Trail Review: Bald Knob (Giles County, VA)

I love living in the digital age.  I was a Virginia Tech student for 4 years from 1987-1991, and had no idea the magnificent Bald Knob trail was at nearby Mountain Lake Lodge of "Dirty Dancing" fame.  Of course, I was not a very outdoorsy person back then.  I cared more about the movie than hiking to the summit of a mountain, but nowadays it is wonderful to be able to find trails easily with my AllTrails app.  

Sometimes AllTrails has more than one description for the same trail.  I am glad that I happened to open the one that has Bald Knob listed as a 1.6-mile loop.  Instead of going straight up to the summit (a 403-foot ascent in 0.4 miles), my husband and I took the advice of reviewers, turning left onto a fire road and heading to the summit in a counterclockwise direction.  It's a much gentler incline than climbing straight up to the summit, which is what the signs at the trailhead and other AllTrails routes indicate.

The trailhead actually wasn't all that easy for us to find, but again, hooray for the digital age.  We simply navigated using AllTrails, wandering around until we were on top of the highlighted route.  

The road takes you up to some powerlines that zigzag across the mountains.  While some people think of these as scars across the landscape, I always find myself rather fascinated by them, wondering just where they go... how many hundreds of miles and about the millions of people served by them.

The only time we missed a turn was when the road went straight and we had to turn right.  Because I was using AllTrails to navigate, we didn't go far before realizing we had missed it.  We simply backtracked, looked around, and Eddie found the trail.  If there were blazes, we didn't notice them.  The vegetation was kind of scrubby.  The trail was a little bit rocky as we approached the summit.

Once we got to the very top, it was all rock, with a marvelous view.  There are a lot of crevasses to jump across (or, in my case, find a safer way around).  It's no wonder that people come from all over to do this hike.

A surprise marriage proposal!

We noticed some survey markers at the summit, which was pretty cool.  They've been there a long time.

There were interesting tower-like rock formations at the top (in addition to an actual man-made tower.)

I think I'd rate this a 5-star hike mainly because of the view and the fact that it's not a very long trail to get there.  There are a number of other trails that intersect the fire road that we hiked.  Someday I would like to come back here and explore more of them.  You can see them on this map, as well as the less steep fire road that we took to the summit instead.

Back to "Dirty Dancing"...  When we were at the summit, we heard a guide telling some people about how Mountain Lake self-drains about every 200 years.  Well, right now it doesn't look anything like the movie because it's in a draining phase.  He said in August, the lake is about the size of a bathtub, and if you stand by there, you can actually hear it draining.  So I hope we will be able to come back and experience that later this year.

In the meantime, I plan to do more hiking and trail running this summer, so stay tuned for more reviews.  Happy Trails, everyone!