by Jeff Alt
“See you in few,” Washington said as he walked away with Cousin Nick and Dolly.
“Yep, see you at Blackrock,” I said.
Papa Lewis, Hug-a-Bug, and I stood and watched them walk away along the beach, and then a loud kaboom shook us, and they were gone. We all stood together and I said “Take us back to the present.”
A gust of warm air swirled around us. Everything went dark and then lit back up and we found ourselves once again standing next to the ancient rocks with the worm holes. We had our modern clothes and packs on once again. On our walk back to the parking area, we passed a family walking towards Calvary Rocks.
“Enjoy the ancient beach,” I said with a grin to the family as they passed us.
The mom and dad gave a confused smile. I heard one of their kids exclaim as they continued on, “Mom, Dad, you didn’t tell us we’re hiking to a beach!”
Hug-a-Bug looked over at me with a grin as we continued our hike back to our vehicle. This really brought home how amazing it was to be able to time travel back and experience history!
When we reached the parking lot, we threw our gear in the back of the Jeep, hopped into the vehicle, clicked on our seatbelts, and pulled onto Skyline Drive headed north, back towards Loft Mountain Campground. Papa Lewis never asked me for directions and a few minutes later he turned off of Skyline Drive and into another parking lot. He had definitely been here before. He brought the Jeep to a halt and shifted it into park.
“This walk is even shorter than Calvary Rocks—it’s just a half-mile stroll. When we get to Blackrock, we will time travel back to the same period that Bubba Jones did when we encountered the woolly mammoth, at the end of the last ice age,” Papa Lewis said.
We grabbed our gear and walked together down the trail towards Blackrock. It only took us a few minutes to reach our destination. The shaded trail opened up to a mountaintop covered with large broken pieces of gray rock. The rock chunks looked like a massive rubble pile after an earthquake. The rocks completely covered the mountaintop and ran down the mountain, deep into a forested hollow, out of view. This barren pile of rocks stood out against the surrounding lush, green, tree-covered mountains. It was really odd, as if this place had imploded among the others.
“What happened here?” I asked Papa Lewis.
“As the climate thawed then froze again at the end of the last ice age, it broke up large rocks into this rubble field that covers the entire mountaintop. It’s called a talus slope. This happened during the periglacial period. There were no actual glaciers in Shenandoah, but it was still extremely cold. Towards the end of the ice age, the temperature would go back and forth between warm and cold,” Papa Lewis explained. “Bubba Jones, take us back to July 16th 11,000 years ago.”
I placed my hand on the family journal and said, “Take us back to July 16th, 11,000 years in the past.”
A cold gust of air blew us backward. Everything went dark. We heard a snap, and then it became light again. We now stood at the top of a large stone cliff. Our clothes were replaced with deerskin and our feet were wrapped in animal hide. An icy wind gave me the chills, and goose bumps popped out on my arms. Washington, Cousin Nick, and Dolly were already there to greet us.
“Come over here and check out the view, guys,” Washington hollered to us as they stood near the edge of the cliff looking outward.
We walked over to take a peek. The valley was completely covered in forest. No roads or farm fields dotted the land, just endless trees across the entire Shenandoah Valley. As we stood there, I thought it would be a good time to find out some more about what Washington was working on.
“Washington, why is your Shenandoah project so secret that you can’t share it with us? I mean, we all have to hide that we can time travel, so it’s not as if we don’t know how to keep a secret!”
“Yeah, what could be so secret? Are you protecting something? Tracking something?” Hug-a-Bug asked as she crossed her arms, shivering from the cold.
We were interrupted by Cousin Nick, “Be careful everyone. The rock we’re standing on could crumble and break off at any moment.”
We all took a step back away from the cliff edge, realizing the danger we were in.
“Argh! This is frustrating, not being able to tell you guys what I’m doing! Yes, Hug-a-Bug, I’m monitoring something and it’s related to our family mission of protecting and preserving this wildland. It may be a few days before we’re able to meet up again. We have some work we need to do that will require us to stay up through the night. I will contact you as soon as we’re done,” Washington explained.
