This week, I spent two nights in Blackwater Falls State Park in West Virginia. Words cannot describe how beautiful that landscape is! I never knew it existed before, before a friend and fellow photographer clued me in on West Virginia as an option for the fall.

I’ll go into many details about the park itself, but today I wanted to give you a glimpse of the DRIVE THERE! Wow, what an adventure. I left DC at 9:30pm, thinking that I wouldn’t hit traffic at all, and would be at the park by 12:30am or 1. Not bad, I thought, since I would get about 4.5 hours sleep before I had to wake for sunrise.

Oh, but that was not to be. First, I got stuck in bumper to bumper traffic just outside of McLean. This ended up taking 1.5 hours to pass a stretch of 5 miles. After I cleared that hurdle, I pushed on West, thinking I could coast on 8 lane highways until Blackwater.

Again, I was wrong. The road quickly turned from 8 lanes to 2, and stretched paper thin onto rolling mountains. I knew I was going through the mountains, but not because they were outwardly visible, but because an ominous shadow of mass loomed over the night horizon. Dense fog began to set on the road. For a while, this made driving a very serious job, as I stretched my eyes to see just past 15 feet, and to the left and right, where deer eyes peered perilously towards my car.

Despite my hardship in driving through it, the fog was quite a serene sight. Time after time, I would see the road descend into a cloud, and then came 360 degrees of whiteness. As I looked around me, the road and the nearby trees looked covered in snow as the misty air packed valleys between peaks.

Towards the middle of my night drive (say 2:30am), I just passed another cloud valley when the moon pushed through the clouds. The full reflection of the sun provided just slightly visible light on the scene I had just drove past, so I decided to stop and take it all in.

This shot shows just a few miles foggy roads that connect DC to Blackwater Falls. But it gives you a sense of the serenity and beauty of the area:

“Foggy Road to Blackwater Falls”

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Stars emerge on a moonlit scene of autumn trees and fog on the road to Blackwater Falls, West Virginia.

A mini crisis (where I pulled over to help a a girl who hit and killed a deer, and disabled her car, was stranded without cell service and who was waiting with me until the Courtesy Police arrived!) and lot more driving later and I finally arrived at the park at 3:30am. Two hours afterwards, I was up and out, on for my two days of hiking (aka scrapping, clawing, and climbing!) and photographing Blackwater Falls.

Stay tuned for the images 🙂