Signal Knob Overlook

On your left, Signal Knob Overlook, one of your last long looks at the Valley. Below the wall, if the air's clear, is the Shenandoah Valley, with the South Fork of the river looping through it. The long ridge across the middle is Massanutten, splitting the valley for nearly fifty miles. It shows two crests because it's one giant fold in the rock, with its two limbs standing up on either side and the Fort Valley between them. Signal Knob itself is the far tip of that ridge, where Confederate troops kept a signal station in the Civil War. The ridge under your car is the worn-down root of a range that was likely as dramatic as the Himalayas. If it's all gone blue out there, you're looking at two hazes. Trees give off vapors that turn into a fine haze of their own. But most of the haze in this region is particles that trace back to burning fuel, and on a given day it's hard to say which blue you've got. Winter's usually clearest, summer haziest, and fog can erase the whole thing any day of the year. Remember Amoroleck, the wounded man on the Rappahannock in sixteen oh eight? John Smith asked him what lay beyond these mountains. The answer, as Smith wrote it down, was the sun. Past that the man couldn't say, because the woods were not burnt. One reading is that his people burned the woods they hunted, and these they didn't. On a clear evening, you can stand at this wall and watch his answer go down behind Massanutten.