A Warm Day on Cold Mountain

One of the most memorable features of my childhood stemmed from my father’s near-obsessive love of being outdoors. Most weekends throughout the spring, summer, and fall, Dad could be found either urging us to come outside and play soccer with him, or planning a trip to one of various lakes, rivers, and mountains in our area near Lynchburg, VA. But his favorite pastime besides camping was hiking. We did a lot of hiking back then.

I don’t know how my dad found the hiking trails that he did before the ubiquity of Google, but find them he did. Everywhere. Virginia is packed stiff with good hiking trails, many of them with hidden swimming holes or creeks or even waterfalls. It seemed like every other Sunday, we would head into the Blue Ridge Mountains to climb a summit or visit a mountain lake. Several times we climbed Sharp Top Mountain, a jutting peak of rock located a little past the town of Bedford.. You can see for miles up there, and the air is almost always cool.

But the one I remembered best of all was a mountain we climbed when I was only in my teens, about forty minutes drive from my parent’s house. The place was called Cold Mountain (or Cole Mountain, it goes by both names). It sounds forbidding but it is truly one of the most beautiful ridges I’ve ever climbed. The trail winds up many switchbacks for about a mile and a half from the road, meandering through deep green forests before finally summitting onto a wide open mountaintop meadow.

Honestly, it almost looks like something you’d see in the Serengeti, as you can see from some of these pictures. The meadow rolls away from you, down and down, and then back up the other side of the ridge where it climbs even higher. It is a vast expanse of grass, punctuated by a few boulders and scraggly trees. And the view is panoramic, a huge 360-degree look at Amherst and Nelson counties.

If you couldn’t already tell, I took Elizabeth and the kids up to Cold Mountain for a day trip to recreate the experience I had as a wide-eyed teen. As I had hoped, the kids were not disappointed. The gasps they made when we crossed over the last ridge were worth the price of the long trek. It took their breath away, as it had taken mine so many years ago.

We brought snacks and blankets and made a picnic of it at the crest of the first summit, breathing in the clean air. It had been a warm and muggy day, and it was still warm and muggy but somehow at the top of the mountain the breeze canceled out most of those effects. Then, while Elizabeth fed the baby, I took the remaining cohort of children up to the second summit where we climbed a very large rock.

Sometimes I fear that today’s children spend too much time indoors stimulated by screens, whether they be computers or tablets or phones or TVs. So in a way I am always surprised at how much my children love the outdoors when I take them on trips like this. It was a pretty challenging hike for children in the age range between two and ten, but they talked about wanting to do it again for days afterwards. That put a smile on my face.