In the 1920s, when the government proposed a national park along the spine of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, wilderness purists scoffed. A century of farming and logging had left a legacy of barren soil and mountain slopes scarred with clear-cut. Wildlife had dwindled to near extinction. It irked some that so much time and effort would be spent on such a depleted landscape.
Oh, if the skeptics could see Shenandoah National Park today.
In a testament to nature’s healing power, scars of the park’s past have all but disappeared. Shenandoah is rightfully counted as one of the crown jewels in our country’s national park system. Long and thin, it measures 75 miles from Front Royal in the north to Rockfish Gap in the south. Within its boundaries are some of Virginia’s finest forests. From overlooks, on a clear day, views stretch east to Washington, DC, and west into West Virginia. You’re as apt to see a bear or deer amble across Skyline Drive as you are another human. That’s not incidental. Black bears are a park success story, having rebounded from near extirpation to several hundred in number.
On the mountaintops, a new generation of oaks and hickories has replaced the oakchestnut forest that provided a livelihood for so many mountain dwellers. Waterfalls come in all shapes and sizes, from the reckless fury of a spring run on Big Devil Stairs to the free-form drops along popular day hikes like Whiteoak Canyon.
Above all are the mountains. Approached from the east, the Blue Ridge sweeps skyward underlaid with granite that formed more than 1 billion years ago—before recorded life on earth—making the Blue Ridge one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth. Basalt lava flows and metamorphic Catoctin greenstone indicate a violent prehistoric past when, deep in the bowels of the earth, heat and pressure formed new rocks from old, then thrust them upwards to form the mountains we see today. So large a barrier did these mountains pose to colonists in Virginia that it bred two distinct cultures: a landowning aristocracy in the eastern Piedmont and Coastal Plains, and a Scots-Irish farm culture in the western valleys and ridges. Today, the only restriction to travel is your imagination and leg power. Hundreds of miles of trails spread through the park and its 79,500 acres of designated wilderness. Each trail invites the traveler to step from the car and explore what lies beyond what the eyes can see.
THE HIKES
15. Mount Marshall Loop
16. Hazel Mountain
17. Old Rag
18. Rocky Mount/Gap Run
19. North Fork Moormans River
20. Overall Run
21. Piney River
HONORABLE MENTIONS
P. Jeremy’s Run
Q. Nicholson Hollow
R. Whiteoak Canyon
S. Big Run Portal-Rockytop Loop
T. Riprap Hollow-Appalachian Trail Loop