#272 Bolar Mountain Campground USFS Warm Springs VA

Well, I licked my wounds as best I could at Charlottesville. All I did was secure the ceiling stable enough to where the thing wouldn't fall on us while we slept. At Covington, we started up the hill which is Bolar Mountain. It's a federal site and we've been there one time a year ago. We were here again and we hope to experience the George Washington and Jefferson National Forest in its full colors. Now that I’m fully committed a local guy said this might not be the best year to see the colors. It's just kind of hard to hear after I planned it so long.

Fall colors and I have a love-hate thing. About 10 years ago I went from my babysitting my dad for a night to what I would call taking a long way home.

It would be leaving the Blue Ridge Mountains on the diagonal Highway 81 that makes the shape of Virginia. I got on the Skyline Drive that day about 3 and I went all the way to the end and it probably took a couple of hours. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen when it comes to colors. The Valleys I went through were like golden tobacco leaves and I even wrote down on a paper plate all the colors that I could come up with. The colors I saw would make a Crayola crayon box of colors.

I've been trying to recreate that event ever since and have never done so yet. I have drug my little family up to the mountains year after year and cannot get it right. Now I’m hearing his year I get skunked again. There have been times when they said it happened the week before. You should have been here the following week. We gave ourselves about two weeks to hit it and this was just one of those years where they didn't dazzle.

Well, I'm in it now so I wasn't going to do anything different. I just had to say what we're going to have a nice time and well still see some color but just not the amazing ones I yearn for.

I had called up to Boulder Mountain and spoke to the host. She gave me some pretty specific directions on what to do and not to do. If you take and do what the GPS says it might recreate our last experience there.

Well, we got nestled into Bolar mountain and I spent a fair amount of time putting a tarp on the roof that was leaking like a sieve. I was trying to prepare for what if it rained. The wind was blowing which meant it took like an hour to put a tarp up there. Every time I thought I had it if the wind blew the whole thing away like a sail. I would start over again and that was the only thing I did the first night is getting dried in. It did rain later on that night so I was lucky, grateful, blessed something. The next day I spent as much time as I could day just making things a little better. There were globs of silicone on the roof and framing on the inside.

The method I used for almost the entire rebuild project was to use a hydraulic floor jack that you usually work on cars with. I would place a two-by-four and a piece of angle iron to it and would jack up the board until I could push the roof up to where it used to be. I would stabilize it with a 2x3 and joists hangers and so forth until I pushed the roof up to its original position.

This would happen over the next several campsites. A lot of working on roofs and ceilings and then a little bit of hiking about with Miss India down by the lake.

19th and 20th To get from Covington to Bolar Make sure you take 220 N till Warm Springs then left on Hwy 39 all the way to Hwy 600 at the fork do not take 687 stay on 39 off 220 turn onto 39 at the big white barn stay on pass 687 bad till blowing springs on left is Bolar draft rd. which is 600 to Bolar mtn. camp ground # 540 279 4144

756 Twin Ridge Dr

Warm Springs, Virginia 24484

Phone: (540) 279-4144