Range View Overlook, at mile 17.1, looks lengthwise down the Blue Ridge toward Stony Man and is often counted the best view in the North District. Elevation is 2,810 feet. It sits on the east side of the Drive, with Pass Mountain and Hogback in the frame and the two ridges of Massanutten beyond when the air allows. The road log once called it Harris Hollow Overlook. The view is kept open by periodic clearing. Gravel Springs Gap, half a mile south, has an Appalachian Trail crossing and paved parking on the east side. On a hazy summer day the far ridges fade, and on a clear winter day they can stack up one behind another. Binoculars help with the towers on Hogback.
Slow down and look right. Range View Overlook is just ahead, and unless it's a very hazy day, stop. The old guide to this road calls it the superstar of the North District. From the wall the whole Blue Ridge runs away from you, lengthwise, to Stony Man, fourteen miles off. The high point with the radio towers is Hogback, and past it, if the air allows, are two ridges of Massanutten and sometimes the Alleghenies. Somebody keeps that window open. Look for the hard edge of cut trees on either side. Without clearing, the forest would close it. Archaeologists suspect the Blue Ridge was a frontier long before anyone wrote that down, between the farming peoples of the Piedmont and the Valley, with trading and raiding parties working along it. Then it was a line on a treaty. The Treaty of Albany, in seventeen twenty-two, fixed the Blue Ridge as the boundary between the Five Nations and the Tributary Indians of Virginia. So the road you're on follows a border. You may have read that the treaty kept settlers out of the Valley. The Meherrin Nation calls that an error. Its prohibitions and penalties applied only to Virginia's Native people and the Five Nations. The line held Native people in, and it never held settlers out. The Monacan Nation's own chronology remembers Governor Spotswood negotiating to save Virginia's Native people from extinction at Iroquoian hands. Another account adds that the Monacan and other Eastern Siouan-speaking tribes were left out of the talks. Both can stand. Old histories like to call the Valley empty, a hunting ground the Iroquois kept clear. The archaeologist Carole Nash says that way of telling it completely renders invisible the native people who were here. The Iroquois claimed it, and people lived there all the same. Their road, the Great Warriors Path, was less a lone trail than the main artery of a dense communication system. In seventeen forty-four the Iroquois sold their rights to the Valley. One historian's notes say the famous Fry and Jefferson map of the seventeen fifties labels a route through it the Indian Road by the Treaty of Lancaster. Before long the same map has The Great Road from the Yadkin River on it, and wagons on the way.
Photo: NPS / N. Lewis · Public domain (U.S. government work; Public Domain Mark on the NPS Shenandoah Flickr record)