More Than a Presidential Fishing Camp Story or: The Fine Simplicity of a Shenandoah Hike

Rapidan Camp via Mill Prong Trail

Shenandoah National Park

4.1 miles round-trip, moderate

Beneath cloud-scuttled blue skies on a late-August afternoon, between mileposts 52 and 53 on Skyline Drive, we lace boots and secure packs. Butterflies flicker about purple thistle and weedy wildflowers lining the Milam Gap Parking area: an unanticipated slice of asphalt sublimity along a storied scenic highway. Our destination is Rapidan Camp, remnants of the 164-acre refuge built by Avid Outdoorsman and United States President Herbert Hoover and First Lady Lou Henry Hoover. The camp served as therapeutic retreat during Hoover’s 1929-to-1933 term of office; today’s hike promises to be a pleasing amalgam of the scenic and the historically significant, a walk through sylvan loveliness to an architectural landmark in the heart of Shenandoah.

Posing with an AT Post.

We cross Skyline Drive and follow the white-blazed Appalachian Trail for the length of a football field to its intersection with the Mill Prong Trail.  As stipulated by one of the park’s ubiquitous metal-banded concrete posts, we take a downhill left on the blue-blazed path and descend into a green-green wooded valley. The trail, like most in our Shenandoah experience, is rock-strewn and requires ambulatory attention. Earlier in the day, one of us tripped and took a nasty tumble on a trek to Lewis Falls, requiring trailside first aid and resulting in an array of cuts and bruises, including a conspicuous facial contusion that is becoming angrier and more colorful by the minute. Not good... but it could have been worse.

Crossing the Mill Prong.

Our downward route through fern-lined forest is interspersed with stream crossings: a half-mile along, we traverse the Mill Prong for the first time, and in less-than-a-half-mile, we stone-step across a feeder creek. After intersecting with a horse path, the now yellow-blazed trail brings us to a final crossing of the Mill Prong and a stop at Big Rock Falls, a modest cascade spilling over nominally big rock into a picturesque pool. 

Wayside Beauty: Big Rock Falls.

We continue down-down-down the trail for another few tenths of a mile, cross a rutted access road, and make quick left on a footpath to our destination. Rapidan Camp, aka Camp Hoover: Marines worked hard to make this remote setting suitably presidential. They wired the camp for electricity and phone service, constructed a lodge, a town hall, mess halls, and cabins, including The Slums— colorfully named housing for the first lady’s secretarial staff. Of thirteen original buildings built where the Mill Prong merges with the Laurel Prong to form the Rapidan River, three remain: Creel House, Brown House, and the Prime Minister's Cabin.

Stonework Ruins: Rapidan Camp Fireplace.

Back in the day, two of Hoover’s trusty aides occupied Creel House: an FBI agent turned security-minded secretary and the president’s personal physician. On this day, Creel House is inhabited by a husband-wife docent team. The snack-munching husband appears on the porch, announcing that it is technically a day off but amicably volunteering his wife’s tour services around the camp.
Politely averting her eyes from the aforementioned conspicuous facial contusion—the one that’s becoming angrier and more colorful by the minute—our guide-wife explains that Hoover presented three criteria for his retreat location: reasonable proximity to Washington, D.C, an elevation that would deter mosquitoes, and opportunity for excellent trout fishing. If Hoover had added soothing water features and sheltering foliage to his wish list, this still would have been the spot. 

Not the White House: Brown House at Rapidan Camp.
(NPS Photo)

We pass through camp to Brown House, the Hoover's charming cabin, a rustic single-floor frame structure standing in stylistic distinction and color contrast to the chief executive’s official Washington residence. We linger on decking where the President and First Lady once entertained foreign dignitaries and domestic leaders, dear family and distinguished friends—working and strategizing, relaxing and recreating. Today, our guide directs attention to a recumbent nonvenomous snake (hiding) and a resident bat (hanging) before we move indoors.

Vintage Hosts and Guests: Brown House Interior.
(NPS Photo)

No photography or packs allowed inside Brown House, but we are invited to compare vintage black-and-white photographs with current furnishing and appointment.  It is a remarkable restoration, for sure: absent from the tableau, though, are the Hoovers, their guests, and the Filipino mess crew transferred to Rapidan Camp from the decommissioned presidential yacht.

President and First Lady on a Footbridge.
(NPS Photo)

The directed tour concludes on the doorstep of Rapidan Camp's third extant building, the Prime Minister's Cabin. After de-activating a remarkably complex security system, our guide invites us to visit the incorporated mini-museum and then takes her leave. We survey nicely-done exhibits before exploring the rest of camp, finding points of interest and interpretive signage along Rapidan's well-worn pathways.

Visitor on a Footbridge.

Retracing our steps to the trailhead, we reflect upon the hike’s blend of scenery and history. After his beleaguered term of office, we learned, Hoover and his wife bequeathed the privately-funded camp and acreage to the government; it would become part of newly-created Shenandoah National Park. Hoover had hoped that this much-loved place would be designated a permanent presidential retreat; Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s disability and distaste for all things Hoover, however, pointed him toward Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains and the more exotically named Shangri-La—rechristened Camp David by President Eisenhower. 

