The George Washington National Forest, established in 1918, covers the northern Allegheny and Blue Ridge ranges in Virginia and West Virginia. The Jefferson National Forest, established in 1936, covers the southern Virginia mountains and extends into Kentucky. In 1995, the Forest Service merged the two units administratively into the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, with a single supervisor's office in Roanoke. The forests together cover approximately 1.8 million acres - a vast contiguous tract of Appalachian highland that crosses three states. Most of what was once virgin hardwood and hemlock was logged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; what stands today is mostly recovered second-growth, mature now but still younger than the trees that once shaded the same ridges.

The forest contains 139,461 acres of designated wilderness across multiple individual areas, including Ramsey's Draft, the Mount Rogers area, and dozens of smaller tracts. In 2012, the New River Group of the Sierra Club commissioned a study of roadless areas in the forest and grouped them into eleven clusters - Glenwood, Craig Creek, Barbours Creek-Shawvers Run, Sinking Creek Valley, Mountain Lake Wilderness, Angels Rest, Walker Mountain, Kimberling Creek, Garden Mountain, Mount Rogers, and the Clinch Ranger District. Some have since received formal wilderness designation. Others remain unprotected, dependent on Forest Service management plans that can change with each administration. The forest is one of the largest contiguous tracts of public land east of the Mississippi, and many of the central Appalachians' remaining old-growth stands survive within it.

In 2018 and 2019, the Mountain Valley Pipeline became one of the most contested infrastructure projects in the Eastern United States. The 303-mile natural-gas pipeline would cross the Jefferson National Forest and the Appalachian Trail near Peters Mountain. Protesters set up tree-sits to delay construction. A Virginia Tech professor, Pamela Krish, locked herself to pipeline construction equipment. The U.S. Forest Service issued arrest warrants. The pipeline was completed in 2024 after multiple court battles and federal legislation that effectively overrode some environmental review requirements. The episode showed how a national forest, in theory set aside for conservation and public use, can be repurposed for industrial easements when the legal and political tides shift.

Camp Roosevelt, where CCC NF-1 was established in 1933, is now the Camp Roosevelt Recreation Area near Luray. Picnic tables and interpretive signs occupy the spot where young men once lived in barracks and learned forestry. The CCC reforested millions of acres of degraded land, built infrastructure that the Forest Service still uses, and gave a generation of young men - many of them from cities, many from immigrant families - their first contact with the Appalachian forests. The work they did is visible all over the George Washington and Jefferson today: the stone retaining walls, the picnic shelters with peeled-log roofs, the trail networks. In 2023, a small plane carrying four people strayed into restricted Washington airspace, was intercepted by F-16s, and crashed in the national forest after the pilot lost consciousness. There were no survivors. The accident is a reminder that even a forest this large remains, somehow, tied to the broader geography of American life.