Grayson Highland Ponies
I haven’t spent much time in Virginia’s Mountains, but with a birthday party to attend in Roanoke we scrambled to put together some adventures. Friday we drove up to Natural Bridge, VA and stayed at the historic Natural Bridge Cottages and aimed to end the weekend at the Grayson Highlands.
Alexis got us deal since it was a fall special and they haven’t started renovating yet. The cottages were right next to lovely Baptist cemetery and all the electrics were control but a single light switch. The Special included 1 nights stay for 2, breakfast, access to the natural bridge, and caverns. Breakfast was awesome! I probably ate a pound of quality bacon, a pile of sausage, several eggs, biscuits, cinnamon apples and much more. Before the food coma could hit me to hard, we went down to hike around the natural bridge. This place was set up to handle a massive amount of school field trips at once. So many places to snack, shop and corral children.
We hike the 113(?) steps to the bottom and saw the limestone arch. Route 11 still is a active highway which runs over the top of it. We unknowingly drove over the night before. The bridge is about 250 high at parts, and has nice walk way paved through it. The arch has been reinforce with multiple giant steel bolts to keep it from cracking more. Sadly the limestone looks very nice for climbing, but it is very unlikely it will every happen there. George Washington initials are carve across the walkway underneath the arch, but are so small you can’t really see them. The further we hiked up the trail we saw a recreated Indian camp, old rock shelter, and waterfalls at the very end.
After the bridge, we went to the caverns and learn about how it was found and formed. The have a couple large flowstones, active roosting bats, and 250 foot vaulted fissure room. It was nice cavern, a good tourist stop, but still pales in comparison to my other caving trips with Ben (Bear Cave, DeerBone, Mirloy Cave, etc).
Afterwards, we attended a lovely 2 year old’s birthday.
The next day, we headed west to the Grayson Highlands. Grayson Highlands is located along the Appalachian Trail near the highest point in Virginia at around 5000-5700ft. We stopped by the park office picked up to rental pads, and headed off to the top of the mountains. We took a quick hiking loop along the pinnacles trail, and got some expansive views of the western Virginia area. It almost had an alpine feel but not quite. Still this is probably as close as one can get to alpine this far east and south in the US. After the hike we changed trail head and hike up to chase down some ponies. Of course they were in the farthest and highest spot in the park. Alexis lugged up the bouldering pads and I all the camera and climbing equipment. Alexis almost got blown away several time because of the bouldering pad airfoil effect. Several of the ponies were hanging around some rocks and getting their scratching one. One seem to stare of into the distance for a while and then pretend to fall over and play dead.
We hiked down a bit and tried to boulder on some of the horizon boulders, but the wind and sharpness was a little too much. So we continued down the hill to the picnic boulders. After the whole 20ft hike to the boulders from the parking, we climbed as fast as possible. We ticked out some sharp problems on the Rock house Boulder and the Olympus boulder. We returned the pad and started the drive back to Charlotte stopping for some sunset pictures on the NC border and a new tradition of Pizza Buffet.
