Blue Ridge Mountains
They say the Blue Ridge Mountains were once as tall as the Alps. Forged in a violent collision of continents, this jagged eastern barrier of the Appalachians was, in its day, one of the highest mountain ranges in the world.
These days, worn down and wearied by millions of years of weather, it’s easy to make snotty comparisons to the much younger, more flamboyantly awe-inspiring Rockies or Cascades of the Western United States. But if she has lost a bit of drama as she matured, the Blue Ridge has lost none of her charm.
Today a tourist can explore the mountains along the famous Blue Ridge Parkway. The scenic highway was conceived during the Great Depression as a way to busy unemployed men and bring desperately needed dollars into the impoverished mountain communities. “The idea,” according to Stanley Abbott, the chief landscape architect of the project, “is to fit the Parkway into the mountains as if nature has put it there.”
They succeeded famously. As we drove down the spine of the ridge on a recent sunny Saturday, it felt for the world as if we were flying over the Shenandoah Valley in a small aircraft, endless misty panoramas on both sides of our car and the eponymous blue ridges of the mountains painting faded watercolor lines on both horizons.
If the innumerable viewpoints and hiking trailheads are crowded with flip-flopped and slow-moving tourists, it can be forgiven. The warmer climate and lower elevation produce a longer-lasting autumn foliage color show that we had accidentally found at its kaleidoscopic peak. A mother bear and cubs came up to the roadside in search of acorns, not an uncommon sight, and well worth the traffic jam they produced. There was so much beauty, we had neither time nor capacity to take it all in.
The Parkway winds for 469 miles through Virginia and North Carolina, connecting the Shenandoah and the Great Smoky Mountains National Parks. If you have a bucket list, it deserves a spot somewhere on it.
The Blue Ridge
STILL and calm,
In purple robes of kings,
The low-lying mountains sleep at the edge of the world.
The forests cover them like mantles;
Day and night
Rise and fall over them like the wash of waves.
Asleep, they reign.
Silent, they say all.
Hush me, O slumbering mountains —
Send me dreams.
- Harriet Monroe