Calf Mountain Overlook, at mile 98.9, is the big view at the south end of the Drive, about 2,480 feet up. It is long, and its 300-degree view takes in the Shenandoah Valley, with Waynesboro toward one end and Interstate 64 dropping off a more distant ridge. Calf Mountain itself rises behind the overlook. Walking from one end to the other shows all of it. Fall hawk counters work at Rockfish Gap, a few miles south, and azalea and laurel bloom along this part of the Drive in late spring and June. Beagle Gap, just south at mile 99.5, has an Appalachian Trail crossing. On storm days, the exposed wall is no place to linger.
Calf Mountain Overlook, on your left, the first really big view of the trip. It's a long overlook, and on a clear day the view wraps around three hundred degrees. Calf Mountain rises behind it. From the Rockfish end you can pick out Waynesboro, and farther along, on a more distant ridge, Interstate sixty-four coming down into the Valley. This ridge is a road, and you're not the only one using it. More than a hundred and ninety kinds of birds use this park, about half of them to breed, eighteen kinds of warblers among them. For the ones that winter in the tropics, the crest is a travel corridor. In the last two weeks of September and the first two of October, hawks come through this end of the mountains by the thousand, and they cross at Rockfish Gap, where people have been counting them for about fifty years. Most are broad-winged hawks. A season brings twenty thousand or more, and the counters' record is eleven thousand in a single day. If you see a slow swirl of birds very high up, that's what you're looking at. Spring uses the ridge too, from the bottom up. The show starts in late March with hepatica and bloodroot pushing through the leaf litter, strongest down low along streams like the South River and the Hughes. Serviceberry shows white for long distances through the bare woods. Then, generally in late May to early June, dark pink azaleas open along the Drive, and in June the paler mountain laurel takes over. Shenandoah counts more than eight hundred and fifty kinds of wildflowers. The roads learned from all this. At Jarman Gap, mile ninety-six point eight, a settler named Michael Woods followed a buffalo trail into these mountains in the seventeen twenties, and it was later replaced by the Three Notched Road, for a time the main crossing of the Blue Ridge. That gap was also the original end of the park. The road from there to Rockfish Gap started life as part of the Blue Ridge Parkway. One warning, for a place this open. If you hear thunder, get off the high ground and into the car. You've got almost a hundred miles of mountain in front of you. Stopping here? If the car going off cuts me out, tap play, and stay close. Boone's got a couple of minutes on the white marble palace above Rockfish Gap, and after that you can walk this view from end to end.
Photo: olekinderhook, via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 3.0