Shenandoah & The Lewis Mountain Cabins

Our room at the Lewis Mountain Cabins

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Every night we made a fire in the fire pit out back. Some nights we cooked MRE’s or Meals-Ready-to-Eat, both the legitimate DOD brand, and some of the kind found at REI, the camp store, and other such places for hikers and outdoorsmen. Some nights we hung out around the fire and chatted for a bit.

I recommend the Lewis Mountain Cabins for anyone who wants to camp, but doesn’t necessarily want to be camping in a tent. It’s a comfortable home base located right in the middle of the national park. There are numerous trail heads and overlooks a short walk from the cabins, and the site itself is not far off the Appalachian Trail.

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Fire.

There’s been about a two and half week gap since my last post to this website. I was on vacation. I ended up going with my partner to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, spending Saturday through Thursday there last week. It was the last week of August, and a lovely time for us to have gone. There were still vacationers throughout the week, but mostly it was solitary or paired off hikers around us. A steady parade of older couples traveling their retirement away. Everyone at the park and in the surrounding valleys seemed friendly. I’ve always found the people who live south of the Mason-Dixon Line to be friendlier than those who live north of it, and that seemed to extend to the Virginians and vacationers both I encountered last week. Maybe it’s the place putting people at ease, or the fact that they are on vacation and refusing to stress about more than they have to. Whatever it was, I felt little preoccupation, if not flat-out warmth from many of the people we encountered. And our stay in the park was at a site both more rustic than I anticipated, and more pleasant.

We reserved a small room at the Lewis Mountain Cabins. Having done little research on the different places in the park, only seeing that the cabins had availability, I was surprised at how simple our room was. Entering, I was hit by the strong smell of cedar, which may be what the cabin was made from. No moths there. The place was spotless, having three lights in the main room, an overhead fan, and a heater built into the wall that did a phenomenal job of heating the small cabin in short order after nightfall. We found the park grounds to be colder than the surrounding towns in the valley. The air was cooler in the mountains, though we were not so high up that I would describe it as noticeably thinner.

There was a camp store a short walk across the street. Lacking a television, I walked over to use the wifi at the shop to download movies to my laptop for later in the nights before we went to bed. Other than that, I was mostly free of the internet. The camp shop had any essentials we or any Appalachian Trail hiker might need, and the clerk was a lovely woman whose name I wish I remembered. We spent the days hiking, checking out the surrounding eateries in the park and down in the valley towns. I unthinkingly had biscuits and gravy four mornings in a row with no regrets.

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A view from one of the many overlooks along Skyline Drive

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Many evenings we’d go driving along Skyline Drive, which spans the length of the park high in the mountains and boasts around 75 seperate overlooks looking down on the valleys below. More than once I found myself looking out from those overlooks at those valleys, at all the green, breathing in the clean air, and more than once I asked-

Who wouldn’t want to live here?

Maybe one day I willl.