This is the Potomac River, Virginia to the left, West Virginia to the right and Maryland in the foreground. The last time we were in this area, the river was much more turbulent, but this time it is really calm and pretty low.
After the side-trail to the view over Weaverton Cliff we continued on to the shelter. There is another 200 feet of elevation, but it is over about 1.5 miles, so it is pretty gradual. About half way, we felt like we had enough of this dang mountain! But like good hikers we took a break and soldiered on.
At three miles we came to the Garvey Shelter. It was an impressively nice place. There is a loft, a fire pit, a water source that is down a steep slope and an outhouse! This place was like the taj mahal of camping shelters. Inside there is a log book that people sign and write stories in. It was pretty interesting to read. Some people had seen bears, others wrote about where they had come from and where they were going.
After a little break we headed back to the car. We ran across a lot more people on the way back. There were quite a few boy scout troups and groups of people enjoying the lovely day. As a reward we drove into Harpers Ferry (3 miles) for frozen custard (I had vanilla and pumpkin twist) and a shake (John had peanut butter cup/vanilla).
We are slowly, but surely attacking the AT. Right now we have gone 3 miles on the southern end of the Maryland section and 3.1 miles on the northern section. One day we'll meet ourselves in the middle!
There are lots of great roller coasters there: Rebel Yell, Hurler, Grizzly, Dominator and Volcano. There are also a few more, we tried to hit as many as we could. We were there from 11:00 am to 8:00 pm and we didn't get a chance to go on all of them. At first, the lines were not very bad - maybe a 10 minute wait, on the Hurler there wasn't even enough people in line to fill up the ride. As the day got sunnier and warmer, the more people came. By the time we got to the Volcano the wait was 1 hour! (I timed it - if the wait had been posted somewhere I doubt I would have wanted to stand in line.) But, the ride was totally worth it. It was so fast and twisty and its one of those roller coasters where your feet hang down. Very fun.
After all the roller coasters we went to the waterpark that's attached and sat in the lazy river. We went around twice. Some people who got into the lazy river didn't realize it was a LAZY river and they were quite rowdy. But it was a nice relaxing end to a very fun day. 