A teacher learns how to unwind backpacking in West Virginia’s Dolly Sods Wilderness Area
The parking lot is shockingly empty when I arrive. Everything I’ve read online tells me that this place gets hammered by crowds, especially on the weekends. Thankfully, I’m able to come in the middle of the week since my summer vacation just started. I’m grateful for the emptiness and the flexibility to go when the weather’s right and most people are at work. To be crowded when I’m seeking solitude, as I do when I’m backpacking, is as bad as having to sign bathroom passes and have lunch duty. My summers have become my time to unravel into a feral state of living each day as it comes, a stark and drastic change from the rest of my year, which is spent in a classroom community of teenagers where our conversations and deep dives into literature and writing are structured by bells and assignments and grades. Over the past few years, I’ve begun each summer vacation with a backpacking trip in order for my body and mind to step into the openness and possibility that the next 10 weeks will afford me.
Right as I’m about to hitch my pack and head out, a car pulls in and a middle-aged guy who looks very similar to me hurriedly gets out and before I even have a chance to lock my doors, is already walking by, trekking poles tapping the gravel behind me.
“Hey man, have a good hike!,” I yell.
“Yeah, you too! Classes ended last week, so I’m heading out into the woods,” he mentions without stopping.
“Hah! Nice! Me too! See you around,” I say knowing full well that neither of us really wants or needs to see the other over the next few days. A kindred spirit who respects the need for unstructured solitude. I watch as he takes a left at the juncture and so when I set out, I go to the right.
I’m surprised at how low the river I’m hiking along is already. I’m surprised by how worn the trail is. I’m surprised by the amount of campsites along the creek, all empty. As I make my way up the valley and across the creek and begin ascending a ridge, my surprise turns inward. I’m surprised how quickly I fall into a routine-less day and how quickly my body adjusts to carrying a heavy pack and walking on a rocky trail and how easy it is for me to notice what needs to be noticed: chicken-of-the-woods growing on a rotting oak log, the white leaves of Allegheny blackberry splattered throughout long fields of thick fern like the last errant snow of April, quartz sandstone erratics frozen in their slow naked erosion surrounded by beech and blooming mountain laurel.
One of the things I love about teaching is that each day is unlike the previous, inevitably full of the unexpected, which is also what I love about backpacking into wild areas. Each holds very different types of mysteries—a classroom is full of the human mystery, whereas the woods are full of the nonhuman. I love them both, but for me to fully engage with and honor the multitude of adolescent surprises that my job entails, I need to get into places as wild as Dolly Sods where I’m able to lose myself in another world that is slowly, deliberately, organically, happening and existing and occurring on its own time and within its own energy and along its own wavelength. I need to let myself go a little and be shaped by a landscape that is far from my day-to-day life as a teacher.
I spend the next few hours climbing out of the Red Creek ravine and make my way towards Lions Head where I’m granted sweeping views south into the Roaring Plains West Wilderness. After a nice lunch of Nutella, almond peanut butter, and honey wrapped in a tortilla, I hike back down to the Red Creek Trail until I reach the forks and set up camp for the night. It’s easy to see how much use this area gets by the number of stone fire rings along the creeks. Since it’s midweek, I have the place to myself. I find a boulder along the water to sit on and read as sunlight fades out of the woods. I listen to a concert of eastern towhees and dark-eyed juncos and vireos—some blue-headed, some red-eyed—and Hermit Thrushes fill dusk and I’m reminded that animals, too, experience joy. I’m full of gratitude for being here, bearing witness to these gleeful melodies. I sleep deep that night with my rainfly open and a cool early summer breeze rustling through my sleeping bag.
I take the next morning slowly: drinking instant coffee, eating hot oatmeal, watching fog lift off the creek and into the canopy before dissipating into a steady stream of sunlight and caddisflies. I have no place to be, no job to commute to, no attendance to take, no lesson to deliver, nothing to do but walk. So that’s what I do, meandering uphill, gaining elevation as I make my way through stands of Eastern Hemlocks and cedar and bright pink blooming mountain laurel. I know it’s supposed to be up in the 90s back home but at this elevation, it stays in the 70s and the humidity that has been suffocating the riverlands back in Pennsylvania hasn’t found its way here. With each step I take, I shake off the routines of my job and untangle myself from the months of grading and, at times, intense intellectual conversations, listening more intently to the sounds of the rhododendron thickets.
I stop in a grove of sugar maple for lunch and let my feet dry from walking through a particularly wet sphagnum bog an hour earlier. By afternoon I am traversing wind-swept grass sods lined with stunted red spruce and yellow birch twirling in wind that is long gone but will inevitably appear again soon. I’m too early for blueberries, but each stem that brushes my leg brings me happiness knowing the sweetness they’ll hold in a few weeks. The north end of this wilderness is truly unique. It reminds me of hiking in Nova Scotia or the alpine area of Maine. Eventually I make my way to the western ridge where I set up camp, the wind blocked by a nice boulder field. I spend that evening and night immersed in the wide, expansive heath barrens dotted with stunted trees and well-worn boulders creating an unraveling plateau where I let myself untether and unfold into an endless horizon.
All photos by the author
