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What would eventually lead to hiking one of my favorite areas in my home state is also the reason I was gone for so long. At the end of September, I was, yet again, called home for some family matters. We lost my grandfather, 7 months after losing my grandmother, on October 3, 2021. Two days after his funeral, my brother and I said goodbye to an extremely tough year for our family by hiking up Seneca Rocks. This 5.4 mile trek truly tested almost 2 weeks of bad eating and hotel living, but we made it to the top, enjoyed the rocks and all their glory, and survived the hike back down.
The day before this adventure, we actually had taken a nice Sunday drive to take in the beauty of my home state of West Virginia, and we decided we may have to come back for a hiking trip next year to truly take in some of the sites. In this cathartic drive through the mountains, my brother and I did take a ski lift to the top of Canaan Valley, a popular ski resort, and hiked down to Blackwater Falls. All of these sites are exactly why I love the outdoors of West Virginia. They are everything that outdoor beauty is meant to be.
I truly enjoyed getting to introduce my little brother to some of these places, as I learned he had not had the same opportunities to experience these places as I did. While Seneca Rocks and the surrounding areas had been introduced to me when I was in elementary school, he had not had the same traveling experiences as I did. I then made sure to visit many of these places again as an adult (or almost adult). I even spent a week on a Senior Trip in the Seneca Rocks area exploring much of the area, except climbing the rocks, which had closed the trail due to repairs that summer.
Raven K 
Nice
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