92: Home Team Sentinel

S M I T H   R O A C H   G A P,  V A 

Over the past thirty-five years, I’ve driven 15,400 times up and over one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world.  The Blue Ridge are an eastern-most front range of the Appalachians which extend from Pennsylvania to Georgia.   The range formed four hundred million years ago when Europe and North America collided pushing these mountains up as high as the Alps.  Millions of years later, they’ve been worn down by erosion to their current height which makes crossing them now only a mild hurdle along my daily commute.  To say the Blue Ridge are a familiar range is an understatement.  They’re my home team, mountain-wise.

The Blue Ridge are renowned for their isoprene-triggered bluish tint.  If viewed with the glow of a sunrise or sunset mixed in, the imagery of this ancient mountain ridge becomes iconic.  Of my 15,400 crossings, many have occurred amid brilliant imagery.

The name is not trademarked, so there are countless entities utilizing Blue Ridge in their titles such as Blue Ridge Brewing, Blue Ridge Church, Blue Ridge Septic, and Blue Ridge Country magazine which once published an article about my climb up Old Rag Mountain – a prominent peak within the Blue Ridge.

The Blue Ridge is also famous for being home to one of America’s most popular national parks – Shenandoah - whose Skyline Drive starts thirty minutes from my home and wends one hundred miles south along the crest affording amazing views both east and west.  Interesting note… looking east from atop the Blue Ridge there are no higher peaks until you reach Portugal.  

Down off that ridge are waterfalls aplenty and hundreds of miles of hiking trails, upon which, long ago I had my first bear encounter.  But I’ve come here today not for waterfalls, bears, or skyline driving.  I’m here to get high.  

The Blue Ridge are dotted with countless outcrops – sandstone slabs devoid of trees high above the landscape below.  There are many famous outcrops in Shenandoah National Park including Old Rag, Mary’s Rock, Hawkbill, and Stony Man… but I’m heading for a more obscure outcrop with a generic name – Hightop Mountain.  It’s the highest peak in the southern half of the park where things are more backcountryish.  You won’t find this one in brochures or in other marketing campaigns, but it’s views westward, and its potential for solitude, are cover-worthy.  

Of the land surrounding Hightop Mountain, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) acquired roughly 800-acres before transferring it to the National Park Service.  For TNC to become involved in land transfers like this, it must hold special importance and ecological value.  Realizing the planet’s biodiversity is in peril, TNC strives to protect higher, cooler elevations like Hightop.  These areas are refuges, especially as the planet warms.  

More specifically, Hightop serves as a superhighway for migrators.  Organizations like Birding Virginia, e-Bird, i-Naturalist, and TNC know this refuge is an ornithologic hotspot.  Each fall, birds of prey utilize the mountain ridge to glide south upon updrafts, hardly flapping their wings as they go.  For hawk-gawkers, Hightop is an excellent spot to strain necks skyward and add sightings of various raptors and migrating birds to life lists.  

Like TNC, trained naturalists also know the importance and ecological value of a high mountain ridge.  Many members of the Shenandoah Chapter of the Virginia Master Naturalist program cite Shenandoah National Park as their favorite destination for all-things nature in this part of the state.  The diversity alone is enough to entice naturalists, but they know too that this place offers so much more to a curious mind.  

Beyond the obvious beauty that the park offers, naturalist find additional beauty in a holistic understanding of this place.  Such as the immense geologic history of these mountains, or their ability to purify air, or that they are home to an incredible array of flora and fauna including endangered species.   

My own special understanding of this place encompasses all of that too.  But today I stay especially focused on one specific understanding.  One that’s under foot.  The sand and pebble trail I’ve been traipsing along, and the sand and gravel collections in crevices at the outcrop, give scale to the eons these mountains have stood as sentinels over this landscape.  Each grain of sand or pebble represents the DNA of this range.  Small fragments of what once was, yet remaining holistic in what they represent.  The Blue Ridge have changed form through millions of years of erosion, but remain a vital, elevated corridor and refuge.    

Whether in car 15,400 times over thirty-five years, or much more slowly like today one bootstep at a time, it’s been a true lifelong privilege to interact on a near daily basis with the Blue Ridge Mountains – my home team sentinel.