Canaan Valley, West Virginia is a high mountain valley. It is, in fact, the largest high mountain valley east of the Rockies. The valley nestles in the bottom of a bowl, surrounded by barren, windblown tundra on the tops of the mountains. As you walk across the strangely spongy surface of the mosses and lichens that cling to the earth high up on the mountain ridge, suddenly there rears up a row of teeth in front of you, stone stalagmites pushing up from the earth.

Chiseled and chipped by decades of wind erosion, these granite goliaths are more like sculptures than stones. Climbing up them you can discover nooks and crannies and caves to hide in.

[A personal note: Our dogs’ favorite find, however, was all wet. Two divots, one large, one small, had been scooped out of the stone and filled …