Shenandoah National Park, Virginia

Skyline Drive is one of the country’s best auto tours

It’s ironic that the automobile, which made America’s national parks so popular by making them so accessible, has become a bête noire among many conservationists. Most of them would like to see it banned entirely from this country’s great nature preserves.

Indeed, very popular parks like Yosemite and Zion have put increasing pressure on people to get out of their cars and begin using shuttle buses, bicycles and their own feet to get around.

That’s what makes Shenandoah National Park and its famous Skyline Drive such interesting exceptions. The park, though relatively small at 306 square miles, is one that has made itself exceedingly hospitable to touring by car.

Shenandoah, established in 1935 and named after the long Virginia valley it flanks, stretches almost 70 air miles southwest to northwest along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a heavily forested spur of the Appalachians that derives its name from the blue haze created by the exudation of esters and volatile oils by the predominantly oak and hickory canopy. (The Great Smokey Mountains in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, as well as the Blue Mountains in New South Wales west of Sydney are also named from the appearances created by their forests’ heavy atmospheric secretions.)

Skyline Drive, built in the 1930s, spans 105 miles in its journey from Front Royal at Shenandoah’s north entrance to Rockfish Entrance Station at its southern end. The road, hugging the terrain just below the crest of the ridge, twists and turns the entire way, snaking in and out of the mountains’ complex folds, canyons and pockets.

At 35 miles per hour, the park speed limit, a determined driver could pass through Shenandoah in just over three hours. But the folks who engineered Skyline Drive built more than 70 scenic overlooks along the way, ample widenings of the road where cars could pull off and park safely to let their occupants get out and gaze out over the landscape. Although most visitors don’t stop at each and every overlook, a majority of them set aside eight or 10 hours for the trip.

That amount of time affords them the opportunity to linger at the park’s more notable turnouts (among them: Crimora Lake, Big Run, Stoney Man, Spitler Knoll, Hogback, Franklin Cliffs and Range View), all of which connect to Shenandoah’s 500 miles of trail. The trails’ length varies from short .5-mile loops through the woods or out from overlooks to the park’s 100-mile-long segment of the Appalachian Trail (which stretches 2,160 miles from Georgia to Maine).

The roadway’s vistas include the Shenandoah Valley to the west, which was settled in the 1600s and still bears stonework traces and the graves of the people who once lived there. Beyond the valley, which cradles the Shenandoah River, lies Massanutten Mountain, a 40-mile long monolith, and beyond it the Allegheny Mountains. On the east side of the park Virginia’s fabled piedmont country rolls off toward the state’s lowlands, its rivers eventually reaching the Atlantic.

For visitors who become habituated to Skyline Drive’s slow pace and welcoming turnouts, their idyll doesn’t have to end when they reach Shenandoah’s southern gate. For as soon as they leave Skyline Drive, they’re on the first mile of the 469-mile-long Blue Ridge Parkway, one of the most spectacular highways in the U.S.

– Patrick Totty