Just then, the ground beneath our feet shook. Large cracks appeared in the rock. It felt like the entire mountain was going to collapse beneath us.
“This doesn’t look good. We better time travel out of here now!” Papa Lewis yelled over the thunder of rocks smashing and breaking up beneath our feet.
Just then, an entire slab of rock where Cousin Nick, Dolly, and Washington stood broke free from the mountain. For a split second, they seemed to stand in thin air, then, they plummeted downward. Cousin Nick held Washington’s and Dolly’s hands as they disappeared from view in a free fall.
“We’ll catch up to you guys later,” Cousin Nick yelled as they fell out of sight.
Papa Lewis, Hug-a-Bug, and I stood close together. The rocks beneath our feet began to separate as I screamed, “Take us back to the present!”
A warm gust of air blew us upward. Everything went dark. I blinked my eyes and we were once again standing on the trail, dressed in our modern clothes, our packs on our backs, in view of the rock field and the talus slopes.
“We have to go back and make sure they’re okay,” Hug-a-Bug panted.
“We can’t. It’s too dangerous. You heard Cousin Nick say they would catch up to us later,” Papa Lewis replied.
“But they fell off a cliff! How can we be sure they were able to time travel back to the present?” I asked, “And Washington didn’t give us a new cipher. Where do we go from here? What do we do?”
CHAPTER 9
A BLACKBERRY MOOD
Papa Lewis wrapped his arms around Hug-a-Bug and me and said, “Let’s wait and see what happens. You don’t know Cousin Nick like I do. I’m sure they are just fine.”
Hug-a-Bug and I trudged back to the Jeep. We threw our packs and poles into the back, buckled in, and sat quietly as Papa Lewis pulled out onto Skyline Drive and headed north towards our campground.
“You both deserve a special Shenandoah treat. Have you ever had a blackberry milkshake?” Papa Lewis asked as he pulled into the Loft Mountain Wayside, a roadside restaurant and gift shop near our campground.
After hiking three different trails today, ice cream did sound good. We hopped out of the Jeep and walked with Papa Lewis up towards the Wayside entrance.
“Look, those are the thru-hikers’ backpacks! The ones we hiked with a few days ago,” Hug-a-Bug said, pointing to three backpacks lined up against the outside wall of the building along with three pairs of hiking poles, near the entrance.
We stepped inside and sure enough, the three hikers we met at Rockfish Gap stood looking at the menu posted over the counter. “Hey guys, we meet again,” I said to the hikers.
“Hey, it’s Bubba Jones and Hug-a-Bug! We didn’t think we would see you again. Sorry about our pace. We didn’t realize you had fallen behind until we ran into a PATC trail crew and stopped to talk with them. After that, we just wanted to get to the shelter for the night and eat dinner,” one of the hikers explained.
“That’s okay. We had a fun hike into the park after driving all day, and your pace was way too fast for us,” I said.
“By the way, my trail name is Soul Search, that’s Bagel Man, and that’s Fungus,” Soul Search said pointing to his buddies. “Thru-hikers take on nicknames as part of the trail culture.”
“Have you all had the blackberry milkshake before? It’s one of my favorite Shenandoah treats. They serve them at all the waysides. I’m buying
. Would you like one?” Papa Lewis said invitingly.
Papa Lewis got a quick yes from the thru-hikers and placed an order for six blackberry milkshakes. We then we sat at a nearby table and slurped them down. Now I understood why Papa Lewis liked these shakes. They didn’t take away our worry about our cousins, but they sure did hit the spot after a day of hiking.
The three thru-hikers planned to stay the night at Loft Mountain Campground, where we were camping. It’s not often you get hot showers while hiking the Appalachian Trail, but three of the four campgrounds in Shenandoah had shower houses, and the A.T. skirted by each one. We offered to drive them into the campground, but they refused. Soul Search explained that they had walked off the A.T. to hit the Wayside, and they wanted to retrace their steps back to where they left the trail so they wouldn’t skip any sections of the A.T. Like many thru-hikers, they wanted to make sure they hiked every inch of the A.T.
