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.