Adventures of a swimming hole aficionado

Today, I decided to take a bike ride on the Guest River Gorge trail near Dungannon, Virginia. The weather continued to be cool and cloudy for the past couple of days, but it looked like this afternoon might be sunny and in the upper 70’s (still not quite ideal for swimming holes, but after the rest of this week, I’ll take it). I didn’t have big swimming hole expectations for today, anyway. I was really just curious to ride the trail and see what was there. It first caught my attention in 2012 when I drove past a sign for it on the way to nearby Little Stony Falls. In 2013, curiosity got the better of me, so I stopped by the gorge on the way back from Little Stony with one of my friends. It was a rails-to-trail bike trail like the Virginia Creeper Trail (which is where we usually went bike riding when I was growing up). We walked the first half-mile or so and went through a tunnel, across a trestle, and found a legit swimming hole with a large sandy beach just downstream of the trestle. The water looked gross and sudsy, though, so the Guest River was never high on my to-do list for swimming hole explorations. Therefore, it seemed like a good option for a day like today, where I didn’t have high expectations and just wanted to get out and do something. I decided I would probably just bike-ride and not get in the river unless I found an exceptionally awesome swimming hole.

The entire trail is 5.5 miles one way, so when you reach the end, you have to turn around and backtrack. The trail follows the river downstream on the way in, so the return ride is uphill. I had marked ten points of interest on Google Earth, so my plan was to check them out on the way down, and then swim in the best one (if any were worthy of swimming in) on the way back up. POIs 1 and 7 were the only ones I definitely wanted to check out, and the others I would scramble down to if it wasn’t too much trouble.

( Click here for the full trip report with pictures and videos )

In summary, the Guest River Gorge Trail is a nice bike ride that offers several swimming holes, but the water quality of the river doesn’t look very appealing, and there was a lot of trash by the river bank. The only swimming hole I found possibly tempting enough to overlook the water quality was the one with the large boulders. As far as biking goes, though, I think this trail would be more enjoyable when the leaves are off the trees. There were towering cliffs above the trail for much of the ride, but I hardly noticed them because of the foliage. I also would have been able to get better views of the river if not for the leaves. After having seen how the Google Earth imagery translates to ground-level views, I’m thinking the area from the boulder swimming hole to POI 4 might have actually been the most geologically interesting from a swimming hole standpoint. Perhaps I’ll return in the winter or early spring to get a better view of what I missed on today’s ride.