What do you do when you have a few days off work and a very unusually cold airmass is moving in? Well, you drive north, of course.
That’s what I did at any rate. I found myself heading to a place I had only visited once before and had never done an overnight trip to: the New River Gorge. I’m going to spend a couple or three weeks of this column talking about this trip, but we are going to start on my favorite part of the trip.
I first visited Babcock State Park in West Virginia in 2019. At the time it was attached to the then just federally operated New River Gorge National River. In 2020, the area became an official National Park, but Babcock remains state owned and operated. The biggest draw to Babcock State Park is the Glade Creek Grist Mill. You have almost certainly seen photos of it at some point, it is probably the most photographed building in West Virginia if not most of the east coast. It was built in 1976 as a tribute to the hundreds of identical mills that at one time were strewn across the Appalachian region.
Any photographer worth their salt will at some point travel there to get their own photographs of the mill. I went back in 2019 and got some decent stuff, but nothing would compare to what I saw on this return trip.
With a forecast for snow, I naturally loaded up my tent and some fire starter and headed north. I camped about 20 minutes away at a place called Ray’s Campground which I highly recommend. I awoke on Wednesday morning to find snow covering the ground, something I was quite hoping for.
I hopped in the truck, cranked up the heat and drove to my goal for the morning: the grist mill.
It was snowing pretty hard at times on my drive there but temperatures were just warm enough to keep the roads from freezing up. Temps around 30-31 were just enough to get the snow to stick to the trees and grass, but the closer to the park I got, the less it was sticking. I got to Babcock around 8:30 and began making my rounds. For the first hour the snow was falling pretty hard making long exposure shots somewhat difficult. Even short exposure times were completely obscured by the falling flakes.
I took advantage of this time to get some closer shots of the mill and get some longer exposures during the brief times when the snow let up. This shot is one of my favorites as it is a clash of not two, but three seasons. The purple flowers in the bottom left, fall foliage and snow all at once.
The rocks were very slippery to hop around on, but I did manage to get beneath the large falls without getting wet. You can tell it was still snowing at a good clip when I took this one.
Finally about 10 a.m., the snow began to let up. Unfortunately, it also started to melt at a breakneck pace as temperatures quickly popped up just above freezing. I grabbed my two favorite shots of the entire trip during this brief window between the snow letting up and the stuck stuff melting.
What a memorable trip. Hopefully the photographs speak for themselves in terms of pure beauty.
I’ll be back next week with more of my trip to West Virginia and, later, Virginia.
Have a great week. I’ll see you on the trail….
