![]() ![]() From hiking to camping to rock climbing, however, whatever your adventure, you’ll be able to find it in Shenandoah National Park. ![]() The park is best known for its beautiful fall foliage season, which brings thousands of leaf peepers to drive the 105-mile Skyline Drive. These days, millions of tourists and outdoor adventurers, alike flock to Shenandoah for a chance to experience the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains firsthand. The park was not formally desegregated until a National Park Service mandate finally took hold in the early 1950s, though the effects of segregation in Shenandoah were far-reaching and were not formally recognized until fairly recently. ![]() However, many of the park facilities were created for a Jim Crow-era Virginia, with substantially inferior segregated facilities and park areas. Old Rag Mountain in Shenandoah National Park The Corps also created plenty of trails and new facilities, which led to a drastic increase in tourism revenues. Over the years, the US Government sought to increase the size of the park by acquiring parcels of land from tenant farmers, homesteaders, landowners, and squatters, allowing many families to continue living on their land, particularly along Skyline Drive, however, many other subsistence workers were eventually forced out of their homes in favor of tourism in the area.ĭuring the Great Depression, thousands of CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) workers finished construction on Skyline Drive and on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Since the park was formally designated, Shenandoah has had a tumultuous history. After Acadia became the first National Park in the Eastern United States in 1919, the National Park Service felt the need to create new parks int the southeastern states, thus, President Calvin Coolidge signed legislation that created Shenandoah National Park and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1925. Despite support from then-President Theodore Roosevelt, the bill failed in Congress. More recently, the area that became Shenandoah National Park came onto the radar of the US Government after a bill was first introduced to Congress in 1901. While a variety of different groups lived in the Shenandoah Valley prior to the arrival of the Europeans in the 1700s, the Iroquois and Shawnee Nations, as well as the Catawba, Cherokee, and Susquehannock Nations and their ancestors were the dominant cultures in the region for at least 8,000-9,000 years until their forced removal from the area. The peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah National Park were built during the Alleghanian orogeny, which folded, faulted, distorted, and metamorphosed the ancient rock into the mountains we see today between 325 and 260 million years ago.Īlthough European settlers did not come to the Shenandoah Valley until the start of the 18th century, countless generations of native peoples have considered the area to be their ancestral homelands. However, much of this ancient bedrock is covered by a relatively younger layer of Quaternary deposits that are 2.5 million years old or younger. The rocks within the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah National Park are some of the oldest in the state of Virginia and in the Eastern United States, with much of the bedrock dating back 1.2-1 billion years. Geologically, Shenandoah National Park contains a large amount of the Blue Ridge Mountain chain, which themselves are part of a high rise of land when compared to the surrounding area and the Shenandoah Valley, with some a topographical relief of upwards of 3,000 (914m) feet in some parts of the National Park. km) of land, though almost 40% of this area is designated as wilderness, which is protected as a part of the National Wilderness Preservation System. Shenandoah National Park contains 199,173 acres (806.02 sq. The highest and most prominent mountain in Shenandoah National Park is Hawksbill (4,050 feet/1,232m) of the Appalachian Range, which marks the borders between Madison and Page Counties of Virginia. Although Shenandoah National Park gets its name from a river, the park is highly mountainous, with 93 named peaks within its borders. ![]()
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