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Ramps is our Wv Right of Spring delicacy food...much like the first 'Crawdad Boil in the low country.
Ramps are from the leek family and enjoyed by millions...or at least thousands...well a few thousand...They are a clinging type of veggie and will stay with a person for a while...days, as a matter of fact..
They are prepared in dozens of ways and great festivals are had from border to border..
I don't think anyone else really claims the Ramp.
In spring, late warm February or March the shoots pop forth from leafy beds of woodland areas that face primarially North...
The history of their use is lost in pioneer legends as a cure all and for their containment of Vitamin C.
They resemble a young green onion with a leafy top...and they are very pungent..
What the Ramp Festivals do more of than anything is bring people together...after a long haul through the winter with cabin fever and the like...a Ramp Festival gets everyone going and give the real focus on the new year...almost like Mardi Gras without the parades...
Whether they ingest or not, Wvians love the part of their culture that includes the Allium Tricoccum...the rampion extrimis!
They are sort of like a green onion but a million times stronger. When you cook them your house will stink for at least a couple days and you probably will also. Ever cook cabbage and know how your house smells? Ramps are worse. However, the taste is REALLY good. Can't explain the taste.
It's easier to hike at most of the trails at 12,000 ft out west vs. the craggy up-and-down trails found out here.
Trust me.
No it isn't. I spent the first part of my life hiking in West by God Virginia, and the second part hiking all over the west, so I know the difference. A steep incline is a steep incline. A 1,000 foot drop is a 1,000 foot drop. But the atmospheric pressure is very noticeably lower from about 7,000 feet up, especially over 10,000 feet. Makes it hard to take in air and altitude sickness is much easier to get than you'd think; but I don't even notice it at all at 4,000 feet, and I can't imagine getting altitude sickness in West Virginia. You don't even reach treeline until 10,000 or 11,000 feet, and the highest point in WV is only 4,863 feet. I can jump in my car and be above that in 10 minutes.
The lowest part of Albuquerque, and several other cities in the west, is over 5,000 feet. My house in Albuq. was at 6,000. Just above that house the mountain was almost 10,700 feet. It would take us four or five hours of really strenuous hiking to reach the top from a trail head not far from our house. Then it took us 20 minutes to ride down on the tram.
The highest I've ever hiked was at nearly 14,000 in the Sierras. Actually, you have to backpack in about five or six hours to around 12,000 feet, and camp under the stars. Quite a thrill being caught in a lightning storm at 14,000 feet, above tree line, with nothing but slight indentations in the house sized boulders to hide under, and the boulders being so electrified that you get zapped when you touch them.
Ski areas, like Santa Fe, New Mexico, are over 12,000 feet and the terrain is as rugged as as it gets. I live at 2600 ft in Las Vegas where the average altitude is 2,000. Of course the Las Vegas Valley, which is just slightly smaller than Harrison and Marian Counties combined, isn't rugged; but I look out my den window at foothills just a mile or two away that are way higher and more rugged than anything in the east. Not nearly as much vegetation on a desert foothill though, if that is what you meant. The mountains beyond are forested though, and so rugged that people go missing there quite often and are never found. You won't find mountains anywhere in this country more rugged than the Rockies or the Sierras.
I'm not putting West Virginia down. Mountains in West Virginia are beautiful, and they are not about altitude, they are about rugged terrain; I know that. But West Virginia, just because it is called the Mountain State, doesn't have a monopoly on rugged terrain or mountains. New Hampshire and Vermont, where I have also hiked, have higher, more rugged mountains than West Virginia, and compared to the ranges in the west, even they can't really be called mountains.
I know my mountains. Id never live anywhere they didn't have mountains. I tell my Texas wife that if God had wanted Texans to ski he would have given them a mountain...or at least would have made BS white.
I think the terrain on most trails out west were pretty darned easy once you're acclimated. Heck, last year my 5 and 8 year old kids did 9 miles on our second day out in Rocky Mountain National Park. (My wife's dad is a ranger out there; actually I just dropped the family off at Pittsburgh Airport. They're going out for 2 weeks)
I've hiked on some of the constant up/down/up down trails on the AT like the Devils Staircase in VA, and some WORSE terrain down in Roanoke VA and by 12 noon you were dead meat. Total pounding, dripping with sweat.. The northern terminus of the AT in NH has some of the toughest terrain (and weather) anywhere..
Now I will say western technical climbing is certainly far more advanced, but out of all the trail hikes I've done out at RMNP, not one was as brutal as the Devils Staircase in July.
