Beth and I were making a half-day tour of Shenandoah National Park over the Thanksgiving weekend, working in some hikes along the way. We had entered the park at Skyline Drive at the north end and had success on one easy summit, Hogback Mountain. It was a slow drive of about 45 minutes to get to the parking lot for Hawksbill Mountain, the highpoint of Shenandoah National Park and for Page and Madison Counties.

The weather had been very cold, misty and drizzly all morning and day, but we got a little lucky here: the rain let up, and all we had was the cold and mist. Not surprisngly, we were the only people here on this day, our car the only one in the lot. It was about 2:30 pm.m when we started our hike. Fortunately, it's not a terribly long hike, and we hoped the weather would behave.

We bundled up and started walking the fine trail up into the forest. Normally this would be a profusion of green: leaves, trees, undergrowth, brambles and so forth, but on this cold, blustery November day, everything had closed up for the winter. Combined with general fog and winds, this made for a spooky, interesting little stroll. The trail gains nicely for about 0.6 mile, then levels and drops slightly to where it meets a fire-access road. The remainder of the hike is up this road, where it ends at a shelter called the Byrds Nest #2. It took us about 20 minutes to make the top. The summit is another 50 feet or so along the trail past the shelter and up to a viewing platform. I'm sure the views done onto the valleys below are something to behold, but on this day all we could see was a pall of gray fog. We snapped some photos and sought out the top "natural" rock before heading down. We were back to the car quickly, a round trip of 45 minutes.

From here we started heading back north along the Skyline Drive. About 4 miles north of Hawksbill is an old resort called Skyland that was built about 100 years ago and pre-dates the National Park. While it no longer is a private resort, the Park does maintain it as a destination, and it has a restaurant, gift shop and an attractive lobby with a large fireplace. In the surrounding areas are some camping areas, stables, and Park offices. We stopped here to do some souvenir shopping and to dry out. The rain had really picked up and was coming down hard. We still had one more highpoint to do, about five miles north in Rappahannock County. Were we going to let a little thing like heavy rain, strong winds and dense fog stop us from our quest? Click on the link to find out!