Devils Marbleyard
Antietam Quartzite Talus Field On Bald Knob In The Jefferson National Forest, On The Edge Of The James River Face Wilderness · Natural Bridge Station, Virginia
Eight acres of bare white quartzite boulders poured down the side of Bald Knob above Natural Bridge Station, some of them the size of small cars, with nothing growing between them and no path across them at all. It is a talus field - Antietam quartzite broken up by hundreds of thousands of years of freeze and thaw and left stacked where it fell - and standing at the bottom looking up at a slope of white rock rising several hundred feet through green forest is genuinely disorienting, because nothing about it looks like Virginia. The Belfast Trail climbs about a mile and a half from the forest road to the lower edge of the field, and that is where the maintained route ends. People go up the boulders because they are there; the rock is grippy quartzite and the scrambling is superb when dry. It is also where the injuries happen, because the gaps between blocks are deep, a slip goes into a hole rather than onto a slope, and rescue from the middle of a talus field is slow and difficult.
Belfast Trail, Petites Gap Road, Natural Bridge Station, Natural Bridge Station, Virginia, 24579, United States
Open at all hours, year round, and free - there is no gate, no fee and no facilities of any kind. Access is by the Belfast Trail from a small unpaved trailhead on a rough forest road; check road conditions after storms. NO water, NO toilets, NO phone signal. THE MAINTAINED TRAIL STOPS AT THE LOWER EDGE OF THE BOULDER FIELD - everything above that is unmarked scrambling and is dangerous when the rock is wet or icy.
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