By the early 1920s, every major national park in America sat west of the Mississippi. Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, wanted to change that. In 1926, Congress authorized the acquisition of land for Shenandoah National Park, but with a catch: no federal money could be used to buy it. Virginia would have to raise the funds itself. Governor Harry F. Byrd pushed the state legislature to appropriate $1 million, and businessman William E. Carson was tasked with assembling the land. What Carson's surveyors found was daunting: more than 5,000 separate parcels, many belonging to families who had lived in the Blue Ridge for generations. Some landowners eagerly sold. Others, especially the elderly, refused at any price. The chestnut blight had already killed half the forest canopy, apple orchards had withered in a severe 1930 drought, and Prohibition had shut down the moonshine trade. Many mountain families were living at the edge of subsistence. Even so, the land was theirs, and losing it cut deep.

The park's creation became one of the most painful chapters in National Park Service history. When persuasion failed, Virginia used eminent domain. Families who refused to sell had their land condemned. A discredited 1930s report by social worker Miriam Sizer portrayed mountain residents as poor and backward, and its conclusions were used to justify forcible evictions. CCC crews were sometimes ordered to burn vacated cabins to prevent families from returning. About 40 elderly residents -- placed on a list by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes -- were eventually allowed to live out their lives on park land. The last of them, Annie Lee Bradley Shenk, died in 1979 at age 92, having been watched over by NPS employees for nearly three decades. President Franklin Roosevelt formally opened the park on July 3, 1936. Small cemeteries still dot the ridgelines, stone-walled reminders of the communities that once called these mountains home.

Beneath the forest canopy, Shenandoah's geology tells a story that dwarfs human timescales. Some exposed rock in the park dates to over a billion years ago, among the oldest in Virginia. The granitic basement was laid down during the Grenville orogeny, roughly 1.2 to 1.0 billion years before the present. Layered above are metamorphosed volcanic and sedimentary rocks from the Neoproterozoic era, 570 to 550 million years old. At Compton Peak, hikers can examine columns of metamorphosed basalt from the Catoctin Formation. The entire Blue Ridge was folded, faulted, and reshaped during the Alleghanian orogeny between 325 and 260 million years ago, and the dramatic topography visible today is the product of differential erosion during the Cenozoic. The Shenandoah Valley on the west side and the Piedmont to the east were carved from softer rock, leaving the harder Blue Ridge standing high.

The park supports over 200 species of birds, populations of black bear, bobcat, coyote, and white-tailed deer, and 32 documented species of fish, including native brook trout that draw fly fishermen to cold mountain streams. Peregrine falcons, reintroduced in the mid-1990s, now nest on rocky outcrops. The forest itself has been through upheaval. The American chestnut, once the dominant canopy tree, was wiped out by blight in the 1930s -- the same blight that hastened the park's creation by diminishing the land's economic value. Oaks replaced the chestnuts, but gypsy moth infestations beginning in the 1990s have destroyed nearly ten percent of the oak groves. Pines hold the sun-baked southwestern slopes, while hemlocks and mosses cling to the cooler northeastern faces. Almost 40 percent of the park's acreage is designated wilderness, protected under the National Wilderness Preservation System.

Skyline Drive is the park's spine and its main attraction: 105 miles of winding road along the mountain crest with 75 overlooks. The Appalachian Trail parallels much of it, and more than 500 miles of trails branch into the backcountry. Lodges at Skyland and Big Meadows, campgrounds at four locations, and Rapidan Camp -- Herbert Hoover's restored presidential fishing retreat -- give visitors a range of ways to stay. Dark Hollow Falls, a cascade accessible from a short but steep trail near the Byrd Visitor Center, is one of the most popular hikes. The park was among the first in the national system to desegregate its facilities, completing the process by early 1950 after a long struggle. Today, Shenandoah is one of the most dog-friendly national parks in the country, with canine companions welcome on all but ten of its trails. From wildflower season in spring through the blaze of autumn color, the Blue Ridge offers a version of wilderness that feels both ancient and remarkably close to home.