Day Trips

A day trip is the one that takes the whole day and admits it. Out before the valley fog lifts, back with the last of the light, with a hundred and fifty miles or more behind you and one long stretch of high country in the middle. These are the trips into Pocahontas, Pendleton, Tucker, Greenbrier, and the ridges between them, where the elevation changes the weather and the calendar both. This section files them newest first, with the hours, the miles, and the season each one needed printed beside the entry. None of them can be done well in a hurried afternoon, and the counts show why.

What a full day asks

Distance in this state is measured in switchbacks, not in inches on a map. A hundred and thirty miles from Charleston to a high scenic highway is a real three hours, and it should be, because the last forty of those miles are the point. The road climbs out of one watershed and drops into another. Hardwood gives way to spruce. Your windows fog on the way up and the temperature reading falls a degree every few minutes. By the time you park at the first overlook you are somewhere the valley cannot imagine. Snow can be lying in the shade up there while the yard at home is green. That gap is the reason these entries carry a season line as prominently as they carry miles.

What you get for the drive is scale. A boardwalk out across a bog where the plants belong to a colder century. A wall of rock standing over a river confluence with a hayfield at its foot. Falls dropping into a canyon so dark with hemlock that the water reads amber against it. A valley of limestone farms with barns older than the highway that serves them. None of these can be done properly in an afternoon, and trying to squeeze one into four hours means driving three of them and standing still for forty-five minutes.

The full-day trips also demand more planning than the rest of this journal, which is why each article names its season plainly. High roads close in winter, and the closure dates shift by weeks depending on snow. Forest gates stay locked into spring while the frost comes out of the ground. Cell coverage disappears entirely for long stretches, so anything you need to look up should be looked up before you leave the last town. Fuel your vehicle where fuel exists rather than where you would prefer to stop, because the next opportunity may sit a long way further on.

Light is the other constraint, and it is the one people underestimate. In December the useful part of the day ends before five, which turns a three-hour drive home into a drive in the dark on roads with deer, gravel edges, and no shoulders. In June you get a fourteen-hour window and can sit at an overlook until the ridge lines flatten into gray layers. The count block at the end of each article prints daylight left along with hours and miles, because on this kind of trip that number is the one that decides whether you turn back.

These are good days and they are long ones. Several entries involve stairs, steep grades, exposed boardwalk with no shade, or a mile of walking on loose gravel. Some are simply too much sitting for a young child. Each article says who it will not suit before it says anything else, and the method behind the numbers is set out in how a trip is counted. If a full day is more than you want to give a Saturday, the shorter sections are Half Days and Hour Trips.

Pack for the ridge rather than for Charleston. A valley morning at forty-five degrees can be a summit afternoon at thirty with wind, and the gap between the two catches people out every spring and fall.

The full-day list