July 30, 2021

Start/End: Berry Hollow parking lot

Peaks: Old Rag (3,284')

Elevation Gain: 1,750 ft

RT Mileage: 5.4 mi

Duration: 3 hours, 11 minutes

Rock Difficulty: Class 1

Old Rag was #1 on our priority list when we visited Shenandoah, and we were really looking forward to the rock scramble on the infamous Ridge Trail. However, the national park has done a great job at discouraging people from attempting that route, convincing visitors that the route from Berry Hollow is nearly as challenging (spoiler alert: it isn't), and we unfortunately believed it too.

We arrived at the remote trailhead just after 11:30 AM and began hiking. The first leg of the trail follows a fire road as it meanders next to a brook. This was probably the worst part of the entire route, since the fire road ascended at an incline which was just enough to be annoying but not enough to make actual progress. A little under a mile in, we reached a crossroads, where we turned right onto another fire road. Another 0.4 miles along, we reached a small shelter at 2,100 ft, and the fire road ended there.

From there, we began hiking up the short rock staircase that began the Saddle Trail, which would take us the rest of the way to the summit. The trail began fairly normally, which was expected, ascending at about a 10% grade along a northward-facing hillside. We were filled with anticipation, waiting for exhilarating exposed rock scrambling and panoramic views as promised. The first viewpoint on the trail presented itself at 2,600 ft, and we thought it was about to get interesting.

The trail turned sharply right at the viewpoint, continuing to ascend the same hillside at about the same incline. At 2,900 ft, we gained the saddle between Old Rag and an unnamed peak to its west, and the trail flattened out. With most of our hiking experience thus far having been in New Hampshire, we expected these last 300 vertical feet to include the exposed scrambling we had been waiting for. However, this ended up not being the case, and the trail gently switchbacked all the way to the summit.

We reached the very anticlimactic summit just before 1:00 PM. We heard from others that the Ridge Trail wasn't actually that bad, but very fun, and highly regretted not taking that route. The summit was kind of nice at least: while Old Rag doesn't technically break above treeline, it does have an exposed summit, similar to Mt. Monadnock in New Hampshire.

We began descending the Saddle Trail at 1:15 PM. The descent to the shelter and the start of the fire road was uneventful and fast. Descending the fire road was even more boring than ascending, especially now that we had to deal with the July heat. We made it back down to the trailhead just before 2:45 PM, ending an underwhelming and very disappointing day of hiking.