We said goodbye to the thru-hikers and parted with them in the parking lot. In a few minutes, we arrived back at our campground. Mom, Dad, and Grandma had dinner ready to throw on the fire whenever we were ready. We caught them up on our time-travel adventures to Calvary Rock and Black Rock. We explained what happened with Washington, Dolly, and Cousin Nick, and we told them about going to the Wayside and running into the thru-hikers we met at Rockfish Gap the other day, and how Papa Lewis treated us all to blackberry milkshakes.
“I love those blackberry milkshakes,” Dad said with a smile.
Dad and Grandpa placed a steel grilling grate over the fire to cook Dad’s special campfire steak, while Mom and Grandma sat in their camp chairs, reading books. Meanwhile, Hug-a-Bug sat down at the picnic table with pen and paper and began working on her timeline. She planned to organize all of our time-travel adventures in chronological order based on the time period we visited, from oldest to most recent.
It felt good to sit down after all our exploring. I stared at the fire, lost in thought. What was Washington working on out here that was so secret he couldn’t share it with us? Were Cousin Nick, Dolly, and Washington safe after their fall during our Blackrock time-travel episode?
I replayed in my mind what Washington had said about his secret mission back at Blackrock. “I’m monitoring something and it’s related to our family mission of protecting and preserving this wildland. It may be a few days before we’re able to meet up again. We have some work we need to do that will require us to stay up all night. I will contact you as soon as I’m done.”
Hug-a-Bug came over to show me her timeline and I shared some of my thoughts with her about Washington’s secret mission.
“Cousin Crockett would be great to have along right now. If he knew about Washington’s secret mission like us, he would want to figure out what all the secrecy was about,” I said to Hug-a-Bug.
Cousin Crockett, and his parents, Uncle Boone and Aunt Walks-a-Lot, joined us in the Smokies on our last adventure. Cousin Crockett had really wanted to come along to Shenandoah, but his parents had business to tend to back home in Georgia, so we parted ways with them and came here.
“Cousin Crockett was a huge help with our family mystery. You’re right; he would be good to have along right now,” Hug-a-Bug replied.
Dad and Papa Lewis removed the fire-seared steaks, corn on the cob, sweet potatoes, and roasted green peppers from the grill, signaling that dinner was about to be served. Mom and Grandma placed a fresh salad and rolls on the table to go along with the grilled food. While we all sat around the picnic table devouring the delicious meal, we discussed our Shenandoah adventure.
“We were led here by Washington, Cousin Nick, and Dolly, but now they are on some secret mission that we are not supposed to know about. So, what do we do from here?” I asked.
Everyone looked at Papa Lewis for an answer.
“I spent many adventures in Shenandoah, and there is so much to see and do. Tomorrow we’ll break camp and head north into the central district section of the park,” Papa Lewis said as he unfolded the Central District map and spread it out on the picnic table for all of us to see.
We all circled around Papa Lewis to see what he had in store.
“I’ve made arrangements for us to stay a night here in the Pocosin Cabin,” Papa Lewis explained pointing to a little cabin symbol near milepost sixty along Skyline Drive on the Appalachian Trail.
“That’s cool. I didn’t know there were cabins here,” I said.
“Yep, the PATC maintains six cabins in Shenandoah National Park. We hiked past one today on our waterfall hike. All the cabins have bunks with mattresses, cookware, pit toilets, and a nearby spring. It will be easier to make camp there and explore the area instead of pitching the tent for just one night,” Papa Lewis explained.
Hug-a-Bug and I didn’t stay up very long after the sun went down. We were exhausted, and unlike most nights, we were the first ones to head to bed. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I slept straight through the night and woke up to the sound of the coffee pot gurgling. Through the unzipped tent flap I could see Papa Lewis and Grandma seated at the picnic table. I slipped on my sandals and joined them. “Good morning,” I whispered.
“Good morning, Bubba Jones. Let’s go pick some fruit to go along with breakfast,” Papa Lewis whispered back.
