Scales Trailhead Basecamp

Beautiful place to camp. Drove up in mid October and enjoyed amazing views and changing foliage. The road up is very rough. I did see some smaller AWD vehicles at the top, but I would be scared to take the road with a low clearance vehicle as it is extremely rocky (some of which were sharp so watch the tire side walls). It took us 45 minutes to make it up the 4 mile road in a 4Runner.

There are bathrooms at the top (no toilet paper though) and I did get spotty cell service with Verizon, enough to send texts and load the weather, etc. There are several fire pits at the top and gathering wood is allowed.

One of my favorite places to camp. Beautiful scenery! Great place to view wild ponies. Bathrooms are available. You will need 4WD or a vehicle with clearance. The road is rocky but is not to bad. Just go slow you will be fine. It’s about an hour or less drive on the dirt road. There is drinking water on the left side of the dirt road before entering the campground. It’s spring water coming out of a pipe. Very clean and cold water. Weather sometimes can change quickly. Be prepared for wind and dropping temperature’s.

My favorite place to camp in VA, despite it being a 5.5 hour trip for us. Right on the AT with access to many wonderful trails. Primitive camping for the most part, though the fenced-in area has always been pretty well maintained and the pit toilets provided by the forest service are nice. We love to hike, stargaze, forage, and take tons of pictures up there when we go. A few things to know before you go:

1. You'll need a vehicle with good ground clearance to reach this site. I've seen locals up there in compact sedans, but I wouldn't attempt the access road in anything lower than a Subaru Outback (and even our Outback scraped in a couple places).

2. Bring your own water. There's a spring near the end of the access road, but it's not convenient to the camping area and often flows slowly.

3. For the toilets, follow the rules and bring your own TP just in case.

4. Pack out your trash!! There are bins in the toilets, but the forest service only empties them every week or so. Let the thru-hikers use those and take care of your own trash so the bins in the toilet don't get mucked up with overflowing trash.

5. Speaking of thru-hikers, we always bring extra water, snacks, sodas, etc and offer them to any hikers that pass through. It's a great way to meet new, interesting people and they are always grateful. Offer to take their trash too! :-)

6. If you are "lucky" enough to time it right (last weekend in Apr/first weekend in Oct, approximately), the herd of steer may be driven up/down the road on Saturday. You'll get to see all the horseback wranglers do their thing which is cool, HOWEVER... you won't have access to the road for several hours on Sat AM and they corral the herd into the camping area before driving them down the road, so it gets noisy and lots of cow pies are left behind. We loved seeing all the activity but if it's not your thing then plan accordingly.

7. Lots of area to camp, but please note that most of the fenced area is sloped, and flat sites tend to be grabbed up first. If you have a rig that you can level, please park on the slope. If you are lucky enough to grab a flat site, be mindful to leave space for others and don't spread out too much.