Summer Superbloom on the Appalachian Trail
As distant travel continues to be impacted (at least for me) by the never-ending pandemic nightmare we are living in these days, one of the upsides has been learning more and more about landscapes that are local to me. The Appalachian Trail is a very special and storied place that has recently become somewhere I find myself returning to over and over.
Last fall I was able to enjoy 4 days of backpacking, camping, and hiking with my wonderful friend Mirna along a section this epic footpath in Shenandoah National Park here in Virginia. Both of us were first time backpackers (though we both are avid outdoors-women and comfortable with camping and being outdoors in general), so the prep was heavy and intimidating, but the trip was a beautiful, memorable experience to the degree that we both soon started planning an equivalent trip in the spring and along a different section of the trail.
This year we did those additional 4 days, this time along a section commonly referred to as Virginia’s Triple Crown, which includes Dragon’s Tooth, McAfee Knob, and Tinker Cliffs, some of the most epic places in our state. Once again, we fell in love with this trail.
We are planning another trip for this fall, though we may try somewhere different than the AT this time. But camera gear is not something I can manage in addition to everything I need for days of backpacking, so these section hikes have not been good in terms of photographic opportunities… So I keep going back to the trail to try to capture it with my camera. There’s a particular section I love - through the Thunder Valley Wilderness up around Apple Orchard Mountain. The trees are gnarly up here at high elevation due to exposure, and the white blaze that indicates the AT just looks so distinctive on these trees… Last year I was here with my daughter on her birthday, mid-August, and discovered a stunning “superbloom” of wildflowers, so I went back recently on a foggy day to see if I could capture some images that did this scene justice. The Joe Pye weed is thick and pink and fragrant, and accompanied by at least a half dozen other wildflowers all blooming at the same time, all shoulder high and just completely crowding out the entirety of the forest floor. Bugs are EVERYWHERE - there’s a dark cloud of flying things, big and small, and every flower seems to have a bee engaged with it. The buzz goes beyond audible and into the LOUD category. It’s a veritable bounty of life up there, and cool, and fragrant, and just all-around heavenly! I took away a very unpleasant sting on my leg, I believe from a wasp or hornet, which persisted for a full 5 days and was quite impressive (alarming?) in size! Stung me through my clothes, too - I wasn’t wandering about in the insect storm in shorts or anything!
So these are just a couple of images from my visit. I like the way they capture the forest, the flowers, and the white-blazed trail. They seemed to somehow sum up what this section means to me, and they were worth the price of the wasp sting, for sure!
I hope you enjoy!
M