George Washington and Jefferson National Forests: The AT's Virginia Spine

The Appalachian Trail runs through Virginia for approximately five hundred and fifty miles, more than in any other state. The vast majority of that distance passes through the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, a combined unit of one point eight million acres that wraps around the Shenandoah Valley on both sides, trailing the ridgelines of the Blue Ridge on the east and the Allegheny Highlands on the west.

The forest's two names reflect a straightforward federal merger: the Jefferson National Forest in southwest Virginia and the George Washington National Forest in the central and northern Shenandoah region were administratively combined in nineteen ninety-five. What the merger obscured, at least in name, was a landscape with a more complicated history than its presidential labels suggest. The Shenandoah Valley between the two ridgelines was one of the principal routes of migration into the American interior in the eighteenth century, traveled by German and Scots-Irish settlers moving south from Pennsylvania, by Cherokee traders moving north, and by the early explorers the colonial governors sent to map what lay beyond the Blue Ridge.

The forest holds some of the highest terrain in Virginia. Mount Rogers, at five thousand seven hundred twenty-nine feet, is the highest peak in the state. It sits in the Jefferson section near the North Carolina border and is reached by a trail through a high meadow environment that the Virginia Highlands Horse Trail crosses as well. The summit ridge carries a spruce-fir forest that is an Appalachian island ecosystem, isolated by altitude from any other high-elevation forest by hundreds of miles.

The Appalachian Trail's five hundred fifty Virginia miles are commonly regarded as among the trail's most demanding, not from any single elevation gain but from the relentlessness of the ridge-and-gap terrain that puts a thousand feet of climbing and descending into nearly every day.