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No. 2
Old Rag Mountain in Shenandoah National Park.
“Mountains are earth’s undecaying monuments.”— Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The Northern Piedmont can claim few landmarks that merit superlatives. Old Rag Mountain is an exception.
Looking down on the gentle Blue Ridge foothills from 3,291 feet, it is one of the oldest exposed granite faces in the world.
The granite that forms the core of the mountain is a quarter as old as the earth itself. It crystalized from molten magma 1,100,000,000 years ago. To put It Tn more understandable terms, if the age of Old Rag’s granite is 12 hours, then less than a tenth of a second has elapsed since the birth of Christ.
When the landscape split to free the lava flows that created the mountain, green algae was the only life that existed here outside of the oceans.
These volcanic lava spews probably lasted until 600 million years ago. Then the land sank, bringing the sea and turning the Blue Ridge into first a sandy shore and then an ocean floor. As the land sank, it built up sediment layers of limestone and dolomite two or three miles thick. Roughly 450 million years ago, the land rose again and the limestone emerged.
For the next 225 million years, the rocks metamorphosed, their physical nature changed by pressure of rocks from above. They buckled and broke and fault lines developed as the uplift of the land continued. Erosion washed away the miles of sediment that lay on top of the granite and greenstone. The softer limestone to the west of Old Rag eroded rapidly, forming what is now the Shenandoah Valley. But the granite and greenstones of Old Rag were more resistant than the sedimentary rocks and when they were exposed, the erosion slowed.
The peak that is left today is more than a geological wonder. Although not in a class with Everest, it presents mountain climbers and hikers with a rewarding day long trek to its summit.
Old Rag stands alone so hikes begin at the bottom rather than on Skyline Drive. The two most popular circuits from Weakley Hollow and Berry Hollow fire roads in Madison take climbers over or around granite boulders, and past “buzzard baths,” water filled hollows in the surface of the granite rocks. The trials provide another wonder, Blue Ridge and the Piedmont.
No. 3
Skyline Caverns at Front Royal.
“Where Alph, the sacred river, ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea. ” —Coleridge
For 30 million years, the caverns waited in secret silence. For 30 million years, the presence of the underground world with its three rivers and 37-foot waterfall was undiscovered, unsuspected by man. Then in 1937, geologist Walter S. Amos concluded a careful examination of the surface topgraphy and reported that a cavern lay beneath the earth.
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