Old Rag Mountain, Va.

While rummaging the archives in support of the past several posts we remembered a few old 35mm film negatives of a trip we had completely forgotten about. An '89 visit to Virginia's Old Rag Mountain. We had prints as well. Those were lost in a move long ago. No ability currently on our part to scan the negatives. We had a great printer with film negative scanning capability, a CanoScan 8400F. Unfortunately, a few versions ago Mac system upgrade resulted in loss of support for that thing. We actually still have it, as we didn't pitch it out. Is settin' in it's box in the next room. Also lost support for an excellent software package, called Cinematize, that we had previously purchased a few years earlier. Could extract clips from DVD's, YouTube videos, just about any format, with excellent sound quality. When attempting to reinstall it we found that the developer/provider had gone out of business. So that was that. A lesson in quickly learning that ya' don't own anything on line. Can be gone with just the flick of a switch. Bet Adolph Hitler is layin' ass up in the grave knowin' he's missed out on the potential to control that library. Maybe not, though. Could be only minutes away if they packed 'em in that gravity bell before shoving off. We're workin' on that. And there's more than enough wanna-be's around now days. But we digress. 

Visited "Old Rag" with a climber friend from Maryland who had grown up in Sperryville, Va., about ten miles north of Old Rag. Was originally his home crag. At the time I was extolling on the splitter cracks of Bellefonte quarry. He was just smirking, "Bring some gear and come with me next weekend" he says. "I'll take ya' to some nice granite cracks".

He wasn't lyin'. And possibly one of the best hikes we've ever done as well. Not just an approach hike. A trek. A little over 2.300ft of prominence in a little over three miles (as we recall). A summit of large granite domes and large boulders with a 360º view of the surrounding Shenandoah NP and Blue Ridge Mountains. Sort of an east coast miniature version of the Needles in California's Southern Sierra. Ya' couldn't camp directly on the summit. Had to pitch our tent several hundred feet below summit elevation. Hiking to the summit early Saturday morning just before sunup we were treated to a pretty fantastic view. That 360º panorama blanketed with thick valley fog, the many lower peaks of the Blue Ridge piercing the mist. The yellow-orange sun slowly rising to the east into a clear blue sky. We could have been standing in the Himalaya for all we knew. For the moment forgot all about the climbing. 

(Internet Image)

Summit view

The area had the most interesting geology of anyplace we'd climbed as well. The rock formation consisting of billion year old "Old Rag Granite" - 900 million years older than the Rocky Mountains. Kind of hard to comprehend. Check out the 'Geologic Time Scale' on this link to this USGS pdf. Puts things into perspective. Our knowledge of existence is nanoscopic at best. Better to just to sit back and enjoy it.

(Internet Image)

A pretty cool geologically formed "granite staircase"

Gettin' back to business at hand. We visited with direct intent of climbin' three routes. Stole a few images from the 'Mountain Project' link above considering that any images we had are long gone. We gave the photographer/contributor (or both) credit. If any disappear ya' know why. Thanks to those individuals none-the-less:

Bushwhack Crack

Photos - Seth Deer (T), DennisL (B)

Strawberry Fields

(Photos - K. Baumgartner (T), John-Paul Zajackowski (B)

Oh My God Dihedral

Photos - Jeffrey Lash (T), Stuart Webb/Will Alford (B)

Those bottom two images I'd have said California's Needles if asked to guess. You can get an idea of the summit view as well.  The rock texture is pretty coarse-grained granite for the most part. We played around on one short boulder problem that was a regular cheese grater. Routes are mostly one pitch, around  80ft length. Doesn't get any bigger sky than this. Wish we would had visited more than just that once.