Over the course of the last week, I read somewhere that the
waterfalls throughout Shenandoah National Park were at their peak because of the recent heavy rains, which followed a snowy winter. I asked Mary if she thought she might be up
for a hike to check out a waterfall or two, suggesting we might go to Jones Run
Falls in the South District, which has become one of my favorite waterfalls in
the park. We set off on Sunday morning,
with Tessie coming along for the hike, and on the way to the trailhead we saw
lingering snow in the shadows along Skyline Drive.
As I prepared to write this post, I took a minute to recall
my previous hikes to Jones Run Falls, trying to figure out why I like this
waterfall so much. I’ve linked a couple
of the old posts below – they’re full of photos of the scenery, and that is
certainly part of what I like so much.
It could also be that the cascades along this stream, along with Doyle’s
River, are so accessible to hikers – you can literally walk right up to them if
you want, and even jump in there for a shower if you like.
While I have done the Doyle’s River/Jones Run circuit
before, we agreed that we weren’t up to a hike as rigorous as that. Instead we chose to simply hike down the
Jones Run gorge from the trailhead at milepost 84, a descent of 900-plus feet
and a round trip of 3.4 miles. The
combination makes it an “easy” hike in my book, it needs to exceed 500 feet of
elevation change and five miles of distance to be moderate.
The fact that there are three waterfalls and two stream
crossings on this short hike makes it a very worthwhile outing. While there are no rock scrambles or other
features of that sort, the jumbled formations of boulders strewn about the
gorge offer some pretty great views as well.
Mary, Tessie and I had a nice walk together, and spent about
an hour enjoying the falls once we reached them. A couple of family groups were out for the
day, and everybody wanted to give Tessie some attention. That’s a canine who knows how to work it.
In addition to the linked posts below, I’ll be making a
second post about this hike – I wanted to use a couple of the iPhone photo
features, and I’ll share a couple of extra photos tomorrow.
As I mentioned, here are some previous blog posts about this
hike:
No comments:
Post a Comment