Today we decided to take a hike up to the natural bridge that gives the park it’s name. We initially got into Charlotte and drove up the road a mile or two and entered the parking lot at the bottom of a very large ridge to the south. There are really large trees, mostly hardwoods, that shade the area. Peggy and I had decided to access the Natural Bridge on something called the Original Trail. It was described as the easiest and most-used pathway to the attraction. The pamphlet we received from the park office stated that the trail was only 3/4 of a mile to the top. I think they might be confused on the measurement of distance here, possibly due to funny arithmetic.
We took the first pitch from the parking lot to the trailhead (shown as a quarter of a mile) with relative ease. It is all uphill but not particularly steep. After completing this section, we agreed that “Hey! That was easy. We can do twice that no problem.” We were stupid or the folks running the park are confused about distance because the section from the trailhead to the top of the ridge seemed quite a bit longer than twice the first section that we had conquered with such ease. We trudged along with numerous younger folks zipping by us for quite some time, stopping at the shady rest stations that had been built by the CCC back in the ’30s. The trail got steeper. We started to sweat copiously.
After about what seemed like a mile or ten, we emerged at the Natural Bridge, which is spectacular. It is a gigantic hole in the rock making up the ridge that you can easily stroll through because it is about 60 feet high and maybe 100 feet wide. Although we were moderately damp from sweat, we elected to continue up onto the top of the arch. The top is accessed via a narrow cleft in the rock on one side of the arch. Peggy went ahead and I followed although the cleft got narrower and narrower such that my corpulent body was rubbing both sides as I crept along sideways through the crack. Just when I thought I was going to become firmly wedged between the sides of the crevasse, the rock was nice enough to widen a bit and my fat ass was through. We continued up some more steps carved into the stone until we were on top where there are grand vistas that are quite stunning.
Once our heart rates got back down to near normal, we chose to return to our car in the parking lot via the Balanced Rock trail, also shown as 3/4 of a mile. This section may truly be 3/4 of a mile but it is all on stone steps and wooden staircases that give old, tired peoples’ knees an invigorating and very sweaty workout. After descending down about 50 stories of poorly-engineered stairs with no regular rise or run and covered with slippery sand and rotten vegetation we arrived at the Balanced Rock. It is pretty neat, too. It is a flat rock about the size of a bedroom in a rich Republican’s mansion. It has some trees growing out of the top of it and the whole array is balanced on top of a little sliver of rock with lots of holes in it. We took lots of pictures.
From Balanced Rock, we descended down another 15 stories of stairs with the same shaky specifications of the upper section and arrived at an enormous cave opening where Peg shot another gob of pictures. Continuing down the same type of tortured stairs and steps for another 10 stories or so, we arrived back at the trailhead. The water we had brought along was exhausted and I made a beeline for Charlotte, climbed inside, turned on the air conditioning and drank about a pint of water before taking the truck out of park.
We returned to the Invader and guzzled another half gallon or so of water followed by Mimosas that had a wonderful re-invigorating effect. We should sleep well tonight.