In Virginia, the Blue Ridge escarpment culminates in a large concentration of peaks and ridges near the North Carolina border. Here, Mount Rogers pokes a tree-shrouded summit above neighboring mountains to lay claim as the state’s highest point. Competition is stiff, with only a 200-foot difference between it and nearby Whitetop Mountain. Striking about both—other than their size—is how little these peaks and the rural landscape around them resemble the more dramatic and sharply etched mountains in the northern Blue Ridge. The difference reflects forces that have shaped each. Folding and faulting characterized late-era mountain-building activity to the north. Here in southwest Virginia, the Blue Ridge’s sweeping mountain slopes and rounded stream valleys resulted from hundreds of millions of years of erosion.
Little about Mount Rogers’s high country resembles Virginia’s other mountain regions. The spruce-fir forest at the highest elevations contains plants and animals typical of northern boreal forests, a result of the last ice age, which pushed plants and animals southward in its path. Mount Rogers’s volcanic bedrock contains rhyolite, a mineral found nowhere else in Virginia. Even views seem otherworldly. Looking west from a wide meadow between Cabin Ridge and Mount Rogers appears more Big Sky, Montana, than Southern Appalachian.
In the high-mountain meadows that slope away from Mount Rogers, horses graze in knee-high grass. A hiker’s approaching footsteps may stir a foal that lies hidden in the overgrowth on Wilburn Ridge. Hawthorn trees and large, house-size boulders are scattered randomly across the fields above. Scales break up the smooth lines of these meadows. The fields here are entirely man-made, created after clear-cut logging and since maintained, first by grazing and now through periodic burning done by the Forest Service.
Given the popularity of climbing Mount Rogers, visitors would do well to disperse their activity over as wide an area as possible. In a recreation area of 117,000 acres, it’s easy to find other attractions, be it the laurel-choked streams on Iron Mountain or the rugged backcountry in Little Dry Run Wilderness, in the often-overlooked eastern section of Mount Rogers National Recreation Area.
THE HIKES
38. Feathercamp Ridge
39. Little Wilson Creek Wilderness
40. Mount Rogers Summit
HONORABLE MENTIONS
JJ. Four Trails Circuit
KK. Rowland Creek Falls Circuit
LL. Whitetop Laurel Circuit