The Skyline Drive 2019.

Earlier this month I took a drive with a friend through the Skyline Drive in Western Virginia, enjoying the spectacular views looking either east towards Virginia horse and vineyard country or west over the Shenandoah Valley towards the Blue Ridge Mountains and the further Appalachians, from the roadways many turnouts on either side of the road.  There are also hiking trails peppered throughout the high-elevation national park, including a portion of the Appalachian Trail.

Wildlife abounds there too, as in prior years we had seen several deer.  This year we were treated to the sight of a black bear sauntering casually across the road.

On the west side on a clear day you can look out over the beautiful Shenandoah Valley, the scene of much desperate fighting during the Civil War, the place where Confederate General Stonewall Jackson created his status as an icon of the Old South by outfoxing and routing larger Union Forces several times in his famous Valley Campaign in 1862, which is still studied at military academies as an example of speed and elusiveness combining with uncertainty about the enemy's intent to create an air of self-fulfilling defeatism in the minds and actions of opposing generals.  Sundowns are spectacular from those heights.

On the east side you look out over Virginia horse and vineyard country, and the site of still further desperate Civil War clashes in the area known during the War of Northern Aggression as Mosby's Country, a land of guerrilla warfare where Rebel irregulars bushwhacked Union supply wagons and killed Yankee sentries and messengers and the occupying troops strung up the armed  partisans on the spot if they caught them before they faded back into their farms and hardscrabble civilian life.  There are Rebel statues outside most county courthouses there even now.