Cedar Run in the Shenandoah National Park
August 5th 2008 by Kelly in Charlottesville
Pick up a copy of this month’s Blue Ridge Outdoors Magazine and you’ll see the Beat the Heat section by Graham Averill. The picture of the girl sliding down one of the rock slides inspires you to want to go on a hike. Saturday 3 friends and I were on a mission to find these beautiful rock slides. The map in the Blue Ridge Outdoors Magazine is less then helpful, there are no road names, it’s a blank map with 10 random points on the map showing the east coast and different places to hike. Stop by Blue Ridge Mountain Sports in the Barracks Shopping Center to talk with the expert, the man that we talked to loves to get outside and be active and he was very knowledgeable on the roads we needed to take to get to the Cedar Run hike and falls. It’s not just as easy as getting on the skyline drive, the roads were windy and it’s very remote. We went through Madison to get there and the drive was beautiful. There is a place in Madison to stop and get apples and fresh fruit, other than that the road we were on looked like it was made for one car. It takes about 30 minutes from Charlottesville to get there.
A season pass to the Shenandoah National Park is $30(they take credit cards), it’s a great deal because it includes all the trails and is good for your whole car load of friends. The park ranger at the bottom of the mountain was helpful and let us know that we were going to follow the blue trail up the mountain. There were only a couple turns and one point we had to cross over a little bit of water, it was a fun hike. The ranger told us there was 100% chance of thunderstorms before we started hiking. The first rock slide you come to is amazing, there is a huge drop from the top into about 6 feet of water. You hit your feet on the bottom. We jumped off the rocks on the opposite side of the trail and the water takes your breath away, but is also refreshing and supposedly a lot warmer than usual. Sure enough we had thunderstorms, but that actually made the day even more fun. I would recommend hiking up to the second rock slide, it didn’t look so dangerous and was a smooth slide into the water.
Some hikers we ran into thought it would be funny to tell us that there was a loop you could hike so that we wouldn’t have to go back the same way we hiked up the mountain…bad idea. The loop is about a 25 mile hike. If you just hike up to the slides and then turn around it’s only about 5-6 miles. I would recommend this to anyone, it was so beautiful and remote and we didn’t see a lot of people. Cedar Run is right around the corner from Charlottesville and it’s really something amazing to see.
What’s your favorite place to hike?