We walked out onto the campground road, not talking so as not to wake other campers. Several deer grazed nearby. The morning dew clung to the blades of grass. Birds chirped, singing their morning song. We walked a few hundred feet down the road to a patch of grass with several apple trees loaded with low-hanging fruit. Papa Lewis started picking the apples, placing them in a sack he had brought along.
“Where did these apple trees come from? Are they native to Shenandoah National Park?”
“No, they are not native to this area. This campground sits on top of Big Flat Mountain. It used to be all pastures and fruit orchards. Cows used to graze here. It was owned by the Patterson family and maintained by the Frazier family. This apple tree is a remnant of one of their orchards. There are apple trees scattered throughout the park. Apples were grown by the mountain families that once called this area home. They would sell the apples for income. Now the bears, deer, birds, and us campers and hikers can enjoy them,” Papa Lewis explained.
“I thought Shenandoah National Park was a wilderness area. I didn’t realize people used to live here.”
“Hardly an acre is original old-growth forest. What you see today is a second-growth forest. About 40 percent of the park is now also designated by Congress as wilderness and all the land is protected as a national park. But until this became a park in 1935, the land was privately owned. Much of the land had been cleared for grazing and crops. The timber was also heavily used as a resource by mountain residents and timber companies,” Papa Lewis explained.
“You would never know it. Our entire Shenandoah experience so far has been in thick forest.”
“It’s amazing how fast the natural world, if allowed, can reestablish itself. You have to know what you’re looking for to find signs of the human history. We’ll explore more of this as we move along through the park. I think we have enough apples. We better get these back so your grandma can make her special fried apples for breakfast,” Papa Lewis said.
We walked back to camp and helped Grandma peel and cut the apples. She put them in a skillet on our two-burner camp stove perched on the end of the picnic table. She added butter, sugar, and cinnamon, and then she lit the burner and let them simmer. Soon the sweet smell of apples and cinnamon drew the rest of the family members out of their tents. In no time, we had a huge breakfast of eggs, bacon, and fried apples. Hug-a-Bug and I put the fried apples on the top of our list of awesome yummy Grandma food!
After breakfast, we all helped break camp and pack up. After we loaded everything in the Jeep, Dad drove us out of Loft Mountain Campground and we continued north on Skyline Drive. We passed by the Swift Run Gap park entrance, which was another area where Confederate General Jackson crossed t
hrough the mountains during the Civil War.
Everyone was enjoying the ride. Skyline Drive gently eased over the top of the mountain and around bends, opening up to spectacular views of the valley below, before slipping beneath the forest canopy.
Up ahead, we could see that cars were slowing down, and several had pulled off to the side of the road. Then traffic came to a sudden halt. Something must be wrong, I thought as we sat there in stopped traffic. People emerged from their vehicles and ran up ahead with their cameras at the ready.
“We might as well join them and see what all the fuss is about instead of just sitting here,” Papa Lewis suggested.
Dad pulled our vehicle a safe distance off to the side of the road and Papa Lewis, Hug-a-Bug, and I jumped out of the Jeep, while Dad, Mom, and Grandma stayed back in the vehicle.
CHAPTER 10
FROM ONE MISSION TO ANOTHER
Papa Lewis stopped short of a large group of people that had gathered along the road and into the tree line. They were snapping pictures and pointing.
“Just what I suspected, a bear jam! All this traffic stopped to watch those bears. That’s why they call it a bear jam instead of a traffic jam,” Papa Lewis explained, pointing towards the tree line off to the right side of the road.
Hug-a-Bug and I looked over to where Papa Lewis was pointing, and sure enough, there were three black bear cubs high up in an oak tree hugging the trunk with their little legs. A large adult momma bear stood down on the ground at the base of the tree. She was protecting her cubs, standing between the mob of people snapping pictures and her cubs.
“It’s never a good idea to come between a momma bear and her cubs, and you should never approach any bear. As a rule of thumb, you should keep at least fifty yards away,” Papa Lewis advised.
The cubs slowly inched back down from the tree. We snapped some pictures from where we stood, a safe distance away. When the cubs reached the ground, the momma bear led them away from the road and the mob of people, into the forest, until they were out of sight. With the main attraction gone, everyone returned to their vehicles.
