The Blue Ridge, Ancient Rock and the Long Road South

The Blue Ridge gets its name from the haze that rises off the trees on hot summer days, a fine mist of volatile organic compounds released by oak and hickory and tulip poplar, scattering blue wavelengths of light so that from a distance the mountains seem to smolder with a slow blue fire. The effect has not changed since the first human beings walked these ridges twelve thousand or more years ago. It is one of the few things in Virginia that looks almost exactly as it always has.

The mountains themselves are ancient even by geological standards, worn remnants of a range that once rivaled the modern Himalayas. The rock underlying the Blue Ridge dates back more than a billion years. What you see today is what survived after hundreds of millions of years of erosion. The valleys between the ridges, the Great Valley that carries Interstate Eighty-One from Pennsylvania down through the Shenandoah and into Tennessee, were carved by rivers moving over softer limestone.

For European settlers, the Blue Ridge was simultaneously a barrier and a highway. The first colonists were stopped at its foot for decades, forbidden by the Crown to cross it, then rushing west when the prohibition dissolved after seventeen sixteen. Daniel Boone was born in Pennsylvania, spent his young adult years along the Yadkin River in North Carolina, and eventually followed the Appalachian system west through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.

The Blue Ridge Parkway, the scenic road that follows the crest of the mountains for four hundred sixty-nine miles from Shenandoah National Park to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, was begun in nineteen thirty-five with Public Works Administration funds, built by contractors and Civilian Conservation Corps crews, and not finished until nineteen eighty-seven. It remains one of the most visited units in the entire National Park System, the haze still blue above the trees on every August afternoon.