Shenandoah: It's Not Just a Park, It's an Adventure

One of America's most popular parks, the Shenandoah is a gentle place, draped across the top of the Blue Ridge. Its quiet forests and deer-dotted meadows lie along the deservedly famous Skyline Drive. Meandering across the crest of the Blue Ridge, the drive runs from Front Royal south for 105 miles, with ample places to pull over and gaze down on the serpentine course of the Shenandoah River or across a precipice into an intriguing mountain hollow.

The hollows are unpeopled today, but it was not always so. Before the Civilian Conservation Corps began building the Skyline Drive in the 1930s, this now accessible mountain terrain was wild, remote, and home to mountaineers. Many made a hardscrabble living off the area's abundant chestnut trees, but the chestnut blight of the 1920s put an end to that, and change soon followed.

It came first with an entrepreneur named George Pollock. He took a mountaintop he had inherited near Luray, and turned it into Skyland, a resort frequented by statesmen and presidents. The way up to Pollock's Skyland was rough in those days and the accommodations rustic, but that apparently was part of the appeal. Nightly entertainment centered around a campfire, where live snakes were exhibited and Pollock showed off his marksmanship.

Away from the fire, off in the shadows of the night, mountaineers, too, would gather to see the spectacle. Pollock's showmanship brought fame to the area, and in 1926, Congress authorized the establishment of the Shenandoah National Park. Ten years later, Roosevelt sent in the Civilian Conservation Corps to build the Skyline Drive and to restore the overfarmed, overgrazed land to its natural beauty.

Today, the park is mostly pristine mountain land again, though it does have several developed areas with visitor facilities and accommodations. One of these is an updated version of Skyland (though the entertainment is considerably milder than back in Pollock's showman days).

Many of the park's trails follow the old mountain thoroughfares that used to be the main "highways" through these gaps and hollows. Some of them are now part of the Appalachian Trail, that hikers' highway that runs from Maine to Georgia, cutting straight through the park along the way.

You can still find traces of the mountaineers' handiwork here and there. Close by a streambed, you may discover an old homestead, marked now only by a neatly chinked chimney or a stone fence. If you look closely, you're likely to see an apple tree or two at its edges and maybe the shoots of a hardy iris, planted who knows how long ago.

Old Rag rears up on the far-east edge of Shenandoah National Park, a rough and rugged peak with a lot of character. Its rock-riven 3,268-foot summit offers all kinds of opportunities to negotiate chimneys and crevices and other geologic spectacles rarely found on Old Dominion soil. The hike to the summit totals about seven miles and requires no overwhelming stamina, with the earlier part weaving up forested slopes. However, the higher elevations make you work, taking you over, under, and through pitched rock formations. At the summit, the views sweep back along the Piedmont region and up into the Blue Ridge.

The park and park facilities are located off I-81. From Richmond take I-64 W; from Washington D.C., I-66 W. For more information, call 540/999-3500.

The preceding article was excerpted from Compass American Guides: Virginia.