Days 4 & 5 - May 23 & 24 - Blue Ridge

In my last post I reported on the fine brook trout fishing on the Robinson River Day 2.  On Day 4 I was able to get an early start, so I decided to tackle the longer, steeper hike to the Hughes River, which is also in Shenandoah National Park.  Good choice.  The small parking area at the Corbin Cutoff trailhead had been jammed with cars over the weekend, but on Monday morning it was empty. I was concerned about the trail conditions because a thunderstorm had marched through during the night.  Cozy and dry inside Camelot, I was fascinated by the storm.  Like the sound of a huge piece of tin being shaken by giants, each thunderclap pulsed down the long ridges and deep hollers for half a minute, only to be superseded by the next roiling boomer before it had a chance to die out.  Apparently the storm's bark was worse than its bite, because the trail to the Hughes was only a little damp.

If the Robinson is a pretty little rill, the Hughes is a Miss America stream.  The holes are deeper, the streamside flora is brighter and the brookies are bigger.  At least that was true on this day.  I caught 15 or so brook trout on dry flies in a few hours and didn't see another fisherman.  The variety of flora was infinite.  Here and there were remnants of old mountain cabins that predated creation of the national park.  Crumbled foundations, mostly, but one old cabin has been maintained - the Corbin Cabin, which gave the trail I descended its name:

 
The hike back up the ridge was challenging, but along the way I stopped to chat with a photographer who was taking pictures of a strange little flower.  I had seen a few others like it along the trail.  It was a pink lady slipper, the photographer informed me, and this was the only place he had been able to find one.  It looked like a hot pink clam stuck to a thick green stalk.  Or like fairy slippers with their soles stuck together, if you looked closely.  It was a shy little flower.  The photographer was quite thrilled to have discovered it.  I thought his excitement was a little strange until I considered what most people would think of me tripping around in cold streams enticing tiny trout to impale themselves on artificial mayflies.

Day 5 was a travel day.  I packed up Tuesday morning and started south down Skyline Drive without a clear plan or precise destination.  A brief study of my highway map showed the green dots designating a "scenic route" on a stretch of highway south of the national park, so I aimed Excalibur in that direction, only to discover that I was traveling on the famous Blue Ridge Parkway.  The Parkway is very much like Skyline Drive (they are extensions of one another), and perhaps even less developed.  There is not a single gas station along the Parkway, whereas the Drive sports at least four.  Both the Drive and the Parkway snake in and out of the gaps between the tall caps of the Blue Ridge, sometimes curling around the eastern slopes and sometimes around the western slopes.  The Drive offers dramatic views of long, broad river valleys dotted with towns and farms.  But the mountains fan out south of the park, so the vistas from the Parkway contain more and more mountains and hollows folding and unfolding in every direction, festooned in high places with gray outcroppings and patches of scree.  Laurel and azaleas and Virginia creeper add color to the roadsides along the Parkway, and there are a couple of small impoundments near the crossing of the James River.

Just above one of those impoundments, I stopped Excalibur at a picnic area on the banks of a small, ultra-clear stream that paralleled the Parkway.  Since I hadn't yet unstrung my Murray Mountain Rod, I decided to make a few casts to prospect for a brookie.  Three casts into Otter Creek and I indeed found a taker, but when I brought it to hand I discovered it was not a brookie but a rotund little sunfish.  Ordinarily I would have considered that fish the most modest of all of possible catches, but considering it had selected my self-tied parachute emerger out of a flotilla of cracked leaves and fallen petals in a rill offering no expectations, I took outsized pride in my achievement, and resumed my drive south.  Here's a two-minute video featuring a sample of the road I traveled - this is the view from my charging steed Excalibur:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEaZ9AhcDbw

Because I was in serious need of a place where I could charge up the batteries in my computer and cameras, I decided to check into a motel for the night, and opted for a Quality Inn near Roanoke, VA.  As I was backing my boat trailer into a slot in the parking lot, I noticed four guys sitting on the curb drinking beer.  They had noticed my Pennsylvania license plate and asked me what part of the state I was from.  They are also from PA and are working on a construction project in the Blacksburg area.  They are blasters.  That's how they described their occupation.  Apparently they dynamite stuff.  When I told them what my home town was, one of them recalled blasting some stuff at an airport that's a few miles from my home.  Must have been true because he knew all the local highway numbers, names of diners, etc.  So I sat down to have a beer with them and to get the rest of the story about the airport.  Apparently my new blaster friend (who is also an avid fisherman, with big fish pictures on his cell phone to prove it) witnessed the aerial descent of several women who stripped while in their plane and parachuted down to the airport buck naked.  I've lived in that area for five years and I can say definitively I've not observed anything that interesting.  I have a few pilot friends who frequent that airport - I think I now know the reason.

After a while one of the young ladies who works at the motel came by, smoking a cigarette.  She was well-acquainted with the blasters.  They've been staying at the Quality Inn for several months.  One of the guys mentioned to her that I was on a long fishing trip and bemoaned the lack of good fishing spots in this area of Virginia. "There's good fishing around here," she said. "I got a friend with a private pond. We go down there and throw a bucket of fish food in the water and just scoop up the fish with a net." I remarked that some people might consider that cheating. "I call it 'city fishing,'" she replied flatly. Makes sense. No doubt her approach is much more efficient and cost-effective than hiking three miles down a steep, stubbled trail to catch a six-inch trout on a $500 rod and then have to scramble back up the mountain in the heat of the afternoon. On the other hand, I bet she doesn't get to see pink lady slippers, or mushrooms like these: