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His announcement was greeted by skepticism, but careful probing of the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills proved him right.
Today, Front Royal’s Skyline Caverns remain the only caverns in the world to be discovered by scientific deduction.
They rank as one of a kind in several other categories as well. Ceilings of the network of caves bloom with anthodites, the orchid of the mineral kingdom. These delicate formations of pure white calcite are found nowhere else. In apparent defiance of the laws of gravity, they grow in all directions, even upward from their ceiling perches.
From the unearthly beauty of the flowerlike anthrodites scattered among the more common stalactites and stalagmites, Skyline’s wonders extend into the insect ,'faorld. The caverns are home to a cave behtle found no- ' 1 Where else, the rare Pseudanophthalmus Petrunkevitchi Valentine, bom without eyes.
And the wonders go on. There’s a stream that flows in opposite directions simultaneously. There are rooms with names that tell of their magic: Painted Desert, Rainbow Trail, Capitol Dome, Fairyland Lake and The Shrine.
During weekends and summers, thousands of tourists descend into the underground where the temperature is a constant 54 degrees.
But during the rest of the year, it’s possible to marvel in near solitude at what the late Dr. R. J. Holden, professor of geology, described as these weird, fantastic and pallid forms: “One stares in amazement and hesitates to believe that nature has wrought such inconceivable 'Structures.”
No. 4
Limberlost in Shenandoah National Park.
“This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks."— Henry Wordsworth Longfellow
When Columbus arrived, the forest at Limberlost was standing.
The giant hemlocks a mile or so up the Old Rag fire trail are more than 400 years old.
The grove begins with a fringe of young trees. As they increase in number and size, the undergrowth becomes progressively thinner. The shade deepens, the needles from the hemlocks drop to form a thick, acid mulch that prevents the seeds of most other plants from germinating.
Even the mountain laurel, a lover of acid and shade, disappears. But in the summer, the Limberlost is one of the best places in the park to find mushrooms, Indian pipes, mosses, pine drops and other plants that thrive in deep shade.
The ancient hemlocks stretch to more than three feet in diameter, silent guardians of forest glades where Indians once hunted. The name, Limberlost, was bestowed on the hemlock groves by George Freeman Pollock, founder of the park’s Skyland. He took it from the novel, Girl of the Limberlost, by Gene Stratton Porter.
Legend has it that this rare relic of the forest primeal wouldn’t exist today if it had not been for Pollock’s interference. It’s said that when the trees were scheduled to be cut down, Pollock paid lumberman $10 a tree, a
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