Shenandoah River State Park

Author's Comments

The Shenandoah here is not the river of postcards and canoe outfitters. It is wider and slower than you expect, braided around gravel bars that shift every spring, and the water carries a green clarity that I have not found anywhere else in the region. Six miles of frontage and almost no one on it most mornings. I first came in early October, before the ridge color had peaked, when the sycamores along the bank had gone pale yellow and the meadows were still holding some green. The river bends in a long curve here and Massanutten rises on the far side, blue and enormous, a wall of mountain that gives the whole scene a scale that is hard to communicate in a photograph but that you feel immediately when you are standing on the gravel. The Cullers Overlook trail changes the relationship entirely. From above, the river bend becomes compositional in a way it cannot be from the bank, and in fall the reflection of the ridge in the slower water below the shoals is the kind of thing that makes you stand very still for a long time before you reach for a camera. Come in the morning, before the wind picks up. Still air is the difference between a river that mirrors the mountains and one that only suggests them.

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