Hogback Overlook

This is the long one. Hogback Overlook runs along your left for two tenths of a mile, so skip the first spaces and aim for the middle. It beats Stony Man for longest on the Drive by all of seventy-five feet. From the middle you can see to the heart of the Appalachians. The South Fork of the Shenandoah winds far below. It's said that on a clear day you can count eleven bends of it, and the nearest is more than half a mile lower than this wall. Past that come Massanutten's two ridges, then more ridges fading into the blue of West Virginia. If you've got binoculars, give it time late in the day, when the slanting light makes each thing stand out. Several short, easy hikes start along this overlook. In the hollow closest to you, Overall Run has the highest waterfall in the park, ninety-three feet, though it takes a real hike to see it. This mountain may be the oldest comeback on the road. When geologists trace the line where the lava sits on the older rock, they find a buried country of rolling hills, shallow valleys and a few peaks several thousand feet high. Some of today's peaks, Hogback among them, may be those same old high points, rising over the land a second time. The bears took a lot less time. By the early nineteen hundreds they were nearly gone from this land. The ones that hung on were likely over in the Alleghenies. Two were reported in the new park in nineteen thirty-seven, and about ten by nineteen forty-four. Today the park says several hundred, and it won't give one number, because it moves with the food. Along the way there got to be enough of them chewing up trail signs that the park took to wrapping the signs in barbed wire. A mother bear's year has a trick in it. She mates in early summer, and then the embryos wait. Nothing starts to grow until she dens in the fall. She carries the cubs for only six weeks, and around February they're born in the dark, hairless, with their eyes closed, weighing about eight ounces. Grown bears here rarely die of natural causes. Hunting and cars are the two biggest killers. The second one's up to you, so hold it to thirty-five, especially at dawn and dusk. Range View Overlook, at mile seventeen, is the next big stop, on your right.