service. All were disconnected, except for the one that connects to a coal mine in Boone County, and the fellow I spoke to had no clue what windmill farm I was talking about or how I got that number. Ugh. I tried calling the non-emergency lines for the Nicholas County and Richwood Police Departments, but no one answered (I'm guessing because it was Sunday).

     I finally had a little luck when I tried calling a non-911 number for Nicholas County Emergency Services. Since we were on the Nicholas/Greenbrier county line, they patched me through to Greenbrier Emergency Dispatch. I explained our situation, but had no clue how to communicate to them our exact location on this expansive windmill maze. As luck would have it, I remembered passing another gate at the entrance of a coal mine and I could actually see the mine. (A coalmine on a windmill farm, how poetic is that?) The dispatch lady called me back, told me someone with keys was on the way, but it would be a while, and that we were TRESPASSING.

     This is where I panicked, because I was not about to go to jail for trespassing when about 50 other rubberneckers were up there taking windmills selfies too. I told her I was unaware of that, to which she tersely replied "There are signs everywhere and you had to go through a gate to get there." There were lots of signs, but they all said "NO HUNTING." Unless I am mistaken and all my college criminal justice courses were for naught, "no hunting" and "no trespassing" are not interchangeable signs. So I spent the two hours we had to wait for the keeper of the keys contemplating running off into the wilderness, away from locks and gates and the human construct of "trespassing."

     I was gazing at some fibrous plants, thinking about all the episodes of "Naked and Afraid" I'd been watching, considering weaving myself a weed blanket for the winter, when the guy with the keys turned up. He let us loose, told us that a researcher studying the dead bats and birds (the ugly side of this green energy) locked us in by mistake, and told us to have a nice day. We specifically asked if we were trespassing, and he said no. It was a happy accident. The only reason I can come up with for the dispatch lady reading me the riot act is that perhaps she thought I meant we were on the coalmine property when I told her I could see the coalmine. In that case, we definitely would have been trespassing and probably been sent to Guantanamo Bay as eco-terrorists.

Boyd Crowder knows.

     Fortunately, we were not on mine property, we didn't go to jail, and I was not forced to use my boyfriend's glasses to start a fire with some dead leaves to boil rainwater in a soda can while I stored acorns for the winter. Thanks for reading!

Tell me your funny stories, leave me feedback, and feel welcome to get in touch at mountainbloodwv.@gmail.com. Like me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/mountainbloodwv/