Crimora Lake

Turk Gap's lot is coming up on your right, at mile ninety-four point one, and the walk up Turk Mountain starts there, two and two tenths miles round trip with a six hundred and ninety foot climb. The park rates it easiest, so go by the climb. On a clear day, Turk Mountain Overlook, just past the gap on your left, shows you cliffs and talus slopes slicing across the top. Crimora Lake Overlook is farther on, at mile ninety-two point six, on your left. Crimora Lake has a quiet name for what it did for a living. Down in that view was what people once called the most productive manganese mine in the world. Manganese makes stronger steel, a discovery of the eighteen fifties. Mining began around Crimora in eighteen sixty-seven, and for ten years Andrew Carnegie's company leased the mine. It boomed again in the Second World War, and in nineteen forty-four it was the largest single manganese producer in the United States. Cheap imports came back, and it shut for good in nineteen fifty-seven. None of the mine's buildings still stand. The lake was its wash water, kept to clean the ore. The body of pale greenish water near it, with a few trees and a little grass, is a flooded open pit. Many old trenches, cuts and shafts around here have filled up and look like innocuous ponds. Fire leaves its own scars. Every year lightning or people burn patches of this ridge, and virtually all of Shenandoah has burned at one time or another. The pine forest that straddles the Drive around Sawmill Run Overlook, mile ninety-five point three, grew up on ground that burned in nineteen forty-seven, and the oaks and maples are still trying to push the pines out. Lightning hit Dovel Mountain in May of nineteen seventy. Three months later a naturalist climbed up behind the fire crews and found chestnut oaks and pitch pines already sprouting from the burn. In a few years, he wrote, the average person would never guess that a fire had burned here.