Shenandoah National Park July 22, 2026

I arrived at Shenandoah National park yesterday after visiting a college friend in the Washington DC area Monday evening.

I left Acadia National Park and drove to the Albany NY area. I got up on Monday and drove to Alexandria, Va and spent the night there. Yesterday I drove to Shenandoah NP and got settled in. I ended up having dinner at the Lodge at Big Meadows and ate a really good meal!

The Shenandoah National Park began as an idea! Really it was born out of a reaction to the incredible success of the very popular national Parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone. The bulk of the population in the US was still located towards the eastern portion of the country. The politicians of the day were very much interested in having a national park that was closer to the bulk of the populace.

Starting in the late 1920’s our elected officials started planning and looking for an area that could be developed into a National Park that was within a days drive out our nations capital. Eventually the area where the park is located currently was selected and the process of buying the land was started. The government bought over 1000 parcels of land to create the park.

Even though they were looking for land that was “virgin” and not developed, that isn’t what they ended up getting. There were many families that were moved off of land that had been in their family for multiple generations.

In 1932 President elect Theadore Roosevelt started pressuring congress to pass legislation that created the Civilian Conservation Corps. The passage of these laws created a way for the government to put males between the age of 18 to 25 years of age to work.

The first major project that the CCC boys worked on was to create the Shenandoah National Park.

The big idea behind the park was to create an area that had unbelievable views that could be seen from a car. The Automobile was just then really coming into its own and they really wanted an area that could be seen and experienced from an automobile.

So the CCC boys started to create the Skyland Drive that runs north and south through the park for over 100 miles! Building the road isn’t all that they did. If you look at photos of the area before they started to create what we see now, you wouldn’t believe it was the same place! The area was more developed as farms and pasture than woods. The CCC created the entire landscape. They planted or moved into place over 10,000 trees! They created the whole park from 1933 through 1942.

There is so many more details that went into the creation of this park. I can’t do it justice on my little old blog!

Today I did go on several different trails and saw several different waterfalls.

I started the day by waking up and seeing these ladies out of Ethyls windshield!

From there I hiked on many different trails. Rose River Falls Trail, Dark Hollow Falls Trail, Lewis Springs Falls Trail, The Blackrock Overlook Trail. I was even able to hike on Appalachian trail for about a half a mile or so! Here are some of my pictures from today: