Compton Gap

Every mile of this road was laid on top of something older. Compton Gap is less than a mile on, with a lot on your left, and from there it's a short hike to Fort Windham Rocks, deeply split boulders fifty feet high, an easy half hour there and back. Start with what's under your tires. You'll hear the word lava all day, and there was never a volcano here. About five hundred and seventy million years ago, two plates began to pull apart, and lava came up through rifts thousands of miles long. Most evidence puts those cracks well off toward the Piedmont. The lava flowed in from there, filled valleys, lapped up against old hills, and ended up covering more than four thousand square miles. It started as black basalt, like Hawaii's. Much later, the heat and pressure of building the Appalachians grew new minerals in it, and those gave it a greenish color, so the rock is called greenstone. Weathered faces go gray or rust, and it takes a fresh break to show it. On your left between mile ten and mile eleven, Indian Run Overlook has the best lava columns on the Drive, where the cooling rock shrank and cracked like drying mud. On top of the rock came a footpath. At Compton Gap this road finishes climbing Dickey Ridge and joins the Blue Ridge itself, and it stays near the crest from there. The Appalachian Trail crosses at the gap, on an old path along the ridge that's said to go back to Native American use. The trail had this crest first. The Drive was built right on top of it, and most of the old trail had to be moved and rebuilt lower on the slopes. That ended a friendship. Benton MacKaye wanted the trail conference to fight this road, because he believed the trail needed wilderness, and cars and commerce would ruin it. Myron Avery, the chairman, didn't just accept the Drive. He embraced it. MacKaye put the whole quarrel in a letter to him in nineteen thirty-five. You are for a connected trail, he wrote, whether or not wilderness. I am for a wilderness trail, whether or not connected. MacKaye left, and that same year he helped found the Wilderness Society. Avery stayed and led the conference until shortly before he died. MacKaye later granted there'd be no Appalachian Trail without Myron Avery. The two never reconciled. And under the road and the trail, there were homes. The Compton family, who gave the gap its name, lived near Indian Run Spring. Down in the Browntown Valley, on the Valley side of this ridge, some of the houses went to people displaced when all this was created. Flint Hill, out on the Piedmont side, was a resettlement community. At mile twelve point four, before any of this, sixteen families named Jenkins owned eight hundred and fifty acres. The gap there still has their name on it.