The Rivanna Rambler

This show originally aired on December 20, 2007 on “The Rivanna Rambler,” a weekly public affairs show airing every Thursday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM or wtju.net.

We are approaching the shortest day of the year. Looking for a local hike, we head out towards Monticello to the Saunders Trail, the 2 mile trail that winds up the side of Carter’s Mountain to the entrance of Monticello. It is a blustery day worthy of being called winter – and the parking lot on Route 53 is barely full. We don fleece jackets and gloves and head out for our first time on the trail, already well-known to locals, birders, and visitors. That we are in for a treat is immediately apparent as we start up the comfortably wide trail.

With a grade no greater than 5% so that it suits walkers, wheelchairs, and bikes, this is a budding naturalist’s dream – almost every shrub and tree is labeled with common and scientific name, and if it weren’t so cold, we might linger even longer over the varieties.As we ascend, the wind becomes the dominant – but invisible – character in the forest, chilling the air that falls into shadow behind Carter’s Mountain. We’d seen and felt it as we left our house in Charlottesville, whipping the tulip trees high above, reminding us of days on the water. But here, the gusts over the top of the mountain crescendo into a roar, sending twigs and small branches down onto the rock dust path. As we approach the boardwalk that carries us into the woods and above the steep grades of the forest floor, the sound of the wind easily masks any noise from cars on Route 53 below. It is thrilling, cold, and somewhat scary.

On the water, a common way for designating wind speed is the Beaufort Scale, named for Admiral Beaufort of the Royal Navy, whose method that linked wind speed with the number of sails a ship could carry, was formalized in 1830. As sailing vessels became more sophisticated, the system evolved to use the wind effects of the on the surface of the water to estimate speed in levels called Force 1, 2, and so on up to Force 12 – a hurricane. Later still, descriptions were added to describe the effects of wind as seen on land: for example, Force 6 is a strong breeze, equivalent to 27 mph and causing large waves with foam crests and some spray to build on the sea. The equivalent on land puts large branches in motion, causes wires overhead to whistle, and makes using an umbrella difficult.

But wind speed is hard to estimate without a lot of experience and instrumentation to corroborate. The noise and the motion of the tree canopy above provide clues, though the wind is broken by the mountain into turbulent downdrafts. I guess that it is gusting to at least 40 mph – Force 8 on the Beaufort Scale – gale force winds that, on land, the Beaufort scale says will beak twigs from trees and cause cars to veer on the road.The boardwalk carries us above the folds of the mountain gathering the waters that will descend eventually into Moores Creek on the other side of I-64. Up the hillside, I hear the crack of wood that continues for several seconds as a limb collides with a tree in the slow, inevitable explosion of descent. Closer to me, a tree that fell many months or years ago is splayed out upon the leaf littered slope, decomposing into segments like the joints of the fingers.

Wind is a primary erosive force on beaches and rock faces, joining with water to transform solids into sediments. On the fetch of open water, wind continually creates the rise and fall of waves in motion towards the shore. Later I learn from the National Weather Surface Charlottesville winds were measured at 29 mph with gusts to 47 mph. But regardless of the number, I left with the descriptive scale for inland wind that moves over the tree tops and through the canopy in turbulent eddies: rustling leaves, breaking twigs and branches, and in the strongest of winds, uprooting trees, hastening the recycling of nutrients from branch to soil in a sea of trees.

Photo credit: Hank Hellman

 

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It is an early December afternoon, unseasonably warm. The slant of sun at two o’clock conveys the certain message that within a couple of hours, the sun will fall off the edge of the earth, leaving us in the cold and darkness of another winter night. I am on the County side of the river, below Pantops, on the Old Mill Trail, named with a nod to the grain mills that once lined this stretch of the Rivanna in the 17 and early 1800’s. When completed, it will terminate at Milton, but here it is a wide “Class A” trail, suitable for wheelchairs, bikes, and older folks who need a firm and clear footing.

The path has been bush-hogged clear of excess brush and bramble, and a thin layer of rock-duct paving shows boot prints and various scuff marks left behind by human and non-human travelers along the river corridor. Here and there, semi-translucent tree tubes, four feet high and staked in place, reveal where young cedars and oak trees have been planted to help restore what was removed to make way for the trail.

