Skyline Drive is the ridgetop road that runs along crest of Blue Ridge Mountains in Shenandoah National Park. South of the park boundaries the road continues for about 500 miles as the Blue Rudge Parkway linking the two great highland parks of the Southeast, Shenandoah with Great Smoky Mountains National Parks.

My first visit to Shenandoah was with family in 1982 en-route to a world's fair in Knoxville, Tennessee of all places . The idea of driving over tops of mountains rather than in the valley seemed fantastic and magnificent. My Dad wasn’t someone who got out very much and faced the thought of mountain driving with trepidation. "It’s gonna be hard on car!" he said and told people for years afterwards about the experience as if it were an act of great bravery. It’s funny to think back at after all these years and roads I’ve traveled since the gradients on the Skyline Drive and Blue Ridge Parkway are so mild and curves so wide. For a mountain road it’s actually quite an easy drive. I’m now amazed that we could just drive up to the lodge at Skyland in the park without a reservation and get a place to stay for the night. It seemed like a big adventure to be so deep in the woods (essentially in a motel room). My father snored loudly in the fresh air that night (a trait I’ve apparently inherited), which started a joke that became a family legend that his snoring attracted a bear. None of us ever claimed to have seen a bear, but my mother attributed sounds she heard outside to a bear because they sounded like noises bears make on Animal Kingdom shows she saw .

I always associated Shenandoah National Park with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, but plans for eastern parks along the lines of great western ones were envisioned earlier for what became Shenandoah and Great Smokies. The planning began under presidents Coolidge and Hoover in 1920s but most land acquisition and work on the park took place during Roosevelt’s term in office in the depression years. We sometimes tend to forget that it was not only Theodore Roosevelt but other Republican presidents like Hoover, Eisenhower, and Nixon also had strong conservation ethics. Republicans may have always been pro-business but only since the Reagan era have Republicans become so hostile to the environment.

Far from being a natural landscape Shenandoah was once a farmed and largely denuded landscape, and much of its current appearance was shaped by man, of course not the topography but much of the vegetation. Visitor Center exhibits on the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps in park show that some 10,000 young men worked in Shenandoah during the 1930s . The CCC seems like such a nice idea, a romantic vision of thousands of young men between ages of 18 and 25 working hard, living in military style camps in out of way places, and doing good works for nation for low compensation (much of which was sent home to their families rather than given to them directly). Actually, it’s not just romantic but sounds a bit homoerotic.

I believe Shenandoah is what my late friend Heinz would call a “feminine landscape”. Heinz was professor emeritus of pathology at Stanford University Medical School when I met him on an overland trip from Saint Petersburg to Beijing in 2007. Heinz would sit back sometimes in the high-latitude late twilights as we were camping, gaze at the hills, and say “this is such a feminine landscape”. Huh? What’s a feminine landscape? What’s a masculine landscape? “Heinz, you speak German. Are there neuter landscapes like there are neuter words?” A feminine landscape is apparently a gentle one of rounded hills and soft colors towards the green end of the color spectrum . I never heard Heinz call anything a masculine landscape, although I’d guess it might include very arid ones with more reddish tones or sharp-edges like Himalayan peaks or our western Canyon Country. On my interpretation of the Furthmeyer rating system I’d give Shenandoah about an 8 on a 1 to 10 scale with 10 being the most feminine landscape.

I attempted a few short hikes from some of the overlooks but conditions were very squishy and muddy after a quite rainy week. That’s another thing I now recall about eastern hiking compared to what I’ve gotten accustomed to in the West; if the weather isn’t too hot and humid or rainy for pleasant hiking, the trails will still often be muddy for long stretches. And you’re also usually in the trees and rarely get much a view. Sometimes you just can’t win in the eastern outdoors!

I apparently hit the park near the peak of autumn leaf color, so by afternoon it was very busy on the parkway and at overlooks and visitors centers. If it’ this crowded on a Friday I shudder to think what kind of clusterfuck it must be on Saturday and Sunday! If possible it’s best to plan to spend weekends in the city and weekdays in the country. The beautiful sunny day, first in about seven, lifted my spirits and made travel enjoyable again. After so many gray rainy days had been starting to wonder why I was on the road.