I hiked up to Bluff Mountain on a drizzly day in October, through black locust and bittersweet, over slippery wet roots, and past a microcosmic universe of mosses carpeting gray boulders in vivid green. Up on top, I sprawled out on a large flat rock and gazed down on the Blue Ridge Parkway winding through Doughton Park. I imagined the Parkway’s visionary planners sitting at this very spot, surveying this same scene, and determining how the road would weave across the ridge here.

The Park-to-Park Highway, as the Parkway was first called, was conceived as an extension of Shenandoah National Park’s Skyline Drive, connecting it with the new Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. When heated debate ensued in 1933 and 1934 over the Parkway’s final route, North Carolina Congressman Robert “Farmer Bob” Doughton, for whom this area is named, evoked the Creator in an impassioned plea to run the road through his state’s magnificent mountains. Anyone who viewed this scenery, declared Doughton, “will find that the Omnipotent Architect of The World has carved and chiseled the most outstanding display of nature known to all creation.”

...From the platform of the Blue Ridge Parkway, standing on the oldest mountains in the country, millions of people each year gaze at the awesome sights of cloud-ruffed crests, tumbling streams, and rain-drenched forests.

Lean closer and touch the rock. It is ancient beyond anything we can fathom in our short life span. Much of the rock of the Appalachian Mountains is so old that it’s been changed beyond recognition from its origins, so old that no life forms have been preserved, so old that entire continents and oceans have come and gone since it formed.

—From “Blue Ridge Parkway” by Rose Houk

Blue Ridge Parkway Road Guide
Rose Houk
80 pages. 9”x9”
ISBN 1-58071-061-1
$9.95

OTHER TITLES THAT MAY BE OF INTEREST

Shenandoah Road Guide by Rose Houk

Civil War Battlefields: The Landscapes of War by Scott Thybony

Birdwatcher’s Guide to Delmarva (Field Guide)