Skyline Drive Mile Zero: The Northern Gateway

Just south of Front Royal, the road tips upward and the valley falls away behind you. This is the Front Royal Entrance Station, mile zero of Skyline Drive, the northern doorway to Shenandoah National Park. Every one of the one hundred and five miles that snake south along the crest of the Blue Ridge is measured from right here.

For the roughly one and a half million people who pass through this park each year, this is where the mountain journey begins. The idea was born in the nineteen twenties, when planners dreamed of a national park in Virginia's Blue Ridge whose centerpiece would be a ridgetop road offering views in every direction. President Herbert Hoover, who kept a summer retreat called Rapidan Camp on the eastern slope of these mountains, pushed hard for the road to be built.

Groundbreaking came in nineteen thirty one, and the work fell partly to Depression era crews, including men of the Civilian Conservation Corps who carved the roadbed, built the stone guardwalls, and planted the overlooks. On the first of October, nineteen thirty six, the stretch from Front Royal to Thornton Gap opened to traffic, at a cost of just over one point two million dollars. Building the park itself was harder and more painful than building the road.

Virginia used the power of eminent domain to acquire the land, and hundreds of mountain families who had lived in these hollows for generations were displaced so the park could be created. That history sits quietly beneath the beauty. Today the drive climbs to elevations near four thousand feet, past overlooks with names like Shenandoah Valley, Signal Knob, and Hogback, where on a clear day you can see the river winding silver through the farmland below.

The speed limit is a deliberate thirty five miles per hour, an invitation to slow down. Black bears, deer, and wild turkey move through the oak and hickory forest, and the Appalachian Trail shadows the road for nearly its whole length. From this single point, you can turn south and spend an entire day crossing the roof of Virginia, or you can turn back into Front Royal, a town whose own story of frontier boatmen, Civil War spies, and mountain caverns is every bit as layered as the ridge above it.

Mile zero. Everything starts here.