I should have listened to the sweaty people.
We had just finished the Bearfence rock scramble — one of the best things I’ve done in recent memory — and were feeling thoroughly pleased with ourselves when we drove down Skyline Drive to the Dark Hollow Falls trailhead. It was the same trip, the same day, April 11th. We were riding high.
Two separate groups of people were sitting on the ground about 50 to 75 yards from the trailhead when we arrived. Sitting. On the ground. Sweating through their shirts, breathing hard, looking like they had recently survived something. Both groups stopped us to ask how much further it was back to the parking lot.
I looked at them with the quiet confidence of a woman who had just conquered a boulder scramble and had been doing squats.
“You’re almost there! Maybe 5 more minutes,” I said cheerfully.
Reader, I should have asked them more questions.
Dark Hollow Falls, Shenandoah National Park
Dark Hollow Falls in Shenandoah National Park is one of the most popular hikes in the entire park — a 1.4 to 1.6-mile out-and-back trail that drops alongside a mountain stream to a 70-foot cascading waterfall. It sounds delightful. It looks delightful in every photo online.
What the photos don’t show you is the crowd.
I don’t know what I was expecting on a Saturday in April at the most-traveled trail in the park, but apparently I was expecting something more manageable than what greeted us. The trail was packed — people going down, people coming up, people stopping in the middle of the path to consult their phones or regroup their children or simply exist without any apparent awareness that there were other humans directly behind them.
I want to be clear: I enjoy people in general. I do not enjoy people on narrow trails when they have no spatial awareness and their children have not been taught basic trail courtesy. Move to the side. Look behind you before you stop. Acknowledge that other hikers exist. These are not complicated concepts.
We spent most of the descent in a slow, stop-and-start frustration shuffle, unable to go around anyone because there was always a stream of people coming the opposite direction. It was less like hiking and more like being stuck in slow-moving foot traffic at a theme park.
But the waterfall IS beautiful.
I’ll give it that. When we finally got to the base — and yes, go all the way to the base, not just the viewing platform at the top — the 70-foot cascade is genuinely stunning. White water pouring over dark rock, misting everything in a fine cool spray. Worth seeing. I just couldn’t get a decent photo because there were people standing in the way. No surprise.
The Climb Out
Here is where I paid for my earlier pomposity.
The climb back out of Dark Hollow Falls is steep. Not moderately steep. Not “gets your heart pumping” steep the way the trail descriptions politely suggest. Steep like climbing stairs the whole way. Steep like occasionally feeling like you’re on a ladder. Steep like I-stopped-three-times-and-I-am-not-ashamed steep.
I want to be fair to myself: we had already done the Bearfence rock scramble that morning. My legs had opinions about the additional 440-plus feet of elevation. But honestly the bigger issue was lungs, not legs — I was huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf trying to blow down a particularly stubborn house. My strength was there. My endurance for back-to-back hard efforts was very much still a work in progress.
Each time I stopped I reminded myself that this was data, not failure. My squats were paying off — my legs were handling it better than I expected. My cardiovascular system, however, was filing a formal complaint.
My daughter, to her credit, did not say a word about the stopping. She just waited. That’s good parenting in reverse.
The Plot Twist
About three-quarters of the way down, somewhere between my second frustration shuffle and my first stop on the way back up, I noticed something familiar.
A steel footbridge.
And then a fire road junction.
And then the slow, dawning, deeply irritating realization that I had been here before.
This was Hogcamp Branch. This was the stream that fed into the Rose River Falls Loop — the one I had crossed on that steel bridge back in March, the one I had looked up at from the fire road wondering what was above it. Dark Hollow Falls is what was above it. I had essentially done this waterfall already, from the bottom up, on a different hike entirely.
I had just fought through a crowd of inattentive strangers, exhausted my lungs on a ladder disguised as a trail, and arrived at a destination I had already visited — from the better direction, with better company, on a better day.
I was not thrilled.
In hindsight: the Rose River Falls Loop is a genuinely superior way to experience this waterfall. You earn it differently. The approach is more beautiful. There is no ‘crowd’, just a few happy, smiling strangers along the way. If you want to see Dark Hollow Falls, hike the Rose River Loop and look up at it from the bridge. Then keep walking. You don’t need to do both.
Would I do Dark Hollow Falls again? No. The Rose River Loop, on the other hand, I would do again in a heartbeat — and I plan to, with different company, in a different season.
The Silver Lining
We drove away from Dark Hollow Falls tired and slightly grumpy and very hungry. But here’s the thing about a hard day on the trail: even the bad parts are teaching you something.
I learned that my strength was coming along but my endurance needed work. I learned that I prefer trails that feel like an escape rather than a theme park. I learned that I should always listen to the sweaty people sitting on the ground at the trailhead.
And I learned that the next morning, I was going to wake up in that hotel room, look at the map, and make a spontaneous decision that would turn out to be the best hike of the entire trip.
But that’s next week.
— Barbara
