Backcountry Diaries

“The house is in there,” said Len, the man who knew more about the backcountry history of Shenandoah National Park than anyone else alive.

After stopping in the middle of Sams Ridge Trail, he saw something we did not. He had recognized the turnoff for an old road trace, an unmarked, faded-away relic, a barely-there indent in the ground that had once hosted wagons and Fords, used to drive into the “neighborhood” to get back home. He had not been back to this place for more than 20 years, but he remembered the way the land came off the curve on the left side of the path, even though the last time he was there the trees were shorter, the underbrush hadn’t yet filled in the human space, and the road was as unequivocal and followable as Skyline Drive itself. 

Our goal for the day was to find the house.

WHEN OUR GROUP began our hike that March day—me; my husband, Neil; our good friend Jeremy and his friend Lisa; our new friend Len; and his hiking buddy Kurt, whom we were meeting for the first time—we were like any other hikers in this park. We shuffled through the litter of fallen leaves on a known path and trudged uphill through the bare, undifferentiated trees on either side of the trail. We were experiencing the mountain as it was intended when the park opened in 1936—for Washington, D.C., professionals and others to get away from it all, to enjoy a day of recreation, freed from the burdens of everyday city life. A white sky dangled over us as we sweated and cooled in our water-wicking polypropylene and fleece layers. 

But Len was ushering us into the other side of Shenandoah, the lesser explored of its two realities. This is the backside of the park that most people experience: the black ribbon of Skyline Drive winding through a dense, unknowable, impenetrable forest. A patchwork quilt of farm fields in the distance, with the Shenandoah Valley on one side of the ridge and the Piedmont Plateau on the other. Burnt, open meadows awash in Eastern bluebirds and white-tailed deer. The dirt paths of trails, blazed and groomed, taking visitors on well-planned and well-specified routes through enchanted foggy forests that make me feel like a princess in a fairy tale and up the oldest mountains on Earth to rocky peaks so tough that reaching them makes me feel like a god, beholding all the splendor of the kingdom.

Looking the direction Len indicated, we struggled to see how we’d push through the brush. But we did, and once deep enough in the brown thickets and the burgundy spikes of blackberry stalks, we gleaned a glimpse of the old road as faint as seeing an object in the dark before harnessing your night vision. 

The vines hung into the walking space like wires coming down from a ceiling. We ducked under them, pushed through the leafless branches, stepped over the fallen logs and scattered rocks and boulders. We could not see through to another side, to a destination, because the woods were so dark and thick.

“What else do you remember?” we coaxed after some time, some of us having already drawn blood from the thorns, Jeremy hobbling around with a healing broken ankle, and myself having just snapped some muscle fibers, like violin strings, in my calf.

“It was a curved road, coming off the main trail like a ‘U.’ On the lower half of the U was the house.”

Neil walked straight ahead until he came to a curve in the faint old road and then followed it to the right, not knowing if he was going toward or away from the lower part of the U. After realizing it was the upper part, he reversed course, heading slightly downhill. I decided to bypass the longer U-shaped route, cutting straight through the middle of it to the lower half, following Neil’s voice. Kurt, Jeremy, and Lisa continued searching in other directions. At 82, Len decided the going was too tough after so much time and stayed put, waiting for our report.

When Neil’s and my paths met up, we each had different ideas of where to go from there, as the house was not directly on the road. We each followed our instincts. I came nearly immediately to a good first clue: an old metal washbasin on the ground. Then I saw what I thought was the house—what seemed like the stub of an old chimney. As I got closer, I realized I had indeed identified the land and some type of old building—a shed, maybe, but when I looked uphill, a large intact stone chimney, silhouetted against the sky by wild vines, rose up above all else. 

Several big, squared chestnut timbers that had made up the body of the house still stood in place on top of the stone foundation, but a tree had fallen over the structure. Two clumps of daffodil greens, pieces of a wood stove, and a barrel stave littered the ground nearby. On our walkie-talkies, Neil radioed the rest of the gang, and we convinced Len to make his way to the grand home he remembered with its walls up so long ago. We gingerly made our way through thorns and brush for a perch on the house to take our lunch, our faces pointed south into the sun, overlooking a large expanse of a yellowed grassy lawn—still cleared after about 80 years of disuse—and a mountainous vista in the distance. 

It was as close as I’d ever come to feeling what it might have been like to actually live in a full-bodied, modern-size stone and log house on a glorious plot of land in this park, as if we had stepped through the looking glass to another world. We were no longer simply off-trail in Shenandoah National Park, finding relics of the old days and the old ways, scattered amid the leaf litter: the farm implements and castor oil bottles and pottery shards and car batteries. We had been transported behind the scenes of the park, to the story that’s behind the scenery, on the other side of the curtain, behind the façade of the ordinary second- or third-growth woods. This is what some would say is the real Shenandoah, a place where men cleared stones from their fields and built with them, a place where towering chestnuts once grew and people harvested them for work and food and shelter: a time and a place that’s not quite gone but not quite present either.

RECENTLY, Neil and I went back to visit the house on Sams Ridge with our now-frequent hiking partners Kurt, his wife Norma, and some other new friends of ours. Hiking to it from the top this time, the group—busy talking—passed the turnoff without noticing it, but I recognized it as readily as if someone had left the lights on. Neil and I shoved our way through the dense dead brush like we were following a path we had taken many times, and we found the house no worse for wear than two years earlier. 

But time had passed, and Len was gone from us now. I had since written a book about moments like these in this park. I felt on the precipice of some new life changes. I was two years older as well, and my knees were wearier, and the Earth continued its rotation around the sun, ever the same and ever changing. I no longer felt as if we were uncovering a secret. This time, finding this home again felt as natural and familiar as breathing.

About the author: Sue Eisenfeld, the author of Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal (see page 66), is profiled on page 9.

Shenandoah: A Story of 

Conservation and Betrayal

Sue Eisenfeld spent 15 years hiking in Shenandoah National Park before she learned the history of its creation—and of the thousands of mountain residents who lost their homes and livelihoods in the process. She and her husband, Neil, spent the next few years hiking and bushwhacking through the park in search of their stories, relics, and cemeteries, using historic maps and notes from earlier hikers as their guides. Eisenfeld sought to, in her words, “know the people who once lived here and the men who determined their fate” as well as to discern “the justice of what happened here.” Her new travel memoir, Shenandoah: A Story of Conservation and Betrayal, shares those on-the-ground experiences while navigating the tangled history of conservation in America. (University of Nebraska Press, $20)