Brown Mountain Overlook, at mile 76.9, is a long pull-off with a wide view across Big Run to Rockytop ridge. Brown Mountain itself is hidden behind Rocky Mountain. Two Mile Run and Rockytop overlooks are close by, and all three look at white Erwin quartzite cliffs. The Loft Mountain campground is up its own paved road, across the Drive from the wayside.
Brown Mountain Overlook, on your left, a long one with a large island and a wide view across Big Run to the Rockytop ridge. Almost everywhere on this road, the forest hides how hard these mountains were squeezed. This stretch lets you see it. White ledges of quartzite outline folds in the rock around Brown Mountain and Rocky Mount, folds several hundred to several thousand feet high. Some show even through heavy summer leaves, from here and from Big Run Overlook at mile eighty-one point two, and they're easier to see in winter, with the leaves down. Two Mile Run Overlook, at mile seventy-six point two, is less than a mile on, also on your left. Look out to the far end of Two Mile Ridge for two tiers of white cliff that rise, level out, and curve back down. That's an old beach, bent into an arch, and the same rock runs through most of this end of the Drive. The pale scars you may see on far slopes look like fresh rockslides. That's talus, from the hard weather of the Pleistocene, and it's now breaking down faster than it forms. You're looking at ice-age rubble, still lying where it fell. The ice itself never got here. No evidence of glaciation has been found in the Blue Ridge, and the glaciers stopped about two hundred miles away. All this mountain ever got was the cold. That white rock has one weakness. Acid rain falls on all of Shenandoah, and the old lava through the middle of the park buffers it well. This white sandstone has the lowest ability of all to neutralize it, so streams on this rock have taken more harm than the others, and the park has been testing that water since nineteen seventy-nine. That matters, because these mountain streams are one of the last completely protected strongholds of the native brook trout. Of about ninety small streams in the park, most have them, and you can't see a single one from your car. Forty-one kinds of fish have been recorded in these waters. They're down in the hollows on both sides of you, in water that goes too warm for them soon after it leaves the park.
Photo: NPS · Public domain (U.S. government work; Public Domain Mark on the NPS Shenandoah Flickr record)