Shenandoah

After the hard bright deserts of the southwest, Shenandoah felt like the land exhaling. We came up onto Skyline Drive in a morning fog so thick the road vanished twenty meters ahead, and Lia was ready to be disappointed — and then, as we climbed, we broke through the top of it into clear gold sunlight with the whole fog-filled valley lying below us like a lake. That is the Blue Ridge trick, and it never got old in the days we spent there. You drive slowly because you must, thirty-five miles an hour, pulling off at overlook after overlook, and the mountains recede in front of you in those famous layers of blue, each ridge a fainter wash than the one before.

Skyline Drive, Overlook by Overlook

The drive itself is the destination here, and the pleasure of it is entirely in the not-hurrying. There are seventy-odd overlooks along its length, and we stopped at what felt like most of them, because the view reorganized itself at every one — here a valley checkered with farms, there a hawk turning below eye level, once a black bear and two cubs ambling unbothered across a meadow a hundred meters off. Lia kept a running tally of the deer, who graze the roadside verges at dawn and dusk with an almost comic indifference to traffic. We ate lunch at a wooden table at Big Meadows with the wind moving through the grass and a groundhog watching us with frank suspicion, hoping for crumbs.

Into the Green, Toward the Falls

Off the ridge, the trails drop down into deep Appalachian hardwood forest, all dappled green light and running water. We hiked down to Dark Hollow Falls one afternoon, a modest but lovely cascade tumbling over mossy ledges, the air by the water noticeably cooler and full of the smell of wet leaf litter and stone. The climb back up is the honest price of the descent, and we paid it slowly, stopping on a log to catch our breath while a pileated woodpecker hammered somewhere out of sight, laughing its wild laugh. This is old, worn, gentle mountain country — nothing here is trying to kill you or awe you, it simply asks that you walk into it and pay attention, and rewards you when you do.

Blackberry Milkshakes and the Long Light

There is a small, unglamorous, entirely wonderful ritual at the historic Big Meadows Lodge and the waysides: the blackberry milkshake. We had heard about it and been skeptical and were promptly converted — thick, cold, purple, the taste of a mountain summer in a paper cup, best drunk on a porch rocking chair while the sun goes down over the ridges and the swifts come out to hunt the last of the light. We stayed on that porch far longer than we planned two evenings running, watching the blue drain out of the mountains and the first fireflies rise out of the meadow, and I remember thinking that not every great place has to be dramatic. Some of them just have to be kind.

Getting There

Shenandoah National Park runs along the Blue Ridge in northern Virginia, and Skyline Drive is its single road, entered at four points along its length. The northern Front Royal entrance is about seventy miles west of Washington, D.C. — roughly an hour and a half by car. Fly into Washington Dulles or Reagan National, rent a car, and drive; there is no public transport into the park. The full drive takes around three unhurried hours end to end without stops, and you should absolutely stop. Come in October for the famous fall color, though expect crowds and slow traffic; late spring and early summer bring wildflowers, waterfalls at full flow, and gentler weather.