Last month, 7 DCULers travelled out to Spruce Knob to do the classic loop with the Seneca Creek trail. We had two first-times Ben and Colleen, as well as Vinay, Alyssa, Dibya, and myself, and Vera coming in from Ohio. We all met at the top of Spruce Knob around dusk, and found that Vera had amazingly secured a nice campsite for us and then came back out to the parking lot so we wouldn’t have to flounder around looking for her as it got dark. The top of Spruce knob was an explosion of mushrooms of all shapes and sizes.
Sadly, in the morning Vinay found out that he was urgently needed at work and had to head home. I feel very bad that he drove all the way out to Spruce Knob but hopefully it was still a nice night of camping? The rest of us headed down to Seneca creek through a beautiful (but thorny) meadow and enjoyed walking alongside the creek for a while. Then, we turned uphill to hike along the Allegheny Mountain trail, which is necessary to make this a loop but was honestly a mud pit. Luckily there were still several stream crossings yet to come so we could rinse our shoes. We enjoyed many wildflowers in bloom with fields of jewelweed and scarlet beebalm.
Finally, we made it to our destination of the waterfall. Unfortunately it was quite a busy weekend with a lot of groups out so we did not get the campsite right next to the waterfall, but we set up in a nice spot next to the creek. It was a little too cold to get in the swimming hole but a little too warm to start a fire, so we sat around and chatted. With the low mileage we ended up having a lot of time to kill so I guess we didn’t have to wake up so early.
On Sunday, we hiked back up to Spruce Knob, passing a cool witch pond. On the way back we hit up El Jaripeo in Petersburg, which was the perfect post-backpacking tex mex restaurant. It was a beautiful weekend with a great group! And congratulations to our new Members Ben and Colleen!
DC UL Backpacking 
Leave a comment