Skittering, etc.

I needed a runaway. I had not really planned my day, in fact I thought I would run away to the Great Falls Tavern area of the C&O Canal National Historic Park. At just a half hour from home, I could get away from duties at home. Duties included family visits, doctor visits and many hours working out at the gym. No those activities are not related to each other, they just illustrate that I had things that kept me from a taking a runaway since Thanksgiving Saturday, three months ago.

As I drove away from home toward the C&O Canal, for my runaway, something in my heart and mind pulled me much further, I drove two and a half hours to Shenandoah National Park. The day was chilly, below freezing in Silver Spring. Some snow still survived on the ground from a week ago. But there would be more snow on the ground in Shenandoah National Park, where the sunrise temperature was a single digit seven degrees Fahrenheit. I wanted to see Dark Hollow Falls frozen solid.

I parked at Fishers Gap and walked across Skyline Drive to Rapidan Fire Road, still covered with snow two inches deep, but with a hard crust on top, the result of a surface melting on warmer days since the snow fell. The snow looked smooth as china with many tiny nodules interrupting the sheen of light reflecting from it. Footprints of several different sizes going both directions broke up the surface, looking like they had been made when the snow was still soft.

Photo by Bob Kuhns

I started down the fire road, my feet making crunching sounds as they punched through the shiny crust of the snow to the softer stuff underneath. The sound of my feet broke the silence of the winter forest. I was fooled several times into thinking there was some other sound in the woods but my own, forcing me to stop walking and listen for other sounds. They were not there, just silence.

Photo by Bob Kuhns

Then the toe of my boot caught under the crust a little bit and lifted a chunk of the hard snow up and sent it sliding over the hard snow toward the downhill side of the fire road. The piece skittered slowly over the snow, pulled along by its own inertia and the pull of gravity, moving ever closer to the bank that dropped off on the side of the road. I stopped and listened to the skritching sound it made as it moved away from me. It glided over the edge of the road and down the slope of the bank, picking up speed, steering around tree trunks where the snow was a little higher. Finally, the chunk stopped moving and the forest was quiet again.

What else could I do? I deliberately kicked my boot into the snow and sent a flotilla of crusty snow chunks charging along the same path.

Dozens of crusty fragments of snow began to move over the top of the snow, much the same as fall leaves float on a slow flowing stream. Tiny variations in the surface made them start to diverge and take different routes on down the bank, some stopping early, some continuing. The multiple scritching sounds amplifying each other to sound like an explosion of noise compared to the quiet winter forest. The last chunk to stop was fifty feet away from me having traveled ten noisy seconds. I played this child’s game several more times that day.

When I reached the Cave Cemetery, I wanted to get some photographs of the markers in the snow out of respect for the people who lived in these mountains before the park. Somehow, I feel warmth when I visit this place. I think of the people buried here as no longer feeling the cold of winter, but feeling the warmth of being in the land they loved. I spent a half hour paying my respects, reading headstones, and photographing from different angles.

Photo by Bob Kuhns

Next stop the bridge across Hogcamp Branch and the beautiful small nameless falls visible upstream from the bridge. This is where in November, 2005, I photographed the “Ice Mermaid of Dark Hollow”, see Ice Mermaid of Dark Hollow. (My friend Jan, calls it the Ice Angel of Dark Hollow.)

This day, the temperature still below freezing, nearly the whole surface of the creek and most of the falls itself are static ice structures that look like the flowstone formations in a limestone cave. I did not see any mermaids or angels. I’ll be looking closely at all of my pictures.

Photos by Bob Kuhns