Grayson Highlands State Park

No exciting adventures are happening in my life right now. I'm still thoroughly stressed over budgeting and saving for the trip to Switzerland. I really need to stop letting the money get in the way of the general excitement of going there. I already booked the damn trip. I may as well get used to the idea of being broke. Even though money is tight, I think I could still afford a camping trip in the Outer Banks over Labor Day weekend (which also happens to fall on Boyfriend's birthday weekend). Boyfriend only gets 5 vacation days a year, and he says we don't have enough money, and he doesn't want to go. I am resentful.

Anyway, I'm going to share a few pictures from a trip to Southwest Virginia and Grayson Highlands State Park, where we visited last year during a long Labor Day weekend. We had planned to go to the beach, but a hurricane came, so we ran to the mountains instead. It was a really nice trip, and Grayson Highlands is a great park. We camped in a National Forest campground called Hurricane Campground, in the Mt. Rogers recreation area, about an hour away from Grayson Highlands.

Grayson Highlands has lots of excellent hiking. Overnight hikers park here and then do their overnight backpacking thing, which is not comfortable enough for me. During our day there, we did a short hike through the woods to see a few small waterfalls, and then we hiked up into the highlands to see the strange landscape and adorable wild ponies.

 

Much of the park is set on these mountaintop "balds." There are wild ponies there which help keep the vegetation down. The landscape is like nothing I've seen in Virginia. There were wild blueberry bushes along the beginning of the trail. I picked and ate a few.

My pictures really can't do the mountain views justice. The elevation is high here, compared to what everyone is used to in Virginia. It just sort of feels different. Can you see how blue the sky is? And then there are the little wild ponies. They are super cute and kind of grumpy.

If you're a mountain lover like me, I definitely recommend a trip to the Grayson Highlands. You'll experience a different kind of mountain landscape from much of what you've seen in lush Appalachia. I didn't pay much attention to the campground in the state park (I much prefer quiet national park campgrounds to the busier and more modern Virginia State Parks), but it seemed nice and not too crowded even on Labor Day weekend. The Hurricane Campground was a great central spot for us to expore the Mt. Rogers area, and we had a nice time hiking, driving through the countryside, fishing in the New River, and visiting the Grayson Highlands. It was a super relaxing weekend, and I hope we can go back soon.