Stony Man Overlook

On your left, Stony Man Overlook, the second-longest on the Drive. To find Stony Man's face, stop at the far end of the lot and look back the way you came. That rock profile is him. Those stepped ledges are lava. Each eruption laid down a flow twenty to over a hundred feet thick that cooled before the next one came, twelve flows in this stretch, eighteen hundred feet in all, and the layers weathered into benches and sheer cliffs, a staircase you can see from a long way off. Out past the wall, on a clear day, the view runs straight to the town of Luray in the Page Valley. Three things live up on this mountain that by rights shouldn't. The first is a falcon. In nineteen seventy-five the park's own natural history said it was doubtful peregrines would ever again nest on the cliffs of Shenandoah. Pesticides had seen to that. So the park went and got some. On Virginia's coastal bridges, young peregrines often fledge too early, out over open water, so staff carried chicks up to these mountains, kept them about ten days in a box on a cliff ledge, and opened the door. Through two thousand eighteen that's a hundred and fifty-one falcons, and pairs have nested in the park again. That book was wrong, and I'd guess the park was glad to be. The second is a salamander. The Shenandoah salamander lives high on the rock slides of three mountains, Stony Man, Hawksbill and The Pinnacles, and nowhere else on Earth. It's so protected that it's against the law even to try to observe one, so this is as close as you and I are going to get. The third is a tree. American chestnuts once grew over a hundred feet high and nearly ten feet across, the redwoods of the East, and nearly one tree in three here was a chestnut. A fungus came into New York City on imported trees in the early nineteen hundreds and cut them down. But the roots survived. So chestnuts still sprout under these oaks, and they rarely get past shrub size before the blight kills them, twenty feet at the most. That's been going on for a century, and it's going on today, somewhere in these woods. A word for tall vehicles, while there's time. Marys Rock Tunnel is less than seven miles on, with twelve feet eight inches of clearance. If you're taller, turn around. The next way off the Drive is Swift Run Gap, about twenty-seven miles back. Boone has a tale about a woman and a hundred hemlocks, two or three minutes long.