Many CDL permit holders know full well the beauty that blooms along the East Coast every fall. As drivers, you probably have your favorite spots to espy vibrant colors along your trucking routes. But there’s perhaps no better place than the Blue Ridge Mountains or the Shanandoah Valley to absorb the beauty of the season.
One Los Angeles Times reporter put fall colors to the test when he drove all 105 miles of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park, Va., then all 469 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina.
In beautiful prose, reporter Christopher Reynolds captured the majesty of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the fall.
For four days I could almost hear the swelling violins as I zoomed under leafy canopies of red, orange and gold; hiked along creeks, lakes and ridge lines; listened to plenty of bluegrass and blues; and gave thanks to the National Park Service for bringing together so much beauty and so much blacktop.
The Blue Ridge Parkway is America’s most popular national park, with good reason.
The Blue Ridge Parkway, authorized in 1936, has been all about the automobile from Day One.
Both the parkway and Shenandoah National Park were Depression era projects intended to create jobs in a desperately poor region. For the parkway, the idea was to sculpt an epic country road, a black ribbon that would unfurl seamlessly amid the knobs, hollows, notches and gaps of Virginia and North Carolina.
The work took decades, but now the road’s shoulders are graced with overlooks, its straightaways unsullied by billboards or service stations. (There are also plenty of hiking trails along the route, including the 2,180-mile Appalachian Trail.)
The parkway speed limit is 45 mph, Reynolds notes.
Which means drivers move slowly enough to notice the region’s nuances and beauty.
For most of the last 50 years, including 2015, the parkway has been the most-visited unit in the park system. Last year its rangers counted 15 million visitors, who spent an estimated $950 million.
The parkway rises, falls, bends and straightens, following the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains with no commercial buildings or truck traffic, cushioned by a buffer zone of landscaping that alternates between narrow and wide, semi-wild and manicured.
The scenes I glided through were not quite natural.
They were more orderly than that. But they were unfailingly pretty.
Now I was heading into the busiest stretch of the parkway, the area around Asheville, N.C., where rangers counted 42,520 vehicles passing through in October, the month of my visit — almost three times the traffic tallied at the Peaks of Otter.
It was easy to see why. I happened to hit this stretch within a few days of peak color. In the hour before sunset, about Milepost 360, the scene turned surreal as the road carried me through tree tunnels of flowing orange and flaming red, then luminous yellow-green.
As CDL permit holders, what are your favorite roads to drive in the fall? We’d love to hear!
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