Fancy Gap, Virginia

Fancy Gap takes its name from a natural cut through the Blue Ridge, high enough at roughly two thousand nine hundred feet that it marks a distinct break in climate and landscape, but low enough that travelers have been crossing it for centuries. Drovers and settlers moved through here on early roads linking Virginia's valleys to the Carolina Piedmont. The name, by local tradition, was coined by a young drover so struck by the beauty of the pass that he called it a fancy gap.

Interstate Seventy-Seven, completed through here in the nineteen seventies, carries one of the longer, steeper grades on the eastern interstates. If you feel the engine working harder right now, that is two centuries of mountain crossings beneath you.