My brother, his girlfriend, and I spend two nights in Grayson Highlands State Park, roaming the park with the ponies and summitting the highest point in Virginia.
Grayson Highlands State Park
It’s 5 o’clock, and the sun is just beginning to cast long shadows across the neighborhood. I’m in Boone, North Carolina, at my brother’s place. He’s loading in the last backpack and his girlfriend is herding the dog toward the car. We’re leaving ASAP toward the Virginia border and a weekend in Grayson Highlands State Park.
Grayson Highlands State Park is a 4,500 acre park in the southwest corner of Virginia, adjacent to the Mt. Rogers National Recreation Area and included within the Jefferson National Forest. The park is a popular destination for backpacking, hiking, camping, and horseback riding and also hosts a folk music festival every fall. But its biggest claim to fame is the herd of introduced “wild” ponies that roam the mountain-top meadows (called balds) and forests that fill the park.
Hiking Into The Night
It’s almost 2 hours to the trailhead we’ll be using to access the park. We plan to leave our car at an Appalachian Trail (AT) trailhead on VA Route 600. We’ll be following the AT for the entirety of our hike. The sun is beginning to set as we arrive at the parking area. By the time we’ve finished our final preparations, it’s beginning to get dark, and we don our headlamps, setting off into the damp night towards Grayson Highlands State Park as a thunderstorm rumbles in the next valley over.
Night sets in before long and we plod quietly through the woods. We plan to hike to a trail intersection and camp near a water source for the night. The hike should be only about an hour and a half. The thunderstorm moves on ahead of us and continues to grumble until just before we arrive at our planned site.
Upon arrival however, we quickly realize that someone has already set up camp in our spot, and after searching in the dark for some time, unable to find the spring depicted on the map, we decide to keep moving and seek out a campsite farther down the path.
As we hike, the path suddenly begins to incline and we spend the next hour or so climbing through switch backs as we ascend toward Mt. Rogers, the highest point in Virginia. After hiking for almost 3 hours, we decide it makes more sense to just finish the hike, figuring we only have a mile or two left. So we push on.
We walk into the AT backcountry campground just inside Grayson Highlands State Park around midnight and quickly set up camp. The park has a developed campground nearer the visitor center as well, if you’re feeling the car camping vibe more. More encumbered by exhaustion than hunger, we settle in to bed as quickly as we can get the tent set up and sleeping bags unpacked.
Morning in Grayson Highlands State Park
In the morning, we wake up to singing birds. It’s a cool 65 degrees, bright and sunny, and I’m definitely ready for coffee. Seeing the campsite in the daylight, we discover we’re camped in a hemlock grove, shielded from the sunlight in most directions. Not good. The dew will never dry off the tent! But, we notice a group across the trail with a fantastic site are getting ready to leave, so we quickly pack things up and claim the site before anyone else can. The new site is a grass covered clearing in the midst of a waist-high blackberry bush thicket. It has a single pine tree and looks out over a long, winding valley and on to the mountain ranges running to the south. The. Perfect. Site.
After cooking breakfast and rebuilding our camp set up, we pack our day packs and set off to summit Mt. Rogers, a steep mile-and-a-half from our campground. Mt. Rogers’ summit offers very little for a view as the peak is blanketed by thick, moss-covered forest. The summit is marked on a large rock that rises up out of the ground like a platform.
Ponies in Our Campsite
Hiking back into camp, we notice movement in our campsite and begin to watch closely as we approach. One of Grayson Highlands wild ponies has found its way to the grassy patch that is our campground, and he takes little notice of us as we approach. We soon discover that there is a small herd of the ponies moving through the campground. As the ponies normally live farther into the park, it’s rare to see them here in the AT campground.
Exploring Deeper into Grayson Highlands
Once the ponies move on, we head farther into the park, following the Appalachian Trail as it winds along the ridgeline, through scraggly rhododendron forest and wide open balds. We discover a giant boulder jutting out from the ridge and climb to the top for a spectacular view looking north up into the Blue Ridge. A perfect photo op!
Down the trail, we interrupt a grazing herd of cattle that have taken over one of the largest balds between us and the AT campground. One of the bulls doesn’t like our presence and starts to get somewhat aggressive, so we backtrack towards a split in the trail and take a roundabout way back to our camp.
It’s only about 2 pm by the time we make it back to camp, but we are all three feeling the sun and heat and decide to settle down at the site for a lazy afternoon. With the view from our campsite, it’s hard to find a good reason to leave.
A Peaceful End to the Trip
As dinner approaches, we realize we are running low on water and my brother and I volunteer for water schlepping duty. The spring at the Mt. Rogers AT campground is located quite a ways down the hill behind the shelter. It is not something to attempt in flip flops, but we do anyways. One precarious scramble down and a slow climb back up later and we are set for water for the rest of our trip.
When we get back, a fire is already roaring and ready for cooking. We get to boiling water and dump in our ramen packets as a thunderstorm rolls through the valley beneath us, rumbling away and providing a dramatic soundtrack to our dinner prep. As the sun sets over Mt. Rogers and Grayson Highlands State Park and the evening chill begins to set in, we sit on top of the world and sip the warm ramen broth, watching the golden light fade to purple over the mountains beneath us.
Parker Outside 