This swath of green is what is called a “riparian buffer” … “riparian” for river; buffer for the fact that it is a protective transition zone between civilization and the river in its normal flow within its banks. The river’s buffer is often the same as its floodplain, as it ishere, a broad expanse of sand deposited in the slow curve of the river. Federal and state regulations and county code all protect this buffer and ensure that there is little or no disturbance in what is called the floodplain overlay district.

But recreational uses are allowed, and there’s no keeping out the animals. Every hundred yards or so, placed neatly at the edge of the path, is a desiccated clump of scat, full of berries, left behind by fox or raccoon.

And everywhere, the sign of beaver … here, a series of tree stumps scraped to points like pencils, ragged with teeth marks and accompanied by piles of fresh wood chips on the ground. There are some random scrapes in the rock dust, where a beaver has pulled the trunk across the walking path towards the river making its own trail through bramble and woods and eventually to a steep earthen slide down to the water. One unlucky animal was forced to leave its quarry behind, the trunk left dangling a foot off the ground gripped by thorny greenbrier and bittersweet.

Apartment complexes have sprouted up all along the hillside overlooking the river in this part of the county, but today there is no one on the trail, so as I cross the simple bridges that ford the creeks flowing into the Rivanna along this stretch, I am left to a quiet that is punctuated only now and again by the sounds of hikers on the other side of the river at Riverview Park and the faint gush of the river itself tumbling on down towards the Bay.

Well before I reach the remains of the Woolen Mills dam, I turn back, watching for more signs. Bicycle tracks weaving figure eights in the soft gravel. A series long lines and crooked hieroglyphics dug into the rock dust have me mystified until I come upon a perfect circle, made by a kid – or young at heart – with a stick and the desire to leave a mark. Against a tree, there’s a stack of trash bags bulging with soda cans, fast food wrappers, plastic toys, leftover from a river clean-up, I suppose.

Though the urban trail system along the river is relatively tame, it still touches some deep and primal places within, where I can exercise my tracking sense, however dim and unskilled it may be, and where I can watch each season fold ever so gracefully into the next.

November 22, 2007

I cannot hear the stream below me on the left as I ascend the fire road along the South Fork of the Moorman’s River above Sugar Hollow Reservoir.   The only sound I hear is the rush of wind funneling briskly down its own course of this steep valley in the Rivanna headwaters.   And my own foot noise, in spite of my effort to walk quietly up the path strewn with leaves. Occasionally, my eyes search the hillside, looking for movement.  There were only two cars in the parking area, so I imagine privacy and maybe, if I am lucky, some wildlife.  But leaves continue to fall with abandon everywhere, camouflaging any living thing, except myself.

It’s a steep climb at first, but as the hillside flattens along the trail, I cut off the path and approach the water through a stand of young hemlock and flowering witch hazel.  I scramble down to a moss-covered boulder with a view of a shallow pool that is fed from upstream around the bend and which disappears downstream over a small riffle.  I sit, letting the sound of water over rock join the wind rush and the wood creak making harmonies in the moving air.   I strain to discern what is not the sound of rock, air and water, feeling hopelessly human with an unpracticed perception and limited audio hearing range.  I hear nothing and everything in the water:  the faint sound of mewing, as I imagine the cougar cubs I long to see.  The sound of human voices, but when I look behind me on the trail, I see nothing.  The clap of iron upon wood, like a hammer.  All imagined.   I lean back, my knees draped over the rock, the sun warming me through ever thinning leaves. I descend into sleep.

An unfamiliar sound alerts me, and I sit up and scan the stream.  From around the downstream bend, with the slow tempo of dreamscape, a man comes in to view.  He is walking the streambed, carefully picking his way from rock to rock.  He is older, his rock-hop more of a step-by-step assessment as he approaches where I am sitting.  His head is down, and I am not sure if he has spotted me.

I have only a moment to make my decision, but that’s all I need.  I drop my eyes and still my body.  I am in plain view as he approaches from thirty feet away, but I have decided to be part of the scenery.  Every once in a while out of the corner of my eye, I check to see where he is.  It appears, by the path that he takes, that he has seen me and is steering respectfully clear.  Only when I cannot see or hear him anymore,  do I arise and walk carefully through the under story towards the trail, pausing to answer the call of nature,  making my own mark in private, I hope.

