An industrial-strength giant, the park encompasses two hundred thousand acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and generates millions in tourist dollars every year. A great many visitors never leave their cars except to use a restroom, admire a view, or purchase a souvenir, and the main roads can be as choked as the New Jersey Turnpike. With more time and better gear, I’d have escaped for a night into the eighty thousand acres designated as wilderness, but I only had my sleeping bag and a cheap tent I’d grabbed on the fly in Culpeper, too flimsy for any challenging camping. Lewis Mountain, set aside for African Americans when Shenandoah was still segregated—a system of apartheid that lasted, rather incredibly, until 1950—is the most rustic of the four developed campgrounds. I reserved a site there and joined the motorcade on Skyline Drive, a road that runs for 105 miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge between the Shenandoah River Valley and the green hills of the Piedmont. The motorcade moved at a funereal pace.
