Bacon Hollow Overlook

Bacon Hollow Overlook, just ahead, is the one with the rocky, shady island, and Flattop out across the hollow, the mountain with clearings on top. This is also one of only two overlooks where you can stand beside the park's oldest rock. Think about who was missing when this park began, because the wild here got put back partly by hand. In March of nineteen thirty-four, deer were reportedly absent from this land. The comeback began with a small shipment from the Mount Vernon estate, turned loose along Big Run. By nineteen seventy-five it was no trick to see fifteen or twenty deer on a night drive along this road. Those Mount Vernon deer had come from Michigan, and might not even match the native Virginia deer. Without wolves, cougars or hunting in the park, you'd think deer would overrun it. The answer people give is this park's shape. At this overlook, the boundary is not much more than a hundred yards downhill. It's so narrow that extra deer drift downslope, and many are taken by hunters on the other side. Beavers had a shorter run. A pair was released in nineteen thirty-eight, and another pair on Jeremys Run a year later. All but one died or were killed. The fourth was last seen on the Hughes River, hauled there after a short career felling apple trees around Sperryville. Then there's the cat. A park estimate from nineteen forty-two lists three cougars, three hundred and seventy bobcats, forty deer and sixty-four turkeys. People kept reporting cougars, and one naturalist wrote that those reports kept alive the hope or fear, depending on your interest, that they were back. He also said what a scientist needs, a dead animal or a photograph, and nobody had one. Ravens stayed. Look high over the ridges for something much bigger than a crow, with a heavy bill, a wedge-shaped tail and a hoarse croak. They patrol Skyline Drive for road kills. For all those big names, the most abundant animal with a backbone here is probably none of them. One herpetologist gave that title to the red-backed salamander, in this park and possibly the whole eastern United States. He estimated one for every two point nine square yards, wherever the ground stays moist. On wet nights they climb the shrubs and trees. By his count, the biggest crowd on this mountain is under the leaves at the edge of this road.