#63 Hiking Smith Roach Gap: Who Owns This Land?

October 18, 2007

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.