Late morning on our first full day in West Virginia, we found ourselves at the Endless Wall Trail. It’s not only a place for horizontal walking motion across the landscape, but the vertical motion of rock climbing too, as the park sign points out.
How we got there (that is, besides driving in our car to the trail head) is best characterized as a misreading or misunderstanding of a map on my part. So the trail wasn’t the one we’d been looking for, but it seemed like a good trail, so we headed in, with a place called Diamond Point as the goal.
Not a particularly difficult trail, for the most part, though there were roots and rocks and mud patches, but they never rose past the level of sometime annoyance. Nowhere was it steep, but the trail rose slowly in elevation much of the time.
It takes a fairly healthy old man about 30 minutes to get to Diamond Head. I mean, Diamond Point. Odd the things you think about sometimes, such as a land form in the tropics while tramping through some temperate zone mud, just because of a coincidental name.
Close to the destination.
Some of the glories that were Diamond Point.
There isn’t agreement on the exact age of New River among scientists, but it is measured in the hundreds of millions of years. Guess it was worth climbing a slope to take a look into deep time.
But you don’t need to walk that far to see a sweeping vista at Grandview, in a part of the park that’s some miles south-southeast of Diamond Point. We went there toward the end of the same pleasantly warm day, driving on local roads through Beckley, as well as short stretches of I-64 and West Virginia 9, to get to a large NPS parking lot, playground and ball field, occupied that day by small groups of parents and kids.
A walk of five minutes or so led from the play area to Grandview overlook. It is.
