Legends of the Fall

Sunday I pulled into the upper lot of Old Rag at five thirty in the morning. It was cold, dark and quiet. My head lamp did little to illuminate that rocky path up the flanks of Shenandoah's trophy peak. The plan was to meet Chad and Jeremy at the summit as they had slept somewhere on the mountain. I reached the summit before sunrise, taking only about one hour to get up the trail, not bad. Of course, Chad and Jeremy were nowhere to be found. It was cold, it was windy. Seeing a headlamp in the distance, I hiked back to the PATC wall (the false summit). There were a few guys down there but not who I was looking for. I went back to the summit and looked around again. Then hiked down to Bird's Nest shelter on the backside of the mountain to see if for some reason they were thinking I was coming up that side. Nothing, so I then trekked back up to the summit. I figured at this point I would just wait up top for a period of time before scrapping the whole endeavor and heading down the mountain. The sun had long been up now, so it was nice to have some rays to take the edge off the cold. After about a half hour I spotted Chad in the distance climbing some boulder on the PATC wall, you could see the haircut a mile away. They had taken their time getting out of bed and making their way up higher. Anyways with that hunt over, we got on to shooting scenes for our film. We ended up getting some good footage in the can and the leaves were great. I hiked down around 11 a.m. past the hundreds of city folk coming up the trail. Back to Millwood, got on my motorcycle and sped off to Winchester.