Southwesternmost Virginia seems like the true heart of
Appalachia along with eastern Kentucky and southern West Virginia, the declining
coal country that contains some of the poorest and most rapidly depopulating
counties in the country . To be honest, though, I’ve gradually found much of the
rural South to be looking significantly less hardscrabble than two or three
decades ago. Good new roads enable people to escape or replace their old
shotgun shacks with more modern doublewides in trailer parks.

Cumberland Gap is the spot where Virginia, Kentucky, and
Tennessee meet and represents a lower notch or gap in the Cumberland Range which
was easiest place for about 300,000 early settlers to cross the Appalachians to
the American frontier between 1775 and 1810 on the so-called Wilderness Road
from the Shenandoah Valley. The range including the crossing is now part of
Cumberland Gap National Historic Park, an NPS unit oriented toward hiking with
a trail along the top of the ridge for the length of the park. The park itself,
though, is quite small in comparison with Shenandoah or Great Smokies. I just
checked out the visitor center and drove up to the Pinnacles Overlook, a
viewpoint over the gap with a view of the three states, a pleasant view but not
particularly high even by eastern standards at 2,440 feet. Lee County, the
westernmost in Virginia, is apparently outside the coal mining belt and is
actually a very beautiful landscape of wide farmed valleys. With passing
through the four far western counties in Virginia I can now add the state to my
list of states in which I have been in every county in the state (and in
Virginia’s case independent cities too).