Hiking Through Appalachia

Smartwool socks, check. Nike trail running shoes, check. USGS/National Geographic map, check. Camelback day pack, check. Pick a trailhead, drive down Skyline Drive, park the car, check the map; time to hit the trail and see Shenandoah from the trail. Time now to enjoy the view and spending time one with nature on a well-marked trail.

This is how I tackled the mountains ringing the Shenandoah Valley. Think though how our ancestors saw this range of mountains from the early settlement of the continent, the Revolutionary period, in the Civil War and throughthe Depression.

When the first white settlers landed in the early 17^th Century the land was an unconquered wilderness stretching from sea to shining sea. The priority for these brave folk was merely to survive the coming winter and make a home for themselves in this foreign land. They were woefully unprepared for the land they set out to tame and had to improvise and rely on the assistance of the natives. The mountains on the horizon were not an immediate concern short of a hope that a route to the Orient might lie beyond.

By the Revolutionary period white settlers had established the first homesteads in the mountains of Appalachia and roamed beyond to the West…Ohio and beyond. As our forefathers fight for independence for the Colonies, the mountains are seen as the natural boundary of the nation being birthed. Let the natives live beyond them, there is enough room between them and the sea for our citizens was the government policy of the day.

This lasts not so very long as settlers pushed on seeking their own land and fortunes equipped with the bare minimum or less to build on. Crossing unmarked mountains and rivers barely charted with shoes of felt or hide, leather if they were lucky they made new settlements and pushed onward. Living in canvas shelters or rough cabins, slowly they worked the stony soil by hand to build the farms to sustain them. These were the first wave in our Manifest Destiny.

Four-score and seven years later a war is fought for the soul of the nation and future of the Union. The prime battleground lies between Washington and Richmond, both fortified beyond any other city in American history before or after. Yet the most active campaigns in the east are in the Shenandoah Valley, the “breadbasket of the Confederacy”. Stonewall Jackson’s “foot cavalry” move at up to 25 miles per day on foot ranging through the valleys and mountains of the Shenandoah as a constant threat to Washington. His efforts tie down many troops of the Union Army in defense of the city and attempting to hunt down the Confederate armies of the Shenandoah. The campaigns last until 1864 when Union General Philip Sheridan finally succeeded in defeating Confederate forces in the Valley. The troops of the Confederacy managed all that they did ill-clad in homespun wool uniforms, suspect shoes, eating hardtack and salt pork and sleeping on the ground in a wool blanket and hauling the tools of their devastating trade.

Another several generations later, a great Depression sweeps the land and the unemployed are given work in the Civilian Conservation Corps. Using hand tools and the primitive machines of the time, they make a lasting impression on the landscape in building Skyline Drive through the forest growing back where farms once stood before their families moved West or into the cities seeking a new life.

One-hundred and four miles of road riding the ridgelines of a mountain chain that has left a legacy in American history of amazing feats and stunning beauty; once a place of labor and future building, now a place for peace and rediscovery of the soul and remembrance of those who came before.