Hoover once observed, All men are equal before fish, an apt and charming postscript to the democratic sensibilities of his arcadian retreat. Of course, history tells us that government minions heavily stocked the Rapidan River with trout in anticipation of presidential visits, improving the piscine prospects of the Angler-in-Chief to something more than egalitarian. But a fine, simple sentiment, nonetheless.

Fishing is much more than fish.  
It is the great occasion when we may return
to the fine simplicity of our forefathers.
--Herbert Hoover

Desert Day Hike, a Hop and a Skip from The Strip

Calico Tanks

Red Rock Canyon NCA, Nevada

2.5 miles round-trip, moderate/strenuous

What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas: the cheerfully debauched slogan rings true. After forty-eight hours of rolling dice, spinning slots, and shuffling cards, we flee the misplaced hours and measured air of Mandalay Bay, determined to discover What Happens in the Eastern Mojave Desert, a Chunk of Sandstone’s Throw from The Strip. 

We Are Leaving Las Vegas.

Our destination on this blue-sky late-winter morning is Red Rock Canyon, an accessible tract of mottled rock and petrified dunescape less than twenty miles from the human histrionics, gregarious gambling, and wild, veneered bustle of Las Vegas. Even as it offers respite from Vegas, the Calico Tanks Trail will provide an aptly-named introduction to the distinctive fabric of the BLM conservation area: its human history, its jumbled geology... its wild, variegated beauty. 

Incongrous Blocks? You Bet!

From the Sandstone Quarry Trailhead, we follow an erstwhile road to an abandoned quarry where the Excelsior Company operated in the early 1900s. Several massive sandstone blocks remain at the site, monolithic reminders of an ultimately unprofitable extractive past. 

Non-Roasted Agave.

Northwest of the quarry, trail signage directs our attention to the rubble of a Native American agave roasting pit, a reasonably well-preserved prehistoric kitchen and further evidence that Human History Happened Here.

Beyond the roasting pit, the reasonably well-marked path veers to the right, dropping into a broad wash at the mouth of a canyon. Crunch, crunch, scrunch, scrunch, squish, squish: dry-ish gray gravel gives way to damp-ish white sand, then moist-ish red sand. The trail narrows, and we brush against glistening scrub oak and single-needle pine. The sky is clear and the air feels cool as our hiking boots move up the drainage.

A Calico Landscape.

Before long, we learn What Happens When Official Trail Signage Disappears Here. The heretofore reasonably well-marked path ascends a sandstone ramp and vanishes into Early-March oblivion. This confusing terrace is the only point on the hike where we encounter other hikers—a pair lost and lingering on the way out, and a pair (with a dog) lost and lingering on the return hike.  As we point ourselves in the direction we think we should go, we hear-but-never-see climbers, disembodied voices ricocheting off distant sheer canyon walls.

Surveying the Scene.

Now is the moment to put our cards on the table, to collect our hiking thoughts, to summon common sense, to call upon route-finding skills! We survey and we scramble: pointing toward sporadic cairns and occasional cut-stone steps, we negotiate a 15-to-20-per-cent grade and proceed up-canyon.

Looking down the Canyon, Calico Tanks Trail.

It becomes increasingly apparent that Precipitation in the Form of Rain and Snow Recently Happened Here.  We spy dollops of snow and patches of ice in sheltered niches and shadowed nooks.  Water is running briskly in the drainage, delimiting our path and making the slick rock scramble… slicker.  Loose stones shift beneath our feet, and big boulders are clammy to the touch as we hoist our way up-up-up the canyon.

In finest Vegas fettle, we hedge our bets, never straying too high on sandstone or slogging too low on sandy bottom.  We are focused on trajectory and footfall, and we miss the petroglyph on the north canyon wall.  This is a bit of physical exertion. But it's so much fun!

Greenish Water.

After a final steep-stone staircase, the terrain levels briefly and then descends sharply, improbably, to a hidden water pocket.  Our reading tells us that Calico Tank is frequented by bighorn sheep, birds, frogs, and insects—that it may be dry in the summer or icy in the winter.  Today, the tinaja is tranquil, full of greenish water, margined with sedges and grasses.

A Lofty Tank.

Calico Hills, Turtlehead Peak.

We scramble across a rocky saddle, a shelf to the south of the tank, pressing our luck and ourselves toward the Big Payoff View. Behind us, set against incomparably-blue late-winter sky: views of Turtlehead Peak and Calico Basin, a geologic concoction infused with amalgamated iron oxide and calcium carbonate—the deep-red-blanched-white hues of Aztec Sandstone. 

What Happens At the Overlook Doesn't Necessarily Stay at the Overlook.

Before us and beneath that same incomparably-blue late-winter sky, we take in the Las Vegas Valley and—look over there!—the phantasmagoric swath of windowless casinos where we began our day, where, presumably, all manner of things are happening and staying.  We appreciate What's Happening Here, but we cannot stay.  Soon, hiking boots and gravity return us safely to the trailhead, but not everything stays on the trail. Our hiking hearts are filled with a sense of human history, visceral beauty, physical exertion, so-much-fun... a marvelous display of color and light and geologic texture.  Bet your bottom dollar.