The Journal / Routes
Four days in the Grayson Highlands, and the stretch with nowhere to eat
The high country of southwest Virginia has the only true balds in the state, a herd of feral ponies, and a summit worth skipping. Four days out of Damascus, with the awkward parts named rather than glossed over.
Most write-ups of this stretch tell you about the ponies and leave it there. There are ponies, and they are as good as advertised. There is also, on the second day, nine miles of open bald above 5,000 feet with no shade, no store, and exactly two reliable water sources — and nobody mentions that until you are standing on Wilburn Ridge at two in the afternoon rationing what is left in your bottle.
So: four days out of Damascus, walked in the second week of October when the high country has turned and the crowds have thinned.
Getting there and why Damascus
Damascus calls itself Trail Town USA and has earned it. The Appalachian Trail runs straight down Laurel Avenue, the Virginia Creeper Trail crosses it, and the whole town is set up for people who arrive on foot and need a bed, a shower, and a large breakfast.
More usefully, it is the base for shuttles. This route is not a village-to-village walk — the high country has no villages in it. You sleep in town and get driven to a trailhead each morning, which sounds like cheating and is in fact the only sensible way to see the balds without carrying four days of food over them.
Book the shuttle before you arrive. There are a handful of drivers and in October they are busy.
Day one — the Creeper Trail, Green Cove down to Damascus
11 miles. Four hours if you dawdle, and you should.
Start on the Virginia Creeper Trail rather than the AT. It is an old railroad grade, which means a steady downhill gradient the whole way and no navigation to think about, and it is the right way to spend a first afternoon when your pack still feels wrong.
The trestles are the reason to walk it. There are dozens, some of them a hundred feet above the creek, and the rhododendron closes in over the trail so completely that you get thirty feet of tunnel and then a sudden gap with the whole valley in it.
Most people bike this. Walking it means you are moving against a current of rented mountain bikes all afternoon, which is either charming or tiresome depending on temperament. Go on a weekday if you have the choice.
Sleep in Damascus. There are several places on Laurel Avenue and they all know what a hiker looks like.
Day two — Elk Garden to Massie Gap over the balds
9 miles. The big one.
This is the day to carry lunch and more water than you want to.
Get dropped at Elk Garden, where VA 600 crosses the AT, and climb north. The trail goes up through spruce-fir — dark, damp, smelling like Canada, which is roughly what it is, a relict forest left behind when the last ice age retreated — and then breaks out onto open grass and stays there.
Skip the summit of Mount Rogers. It is the highest point in Virginia at 5,729 feet, the spur trail is half a mile each way, and the top is completely wooded with no view whatsoever. Purists go anyway. The honest answer is that the balds you are already standing on are better than anything at the top.
What you want instead is Rhododendron Gap and the scramble over Wilburn Ridge — bare rock outcrops with a view over three states on a clear day, and the best of the pony herd. The ponies are feral, managed by grazing agreement, and completely unbothered by people. Do not feed them. They will investigate your pack with real determination and they are stronger than they look.
Water: there is a spring near Thomas Knob Shelter and not much else you should count on. Fill up there whether or not you feel like it.
Down through Grayson Highlands State Park to Massie Gap, where the shuttle meets you. By then you will have eaten everything.
Day three — the day of not walking
No walking at all. Deliberate.
Every good route has one. Stay in Damascus and do nothing in particular.
This is not padding. Three consecutive days on your feet with elevation turns a trip into a task somewhere around day three, and the whole point of the slow route is that it does not become one. Rent a bike and coast the top section of the Creeper Trail from Whitetop Station if you cannot sit still — seventeen miles, almost entirely downhill, and it does not count as walking if you are not carrying anything.
Day four — the Wilburn Ridge loop
5 miles. Two and a half hours.
Short, and back into the state park at Massie Gap for a loop up onto Wilburn Ridge and down again. You saw this ground on day two with a pack on and somewhere to be. Doing it again empty-handed, slowly, is a completely different walk.
Go early. The light on the balds in the first hour is the thing you will remember, and the parking lot at Massie Gap fills by ten on an October weekend.
You will be back in Damascus before lunch, which is correct — it gives you the afternoon in a town most people drive through on their way to somewhere else.
What to take that is not obvious
A paper map. Cell service on the balds is unreliable and vanishes entirely in the spruce-fir. The AT is well blazed but the side trails through Grayson Highlands are a genuine tangle, and there is a junction above Massie Gap where three paths leave within fifty feet of each other.
A wind layer, in any season. The balds are open and over 5,000 feet, and the weather up there is not the weather in Damascus. It can be seventy in town and forty-five with a hard wind on Wilburn Ridge. People get caught out by this every year.
Real boots. The rock scrambles on Wilburn Ridge are easy but they are rock, and the grass on the balds stays wet until midmorning.
Something to write on. Not a sales pitch, an observation: the parts of a walk you actually remember a year later are the ones you wrote down at the time, and they are never the views.