White Oak Canyon Trail Hike

In October 1999, eight adventurous souls trekked out to the Shenendoah National Park to hike the White Oak Canyon Trail. After some directional problems (it was much harder to find than I remembered!), we made it to the trailhead. This first picture is actually at the top of the trail. Front row: Yev, Sarah, Scott, Brendan. Back row: Debbie (hidden behind Sarah), Vicki, Brian. I took the picture (actually, I'm not in any of these pics, oh well). By the way, Scott is wearing 2 backpacks because he's really sweet and took mine when my back started hurting. :)
The White Oak Canyon trail is an amazingly beautiful hike. It's a circuit hike, and you can choose to start at the top or at the bottom. We elected to start at the bottom so that we would get tired on the way up and then kind of bound on the way down. It was an almost perfect day, with my only problem being that I fell and hit my head, elbow, both knees, and hip, but hey! Last time I did this hike I got stung by a hornet so things could always be worse!

The trail has many beautiful waterfalls and several streams that you have to cross. Here, Brendan stops while crossing a stream to watch the waterfall.
Here, Brian and Vicki navigate the stream without falling in. Um, I fell in, only a bit. My foot got wet. (I was wearing double socks so I wasn't cold for long!)

Scott took a video of the trip (I'm actually on it!) and spent a lot of the time taking shots in dangerous places (in the water, from overhangs, yikes! Here's one of him taking a shot of me taking a pic of him. We're both standing on rocks in this stream (hey, I had to get myself in this somehow! There are no pics of me!)
From all this, you might think that we spent the whole time crossing streams. There were actually lots of rocks and trees too! (hehe) Hiking was hard, and we took a lot of rest stops. Below, Sarah and Brian take a break on a big rock, and Vicki, Debbie, and Sarah pose for the camera while Brian looks on.

Probably one of my favorites, here's one of Yev doing YMCA for the camera. He and Scott took a little detour but the rest of us stayed on an overlook, watching. (Well what else do you do from an overlook?)

Well, this goes against my usual scrapbook style, but well, the next section is just pictures. There were some beautiful, amazing views, and Scott let me use his neato panoramic camera to take pictures of them. I am putting some space between them so that they don't interfere with each other.I think that these pictures show the essence of why I love doing this hike in the Autumn. I hope you enjoy them, and that you get to do this hike yourself sometime.