M.K.Duke

Jason and I went to West Virginia this weekend to go camping at Seneca Rocks, which is in the Monongahela National Forest. It was very pretty, parts of it reminded me of central america and other parts reminded me of Oregon. The town of Seneca Rocks very small, the owner of the General Store boasted “2nd least populated county east of the Mississippi!” his grandfather had started the store in 1902 and not much had changed about the store since then, a cardboard sign hangs on the front door that reads “Just Turn the Knob” since the door is really old and resembles a door for a bathroom more than it does for a store front enterance. We camped at Seneca Shadows, which was a really nice campground with a great view of the rocks we got there pretty late so we woke up early the next morning and started to hike the “Rock” before anyone else got there. It was a pretty steep climb but it was only 1.5 miles to the top, you will see from the pictures that we took that there is a point on the trail that warns you about the dangers of going to the actual top of the rocks because 15 people have died since 1971. When we got to the top of the rocks Jason had to do some convincing to get me to go past the warning sign but I am glad that we did, it wasn’t actually that scary as long as you stayed in the center of the rock and the view was so much better than what you could see from the observation deck. We hung out up there for a while taking pictures and enjoying the scenery, we were the only ones on top except for this silly German climber that was setting up his top rope (I didn’t realize it at the time but Jason was really annoyed with this guy for taking so much time at the top). It was really good picture taking weather and Jason was doing his usual and taking pictures of every possible angle imaginable. Jason asked me to get out his filter for his lens that was apparently in the backpack that I had carried to the top, I got out the box and opened it up, inside was a nicer wood box and at the time I was like “Man, Jason sure does keep his filter in a really nice box!” at the time it didn’t even click that a filter wouldn’t have even fit in this box. So I was trying to hand the box to Jason and he was like, “Just open it and get the filter out please!” and so I opened the box and inside was a ring, I was totally surprised, Jason just said “See that?” as he was pointing to his knee to show that he was in fact kneeling on the rocks, but really we were both kneeling because you sort of had to be unless you wanted to fall off. It was pretty funny and perfect for us since neither one of us is overly romantic or gushy about that type of stuff, so of course I said yes. Later Jason told me that he didn’t know for sure that he was going to ask me because he didn’t know what this place was going to be like, a while back I had told Jason that if he asked me in Ohio I would say no, so since we were in West Virginia he was safe, he just brought the ring along just in case and it ended up working out perfectly once the German guy finally climbed off the summit. You can check out our pictures here and check out Jason’s pictures here