Shenandoah National Park VA USA

Autumn Fall 2018 is not one that will go down in the annals of history as one of the most spectacular, the year was mostly too wet and too warm too late, but the colours were still rather lovely. We’d had several days of fine weather but the forecast was for it to break on the Monday.  So, Phil and Lesley proposed a drive out on Sunday 4 November to Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah National Park to view the Fall colours and the never-ending vistas across rural Virginia before the rain and wind brought all the leaves down.

We made an early start which was just as well; the traffic in the final couple of miles to the Park’s entrance was abysmal.  Clearly, everyone else in the area had had the same thought as us!

The Skyline Drive stretches for 60-odd miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Close by to the Drive, the Appalachian Trail winds along just below the crest with campsites dotted along the route and warnings of bears at all the car parks and, presumably and more importantly, at the campsites.

We failed to see any bears but we didn’t go far from the road.  However, this deer, grazing on the verge, seemed entirely unconcerned by our presence or that of the other 5 cars that had stopped nearby with all the occupants taking pictures.

We took a break at the Skyline Drive visitors’ centre which gave surprisingly little detail of the history of the national park.  However, our guidebook says the following: ‘Shenandoah National Park, which contains seemingly endless acres of dark forests, deep rocky ravines and precipitous, surging waterfalls, has one of the most unusual histories of any US national park.  Far from being untouched for the past 300 years, this ‘natural’ landscape was created when hundreds of small family farms and homesteads were bought up by the state and federal governments during the Depression, and the land was left to revert to its natural state.’

As the blurb says, it’s quite difficult to believe that the wilderness landscape we see today is not original but equally it’s not hard to see that the Shenandoah Valley beyond is richly fertile.  As such, was one of the most fought over battlegrounds of the Civil War, changing hands over 70 (yes, 70!) times at the cost of around 100,000 killed and mained.  Staggering figures for such a relatively small area.

It might sound rather trite but standing on the edge of the Skyline Drive, looking out across miles and miles of Virginia and, perhaps, into West Virginia, we had a tiny inkling of just how large this country is.  We feel that we’ve seen quite a lot of it but we haven’t, not by a very long way. We’ve travelled slowly along the coast, spending time in some places, moving on through quickly in others and picking up small snippets of its history as we go.  We’ve got a much greater feel for the place than when we first arrived but the place is so huge, so diverse (goodness knows, the current political scene proves that only too clearly) that we’d need years here and far more travelling to really get to grips with the country.  Perhaps we need to something mad, like walk the Appalachian Trail!

Shenandoah National Park, Virginia, USA