3 November 2012 Bear Fence Rocks with SNOW

Today was one of those days where nothing went as planned.

Last night, Sam and AC made a letterbox to hide somewhere around our favorite hike in the Shenandoah National Park–Bearfence Rock Scramble. The idea was to get up there early this morning to hide it.

First we discovered that letterboxes are prohibited in national parks. So scratch that.

We decided to go up and do the rock scramble anyway, but we misremembered where on Skyline drive the hike is. We ended up way south of where we needed to be and arrived way later than anybody’s idea of morning.

It was 50-some degrees in Charlottesville. This seemed like reasonable hiking temperature and none of the so-called adults thought much about the temperature differential between town and mountain. By the time we finally got up to Bearfence Rocks it was a rousing 35 degrees and there was SNOW. A lot of it. Without meaning to, we hiked in snow. Sam didn’t even have gloves. And on the top of the rock summit it was even colder and there was howling wind to boot. We usually hang out for a while taking in the awesome 360-degree view, but not today.

No, instead there was a snowball fight when we got back to the car. Definitely not what I’d envisioned.