Walking With The Spring: The AT In PC
Some members of the The Rocky Knob Chapter of the Friends of the Blue Ridge Parkway are looking to trace the Appalachian Trail when it came along the northern border of Patrick County along the Blue Ridge Parkway. It reminded me of one of my favorite stories. In the spring of 1948, a young man walked along the Blue Ridge Parkway entering Patrick County near the Puckett Cabin. He proceeded up the hill towards present day Doe Run with flaming azaleas and dogwoods in bloom. He noticed Pilot Mountain in the distance and the small community of Ararat, Virginia at the foot of Groundhog Mountain. He veered off the road and crossed over the Pinnacles of Dan noticing the beauty of the Dan River and later wrote that this area was “the most rugged and most spectacular” place he walked that summer. That night it rained on him and he built a fire and the next day continued through Patrick County observing a gray fox with the sunlight glistening on its fur. That day he encountered a talkative farmer named Handy, who stopped his plowing to tell of his 200 acres and his family. He shared a dinner of “fried ham, spoon gravy…stewed apples, goat’s milk and real southern cornbread, the kind that is broken, not sliced” with the family. The young man declined an invitation to spend the night and proceeded on to Meadows of Dan. A storeowner told him of a shelter near Rocky Knob for hikers. He continued past Mabry Mill and like millions of others stopped to take a photograph. He made it to Rocky Knob and wrote, “I finally stumbled into Rocky Knob by starlight and found the shelter was of stone, open on three sides and with a cold wind howling through. I gathered some snags for fireplace wood and a sack full of leaves to cushion the stone floor. The temperature must have been around freezing.” The next morning Earl Shaffer, the first man to walk the entire length of the Appalachian Trail, found himself staring out over Rock Castle Gorge and the Woolwine area of Patrick County with Bull Mountain in the distance. The trail through Patrick County went south from Rocky Knob via the Mountain Mission School over to Lover’s Leap on Highway 58. From there it followed Ivy Creek and the Big Bend of the Dan River crossing the Pinnacles of Dan and over to Bell’s Spur before returning near the Blue Ridge Parkway and along that road to Carroll County. The Appalachian Trail began with the dream of one man, Benton MacKaye, who wrote an article in 1921 about a trail stretching the entire length of the Appalachian Mountains with actual building starting two years later. The Appalachian Trail Conference began in 1925 to coordinate the work of the individual local clubs that took care of different sections of the trail. The headquarters today is located in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. In 1968, Congress passed the National Trails System Act designating the Appalachian Trail as a National Scenic Trail. “County Agent for Floyd County” Mr. Shirley L. Cole apparently thought of the section through Patrick County in 1930. Myron H. Avery, Charlie Thomas and E. M. Wood marked the trail in February 1933, one hundred years after Jeb Stuart was born here. The AT was completed as a continuous footpath in 1937. Earl V. Shaffer of York, Pennsylvania, then 29, walked over 2,000 miles that year from Mount Oglethorpe, Georgia on April 4, to Mount Katahdin, Maine on August 5, 1948. He estimated it was over five million steps. He wrote about this journey in a book Walking With Spring. In 1965, he again walked the entire length of the trail going from north to south becoming the first man to walk the AT in both directions. By this time, the AT relocated much of the trail through Southwest Virginia farther north of Patrick County to avoid walking along roads and into the Jefferson National Forrest. In 1948, National Geographic writer Andrew Brown wrote an article about the AT. He mentions John Barnard of Patrick County, who took care of twelve miles of trail himself. The Barnard home is located near the intersection of Route 724 (Pinnacle Lane) and Route 614 (Squirrel’s Spur Road). Upon finding Barnard’s home, Brown was invited to spend the night. Brown wrote of sitting in a chair on the Barnard porch, “I tipped gently back and forth in a rocker. Black clouds banked up. It was quiet as a desert night. The shower broke and drenched the well trimmed lawn, the round bed of geraniums ringed with pansies, and the rose bushes along the fence. A spate of water gurgled down the drainpipes…Bowls of vegetables and stewed fruit, platters of meat, plates piled high with hot biscuits and corn bread, pitchers of milk and cream, jars of honey and homemade jam crowded the big table. There were squash, string beans, and mashed potatoes; hot veal and cold ham; applesauce and pears; and quantities of sweet farm fresh butter to slather on the hot breads. What a feast!” Next time you are driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway near Rocky Knob, go up to the Saddle parking lot with a view of Buffalo Mountain on one side and Bull Mountain on the other and walk back towards Rocky Knob along the green trail near the ridge. In just a few minutes you can climb up hill to the shelter that Earl Shaffer spent the night in during 1948 and you can see the vista he encountered when the Appalachian Trail came through Patrick County, Virginia. For a whimsical view of the AT today read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Thanks to Douglas Belcher for giving me this idea for an article and reminding me of Harry Truman’s maxim that “There is nothing new in the world. There is only the history you don’t know.”
