This is not my blog.

Sunday Kay and I went to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. This little town is known for a lot of things but the most famous is John Brown's 1859 raid on the United States Armory that was located there. The town is situated in a beautiful spot where the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers converge and where West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia all touch. The entire original part of town is now a National Park and is under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service which preserves the town in pretty much the same state and configuration that it was in during the civil war (during which it changed possession 8 times). Thus, there are lots of reenactors walking around town and there isn't a Starbucks on every corner.

The first thing that we did after arriving and parking the car was to catch one of the park service shuttle buses to the downtown area. The first thing that we saw when we arrived was this old stone church that was on the hill overlooking the lower part of town. The outside of the church was modest but inside were some stunning carved items such as the altar (see picture at bottom) and the stations of the cross. One of the church officials was telling people about the history of the church and of this special crucifix that at the back of the sanctuary that is a replica of another work at the Vatican. Kay was especially impressed with the beauty of this place of worship so we stayed there for a little while before moving on. Once we were back outside we decided to go visit the headquarters of the Appalachian Trail conservancy (the trail actually passes right by this church). I'll talk more about the AT in a later post because I have lots of pictures of that as well.


The hike up to the AT Conservancy Headquarters should have been some indication of how steep that our hiking of the trail would be. It was a half mile of substantial hill to climb as it was at the periphery of the historical part of town. However, we saw some neat stuff on the way up and once we found the HQ, at the very top of the hill on the left, we took a little breather and then ambled on in. There were some neat things in the HQ including a 15 foot scale replica of the 2,175 miles of the trail along with hiking supplies, t-shirts of the trail, lots of books and guides, and other stuff. Several of the neat things to look at were photos of the various "through-hikers" who had made their way all the way from end to end of the trail posted on a board and contained in many large volumes of photos submitted by such hikers. We heard some neat conversation in the HQ before deciding that it was time to head back downtown and prepare to depart on our hike of the WV portion of the trail (which is about 4 miles of pretty much all steep and gnarly hill ... as we would soon find out).

Before getting on the trail we picked up some water at a local outfitter place and then walked across the Potomac River to the Maryland side where we could start the trail properly. On the way we passed by John Brown's Fort which was the building in which he barricaded himself with his men before a young Robert E. Lee was dispatched by the U.S. Army to quell the raid and secure Brown for trial. This particular building has an interesting history as it has been moved around some four or five times by various people wishing to display and preserve the building (I'm talking a multi-city tour here as it was even in Chicago for a while). While we were looking at the building and I was readying to take a picture a through-hiker walked by on his way north on the Appalachian Trail with one of the typically huge 50 lb. packs that such hikers need to get themselves through the wilderness. We hiked our part of the trail next and returned to civilization just in time to miss a big rainstorm and to catch the last bus back to the visitor center where our car was parked. But that's a story for a later post.

*Update: I fixed the picture of the 50 lb. pack.

Labels: myphotos, travel, wv