Dolly Sods Wilderness

Author's Comments

Four thousand feet is high enough to change the weather and the vegetation and the way you stand in your own body. Dolly Sods does not feel like West Virginia. It feels like something that slipped down from Labrador and forgot to leave. The red spruce here lean east because the wind has shaped them that way over decades, and the heath barrens stretch out in a way that makes the sky feel enormous and low at the same time. Bear Rocks is the place. The escarpment falls away two thousand feet into the valley below, and at sunrise, when the fog settles into the folds of the mountains and the first light catches the tops of the spruce, there is a version of this landscape that does not exist anywhere else in the mid-Atlantic. I have arrived in the dark and waited in wind that made me question the trip, and then watched the valley fill with pink and gold and cloud in a way that justified every layer of clothing. Summer and fall both work. The heath goes deep red in October, which is reason enough to make the drive. A word on conditions. The weather here changes quickly and it does not care about your plans. Fog is common and usually a gift rather than a setback - the wind-bent spruce become silhouettes, the rocks become shapes, the whole plateau turns into something closer to a painting than a place. Come prepared. Come early. And give it more time than you think you need, because this is a landscape that reveals itself slowly and rarely the same way twice.

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