I walk slowly downhill, savoring yellow leaves against blue sky.  I enter a patch of air scented with animal, fresh as water and pure in its rankness.  At my feet is a small deposit of dark and berry-filled scat.  Down the trail, the air returns to “normal” but in another 500 yards, the same thing happens: the unmistakable smell of wild.   I wonder if I am being watched by an animal, folded still into the hillside above me.

When I return to the parking area, the two cars I’d seen are gone and are replaced by a new one that belongs, presumably, to the man I had seen.  It was a chance encounter, not the one I had hoped for, but I learned some things about making my own path through the woods.  Listen to the water: you will hear what is necessary.  Be still as a rock, for your privacy and solace lie within.  Step gently on the leaves and know that you are not alone in the woods.

This show originally aired on October 18, 2007 on “The Rivanna Rambler,” a weekly public affairs show airing every Thursday at 11:55 a.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM or wtju.net.

 

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It is a golden warm October day – one in which I would be inclined to take to the river, but cannot due to water levels that are impossibly low. So instead, I head out with my husband for a high point in the watershed as if, perhaps to get closer to the clouds that hold the moisture hostage high above us.

We drive up to Greene County and follow Route 33 – the Spotswood Highway – west following the crest of the divide between the Rapidan and the Rivanna. From Ruckersville towards the mountains, the ridge defines the head of the watersheds of Welsh Run, Deep Run, Blue Run, and then Long Run. At Lydia where Route 634 ends in the highway, we meet Swift Run which tracks right along Route 33 as it tumbles from its headwaters at Swift Run Gap, elevation almost 2400 feet. We trace the curves in the mountain on a route that has changed little since it was traveled by Governor Alexander Spotswood and his famous Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, the 1716 exploratory party that crossed into the Shenandoah Valley through the pass here. Where we can see it, Swift Run itself is dry, its bones exposed between scant flow and small, still pools of wet.

Once on Skyline Drive, we head south a few miles to the parking lot at Smith Roach Gap – at 2600 feet, it’s the next crossing over the mountains. Named for an early settler , last name Roach, first name Smith, it marks the headwaters of the Roach River which falls from the mountains eastward into Bacon Hollow, Deep Hollow, and Waterfall Hollow.

We hike north in quiet on the trail towards the summit of Hightop Mountain, the leaves so dry they barely rustle. Everything is yellow and brown, like a summer in California, where water goes underground only to emerge in the rivers again during the rains of winter. Here, too, it feels like the water is absent, but in a season of record high temperatures and record low rainfall, I feel unsure of its return. Fall wildflowers are in show: purple and white asters, yellow goldenrod and milkweed pods in various stages of undress. Grass beds along the path glisten in the afternoon sun.

I am calmed by this walk in the woods, but I also know that this part of the piedmont is known for its rough and tumble ways. Though it’s been 80 years since landowners were evicted from the Blue Ridge to establish Shenandoah National Park, the memory is still nursed – and I am aware that this is a country where I need to cultivate understanding. Tucked into these hills are homesteads, orchards, and graveyards: grown over, reclaimed by the succession of cedar given way now to hickory and oak. We see little of this on our walk, but when the trail opens into flat stretches between granite outcrops and ferns, it is not hard to imagine pasture, croplands, and the hardscrabble life of the mountains.

In my own life, I have felt the loss of landscapes special to me — places that have been paved, graded, or filled and planted with houses, shopping centers, roads and marinas. Though truly incomprehensible, this helps me feel compassion for the Monacans and other Native Americans displaced from the land during the so-called era of contact. And centuries later, in these hills, it is a similar displacement, but the opposite has happened – where the dead are buried, the cemetery markers are overgrown with honeysuckle; where the barns and houses once stood, the foundations are crumbling under lichen and wind. And the springs nursed forth from the folds of the hills are secrets only the locals know.

As we walk, two ravens traverse the ridge overhead, announcing in throaty caws to the valley below our presence in the woods. We come to a scattering of gauzy down feathers – roughed grouse perhaps – left in the trail by an unknown predator. Later, we come across a bold dark mound of bear scat, so full of berries it looks ready to sprout. In the cycle of change, today we’ve been left these clues about who is at home in this high corner of the watershed during this moment in time.