4 Yankee Horse Overlook Trail (Milepost 34.4)
This is a quintessential Parkway leg-stretcher trail. Great views of Wigwam Falls combine with an interesting exhibit about the logging railroads that carried off the region’s virgin timber.
Parkway milepost: 34.4
Distance: 0.1 to 0.2 mile out and back
Maps: USGS Montebello; no Parkway map
Finding the trailhead: Start on the right side of the overlook, by the interpretive sign.
The Hike
Blue Ridge Parkway interpretive trails impart an amazing sense of how people affected the mountain environment. If you open yourself to the insights, you’ll start noticing the remains of old cabin sites and stone walls where you’d least expect them. This hike will change the way you look at trails wherever you hike in the eastern United States.
Remnants of the virgin forests encountered by the colonists are rare in the Appalachians today. The last of that timber was carried away in the early twentieth century on narrow-gauge railroads that climbed into the most impassable places on grades excavated by hand and lifted over precipitous gorges on log trestles. This trail explores a section of railroad reconstructed on the actual grade used by the Irish Creek Railway to transport more than 100 million board feet of lumber. Built in 1919 and 1920, the railway was 50 miles long.
Up stone steps, the trail rises and turns right onto railroad tracks across a log-supported bridge that spans gushing Wigwam Creek. The path goes left beyond the bridge, but don’t turn yet. Follow the tracks as the rails end and the ties continue past a pile of huge timbers. When the ties stop, keep going a short distance and see how the grade softens and the woods encroach.
Many trails use portions of grades like this, and most hikers assume they’re old farm or auto roads. Some of the grades you encounter on the Parkway, especially near gaps, may be wagon roads from centuries past. But many are railroad grades, and now you may be better able to recognize them. Drive north a short distance from this overlook; where the hillside recedes from the road on the right, you can see the continuation of this very railroad grade slicing through the woods.
Return to where you would have gone left and turn right (uphill). Pass a tree growing over a huge boulder on the right and then go left across two bridges below impressive Wigwam Falls. The trail continues left, levels above the stream, and then descends on a log-lined treadway to rejoin the tracks. Head left, back toward the bridge, and take a right to your car. Or go right on the tracks toward a picnic table and then left down steps to the overlook.