I arrived here at Westmoreland State Park, Virginia on Wednesday but today was the first day I was able to paddle. One day was spent locating and traveling to a Dodge dealer to check them out and arrange and appointment. The second day was spent traveling back and forth to the dealer to get the side mirror replaced and a 3,000 mile tune up plus some other chores.
Fall foliage is still in full swing in Virginia. The campsites are in a forested area and the leaves are all yellow, gold, yellow green (my favorite), burnt orange and red. It is past peak foliage and a healthy gust of wind produces a deluge of falling leaves and you're soon in a blizzard.
Deer are plentiful in the park. There are some very small ones and what I would call normal sized ones. The small ones are seen in groups of small ones and the big ones are seen by themselves. The two don't seem to mix so it’s not like it's a doe with her yearlings or something like that.
The park started filling up on Thursday (Veteran's Day). A cub scout troop has shown up as well as what appears to be a large fathers/sons outing. There are a couple of other larger groups, most of them well behaved.
There is one group that disrupts the entire park and makes for a bad experience. It sounds like a couple of kids in the later teens and several 12-13 year olds. All of them yell at the top of their lungs hour after hour after hour.
I was up till 11pm listening to their voices reverberating through the entire park last night. I started thinking about what my alternatives to staying at campgrounds might be. I finally decided I can't let buttholes like that affect my new way of life. I've only run into a couple of groups like that this summer (lots of annoying ones but only a couple of really obnoxious ones).
I've become a lot more tolerant since I've been out on the road. I'll just have to adapt to this kind of nuisance too.
Today was an interesting paddle. Westmoreland State Park is on the banks of the Potomac River 40-50 miles south of Washington D.C. It is also right between the birthplaces of George Washington and Robert E. Lee, only a couple of miles from either. I'm probably committing a sacrilege by being in a state filled with so much history and not visiting any of those sites,
I got out on the water about 9:15am, the sun was out, it was about 50 degrees and the little wind there was came out of the west at my back as I turned east.
Standing on shore you can look down river and see the entire near coast is steep clay cliffs. As I paddled along I estimated the cliffs to be from 50 feet down to about 30 feet for the most part.
I'm camped on a clay spot and it was quite a difference moving from my previous two sand based tent sites to this one of clay. It's a good thing I didn't try to force the tent stakes in very far. They went in about 2" and then stopped.
On the way out from the launch, I snuck up on a blue heron closer than I ever have before. He was in a nest on top of a cupola standing on one leg kinda dozing. He knew I was there and I know he knew as I drifted close enough to fire off a picture with my 90mm zoom. Then I made a noise and he took off with his long neck and legs extended and I fired a second time and think I got that too.
The Horsehead Cliffs "are embedded with billions of fossils of sea creatures dating back 15 million years." You're not allowed to climb or dig in the cliffs but it's finders keepers if you find something on the shore.
I just lazed along the cliffs with visions of discovering the jaw bone of a prehistoric shark or whale (they're there) protruding from a recent land slide.
Different areas of the cliffs consisted of several different layers built on top of each others. At the bottom for 10-15 feet was what I first took to be a dark gray, shale type rock. As it turned out, this too was very tightly compressed clay. On top of that would be 10-15 a lighter gray clay and another 10-15 feet of a brownish clay that I assumed contained a lot of organic material from plants living and dying in it. Much of the cliff faces had minor erosion that made it look like a room with paint chipped away.
There appeared to be little erosion from the action of the waves. Most of the erosion seemed to be coming from the top from the wind and possibly rain and rain run offs. This creates some really strange and interesting lunar type formations with lots of hills and valleys. One 100 yard section looked like the jaw bone of some mega-huge creature with the clay rising 20 feet or so to a jagged point and trees growing in the valleys as the clay tapered off again. For added effect, small clusters of trees and bushes could be spotted growing out of the clay, giving the appearance of a tooth with a cavity.
Another section had several steeper and higher clay peaks creating the image of Egyptian pyramids.
Along the way, a couple of small landslides came tumbling down the cliffs as I watched. I passed several large ones that must have been fairly recent otherwise I think the wind and rain and waves would have eaten into them.
I stopped at 11:30 for a short break by another recent landslide. As I walked over to it I saw bits of white scattered throughout the debris. The first solid rock I looked at also had several white shells and what appeared might be a tiny skull of some sort. I went to pick the rock up but it was clay and just started to crumble of its own weight so I let it be.
After searching just a bit I found a tooth shaped white thing. I'd like to believe it's an ancient shark or whale tooth but it's probably the tip of the shell of a very, very large clam or oyster. Two things I am sure of, it's some sort of calcium and it's very old. I kept it but have to find a safe place to store it because it's very brittle.
I had a modest goal for the day to reach a point jutting out from the cliffs some 4 miles or so away. The goal was to get down there, peak around the corner to see what the remaining shoreline looked like and then head back for lunch.
Of course when I got down there, all I saw was another point sticking out into the river even farther. I decided to turn around right then. I've been in that situation before. Oh, I'll just go over one more ridge or around one more bend and that goes on and on and on.
This part of the Potomac River is somewhere around 5 miles wide. I'd never really thought about it before but was mildly surprised. There are other really wide rivers in Virginia too, the Rappahannock being one.
I had a 10 knot wind in my face when I first turned around but that pretty much died out and by the time I got back the water was like glass.
As I was about to turn into the boat ramp I saw the white tail of a soaring bald eagle. I got the camera ready as it circled around the area a couple of times but it then headed inland. Sigh! Maybe someday with the eagle.
This was an interesting trip worth doing again. The unique geological formations eroded into the clay cliffs plus the possibility of finding all kinds of fossils makes this trip a keeper.