Jones Run Falls

My first hike in the Shenandoah National Park was to Jones Run Falls. My wife and I drove to the Jones Run parking area of Skyline Drive (milepost 84.1), which is where the Jones Run trail begins. Take the blue-blazed trail behind the parking area into the cool of the woods. I was amazed that within ten yards of the beginning of the trail, the Jones Run trail crosses paths with the famous Appalachian Trail as it winds its way silently from Maine to Georgia.

Continue a relatively steep descent toward the falls. The trail is pretty wide in some places and is surprisingly smooth. In roughly half of a mile, you should come along beside Jones Run, which adds interest to your hike. In a short amount of time, you'll pass the first in a series of small waterfalls. Finally you come to the top of Jones Run Falls 1.7 miles into your hike (you need to venture off the trail only a few feet to look down over the falls from above). There is a great view from the top of an enormous hollow area carved out by the falls. Follow the trail down to the bottom of the falls and you can stand almost directly beneath the falling water. We did this hike in early summer, but I imagine the falls would be much stronger in early spring.

We got directions for our hike online, and the directions were completely wrong. We believed that if we continued on the Jones Run trail that it would loop back to the parking lot. A simple glance at the maps provided or the huge marker at the trailhead would have told us otherwise, but we had our directions and we did not stop to look.

We continued for another 2 miles on the Jones Run trail, passing the lower Doyles River falls (which was also a great sight to see, but the falls were well off the trail and it looked to be difficult to get close to them). The ascent back up the mountain was exhausting for novice hikers like us. We stopped briefly and drank from a spring of clean mountain water. A sign nearby insisted that we boil the water vigorously, but we were intent on ignoring every sign that day. Fortunately the water was cold, clean, and delicious. We made it to the top and back to a parking lot, but not our parking lot. We were still three miles away from our car.

This would not have been a big issue ordinarily, because we are in pretty good shape, but two factors made it more of an issue:

1) We didn't begin our hike until 4:30PM, because we believed it was a loop hike that would last roughly two and a half hours.
2) We fully expected to emerge in our own parking lot. The unexpected often appears worse than it is.

The entire ordeal became well worth it though on the way back to the car. As we walked along Skyline Drive, we were fortunate enough to see a large black bear cross the road with two cubs following closely behind. We watched from about one hundred feet away, and one of the cubs took a bit of an interest in us. The mother quickly got between her cub and us, and we began moving quickly in the other direction. After waiting a few minutes, we passed the spot where the bears had just crossed the road nervously.

About an hour later we were in our car on the road back to Harrisonburg. The bear sighting made our detour well worth the extra walk.