Dark Hollow Rose River Loop

Yesterday, Tammy and I took advantage of the weather and hiked another loop within Shenandoah National Park. For this outing we combined a couple of well known hikes to waterfalls into a loop that was just under 6 miles long.

Near the Big Meadows Campground and Byrd Visitor Center [pdf], the Dark Hollow Falls hike is one of the more popular hikes in the park. It is short, but steep, and gets you to a series of three waterfalls (depending on how far down the hill you want to hike). Even further north of Big Meadows is the Rose River Loop Trail, that gets you to another set of falls.

When you hike down to the very bottom of the Dark Hollow Falls trail, you intersect with the Rose River Falls loop. So we combined the two into one hike. We started at the Byrd Visitor Center, hiked over to, and down, the Dark Hollow Falls trail. At the bottom of the Dark Hollow Falls Trail, we picked up the Rose River Loop Trail and hiked that until we got back to the Skyline Drive near Fisher's Gap, a few miles north of the visitor center. Finally, we took the Skyland-Big Meadows Horse Trail from Fishers Gap back to the visitor center.

If you would prefer to see that route on a map, then go here for just that, courtesy of my GPS.

Of course, I got lots of pictures on the way, especially of waterfalls. In the near future, my favorite pictures from this hike will be showing up in this blog. This one is of Dark Hollow Falls.