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Appalachian Trail Club bulletin

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  • 100 not far south of Rockfish Gap and Afton. If you are speed hiking for the shortest distance and time between two points, don't take this trail. On the other hand, if you want a trail that climbs from one natural rock overlook to another while crisscrossing back and forth until you have stood upon rock ledges facing every point of the compass, this one will be well worth your while. Harold Kotz spent days scouting back and forth over Humpback to create a trail that provides a maximum of beautiful views of the Valley of Virginia, the Blue Ridge, and Rockfish Valley from a variety of angles—all views that etch themselves upon your mind. On Humpback as on Cole, or Cold, and Tar Jacket Mountains on toward the James River, one finds large, old, dry-rock boundary walls. These relics of another era are in this section constructed of slab rock. The tops of both Cole and Tar Jacket are open with blue grass. The remains of the old walls, built of more rounded rock, snake up their sides like miniature walls of China. The sag between the two is called Hog Camp Gap. Here the hogs, in the old days, having feasted on chestnuts and acorns, were rounded up before being driven down from the mountains to the lower farms to be fed corn before hog-killing time. Here traces of the timber railroad right of way can still be seen—the road that carried away the virgin forest. A few sugar maples still grow just below along the headwaters of a fork of Piney River—reminders of the many giant maples that once reared their stately tops in nearby hollows. There is a wide-sweeping, unobstructed view from Cole Mountain. One sees far across to the northeast where rises the vast bulk of The Priest—patron saint of the area. The Trail has not been finished from The Priest, north down across the Tye River valley and up Three Ridges. When it has been constructed it will make a drop and a climb of 2,000 feet. A shelter will be located near the western approach to The Priest in the high valley of Crabtree Creek with a side trail down to Crabtree Falls, the highest in the Virginia Blue Ridge. Actually the water comes down in a series of falls. Members of the Natural Bridge Appalachian Trail Club like to climb up in the spring to rest on the ledges where, near ancient hemlocks and blooming rhododendron, the stream gathers itself for another leap. One sees hemlocks and water again south of U. S. Route 60 where the Trail drops down off Long Mountain to cross and recross Brown's Mountain Creek, which joins the Pedlar River a little above the man- made lake, the reservoir for Lynchburg. The Trail skirts the sides of this lake after passing through a nice bit of forest with some virgin growth of oaks and tulip poplars. Bluff Mountain looms up to the south, guarding the James River water gap. From Bluff Mountain to Highcock Knob well beyond the James is all Trail area. The Blue Ridge Parkway has veered east down out of the mountain to cross the James, and U. S. Route 501 clings close to the river gorge going west. In order to take in views of the James, the Trail here uses the Forest Service trail from Saddle Gap along the ridge of Big Rocky Row, dipping down to Fullers Rocks on Little Rocky Row. Above the gorge, one sees the Blue Ridge climb up, mounting higher and higher as peak after peak marches south. The sun glints upon the James as it curls down out of the Alleghenies, snakes across the Valley of Virginia, churns through the gorge and on to twist and dodge through the little mountains and hills past Lynchburg to the east. Every autumn the N. B. A. T. C. goes to this point for an afternoon and return-by- moonlight hike. Then the yellows, the reds, the browns, and the evergreens are as a Persian carpet with the James River the tree-of-life From the south the approach to the James is just as impressive but entirely different. Coming in at Hickory Stand, high above the south-
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Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).