It's the quick and constant elevation changes back and forth that kill you here. Out west you generally go upppppppppppppppp for a long time then downnnnnnnnnn for a long time. It's much easier on the body.
I think the terrain on most trails out west were pretty darned easy once you're acclimated. Heck, last year my 5 and 8 year old kids did 9 miles on our second day out in Rocky Mountain National Park. (My wife's dad is a ranger out there; actually I just dropped the family off at Pittsburgh Airport. They're going out for 2 weeks)
I've hiked on some of the constant up/down/up down trails on the AT like the Devils Staircase in VA, and some WORSE terrain down in Roanoke VA and by 12 noon you were dead meat. Total pounding, dripping with sweat.. The northern terminus of the AT in NH has some of the toughest terrain (and weather) anywhere..
Now I will say western technical climbing is certainly far more advanced, but out of all the trail hikes I've done out at RMNP, not one was as brutal as the Devils Staircase in July.
It's the quick and constant elevation changes back and forth that kill you here. Out west you generally go upppppppppppppppp for a long time then downnnnnnnnnn for a long time. It's much easier on the body.
Some of what you say is a little bit true, but if your only experience in western mountains is on easy trails in Rocky Mtn. Nat'l Park, I think you are in for a rude awakening. It is easier in one way; we don't have that humidity to drain all your energy. I did one hike in New Mexico that probably never got over 7,000 feet, but it was up the side of one canyon and down the other as you are describing for about six or seven miles. Not far, but grueling. Hiking speed out here is about one mile per hour. All the mountain terrain that I've hiked in is taking you higher and higher as you say, but you have to go over ridges to get there, which is up and down. Try hiking Bryce Canyon, Cedar Breaks, Zion Nat'l Park, or the big ditch...The Grand Canyon. We hiked to the bottom once and it was the most grueling hike I've ever seen. The trail down (Kaibab) was 7 miles ─ 7 hours. When we got down there we were ready to pass out with exhaustion. Next morning for the hike out we took a slightly less steep trail (Bright Angel); 9 miles ─ about 11 hours. I've never been so sore in my life, and we were experienced hikers. 13 -14 hour hikes were the norm for us. I'd give an important appendage to be able to still do that.
Well, hiking is tough PERIOD, so let's get that out in the open
I've been to Philmont Scout ranch NM (easy) and all over some damned rugged BLM lands down in Southern CO looking for hot springs off the beaten path. I've got a few fourteeners under my belt as well..
But nothing beat the tar at of me more than a section of the AT through VA, including Devils Staircase. The up-down and humidity just beat me down. I could've cried like a baby..
Out West I get tired, but not beaten to a puddly pulp.
Well, hiking is tough PERIOD, so let's get that out in the open
I've been to Philmont Scout ranch NM (easy) and all over some damned rugged BLM lands down in Southern CO looking for hot springs off the beaten path. I've got a few fourteeners under my belt as well..
But nothing beat the tar at of me more than a section of the AT through VA, including Devils Staircase. The up-down and humidity just beat me down. I could've cried like a baby..
Out West I get tired, but not beaten to a puddly pulp.
Well I guess that's a strenuous hike. I've never been on that one. But let's face it...it's the humidity; so maybe because of that it is easier to hike in the west. Humidity is the number one reason why I say I can never again live east of the Rockies. When I was running I could go out and run in Las Vegas when it was 110º, but whenever I'd try to run back east in the summer, especially in Washington, DC, or down in Florida, I got sick after about a block and had to quit. I think I had a humidity headache every day of my life until I moved to Las Vegas. They went away the day I drove into town, but an hour after I'm in West Virginia I'm miserable from the humidity. When I hear the weatherman in the east say it is dry and the humidity is 75%, it cracks me up. Dry is when the humidity is 2% like it has been here a few times this summer. At the moment at 11:20 at night it is 96º, but the humidity is only 12%. Even that's a little high.
As a scout I would have given anything to have gone to Philmont, so one day we were headed up to Red River, NM, and we stopped at Philmont just so I could at least get a look at it. Of course if I had gone there as a scout and saw a bear I probably would have embarrassed my self, so maybe it's a good thing I didn't.
Nah- the constant up/down kills you there. The humidity is the added in your face power sapper.
We'll start another thread on WV hikes for fear that this thread has been hijacked by a bunch of Vibram soled knuckleheads.
Philmont was a good experience. I went with a crew of fine young lads in 1999. Did a strenuous trek which wound up being being mediocre at best. We trained on the AT for a year prior. The Devils Staircase was by far the 'killer'.
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