George Washington and Jefferson National Forest

The George Washington and Jefferson National Forests roll across about 1.8 million acres of the Virginia Appalachians -- the long parallel ridges of the Ridge-and-Valley, the high grassy balds of the Blue Ridge, and the folded Alleghenies out west -- with pieces spilling into West Virginia and a sliver of Kentucky. Two forests named for two Virginia-born presidents, run as one unit since 1995, they carry hundreds of miles of the Appalachian Trail and top out on Mount Rogers, Virginia's highest peak. Cool twist: semi-wild ponies -- brought in long ago to keep the mountaintop meadows clear -- still roam the open high country around Mount Rogers, making this one of the only places back East where you might share a trail with a wild pony.

The place

Stretched along the spine of the Virginia Appalachians, the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests cover roughly 1.8 million acres of public land -- most of it in Virginia, with pieces reaching into West Virginia and a thin sliver of Kentucky. They are really two forests, named for two Virginia-born founding fathers, that have been managed as a single unit out of Roanoke since 1995. The country here is classic southern Appalachian: long parallel ridges and deep hollows in the Ridge-and-Valley, the rounded high balds of the Blue Ridge, and the folded Allegheny mountains out west. It adds up to some of the largest public land in the eastern U.S., threaded by hundreds of miles of the Appalachian Trail and crowned by Mount Rogers, the highest point in Virginia.

History

The George Washington side is the older of the two. It was set aside on May 16, 1918 as the Shenandoah National Forest -- one of the early eastern forests bought back into public hands under the 1911 Weeks Act -- and was renamed for George Washington in 1932 to avoid confusion with the brand-new Shenandoah National Park next door. The Jefferson National Forest followed by proclamation in 1936, stitched together from purchase units and older reserves across southwest Virginia. For most of the 20th century the two were separate; in 1995 the Forest Service combined them administratively into one unit headquartered in Roanoke, though both names live on. Long before any of that, this was Cherokee, Monacan, and other Native homeland, and later a hard-worked landscape of farms, iron furnaces, and heavily logged slopes -- much of what is deep green today is second-growth forest that grew back after the land was bought up and left to heal.

Wildlife & plants

Black bears are the headline animal here -- the Virginia mountains hold an abundant, healthy bear population, so hang your food -- alongside white-tailed deer, wild turkey, and drumming ruffed grouse in the brush. The cold, tumbling headwater streams are native brook trout water, the only trout truly native to these mountains. The forest itself is a great eastern hardwood quilt: oak and hickory across most of the slopes, with tulip poplar, maple, and -- where the hemlocks have not been lost to the woolly adelgid -- dark hemlock groves down in the hollows. Climb high enough, around Mount Rogers and Whitetop, and you break out into a cool spruce-fir world of red spruce and Fraser fir that feels more like Canada than the South, complete with the open grassy balds where the ponies graze.

Notable features

The crown of the forest is Mount Rogers, at about 5,729 feet the highest point in Virginia, wrapped in the roughly 200,000-acre Mount Rogers National Recreation Area and its famous high-country balds. Semi-wild ponies roam those open ridgetops, and hikers usually meet them along the state-park and national-forest high country around Wilburn Ridge and Grayson Highlands. The Appalachian Trail runs for hundreds of miles through the two forests, and the Virginia Creeper Trail -- a rail-trail dropping from Whitetop down through Damascus to Abingdon -- draws cyclists to the southwest corner. Wild, quiet places abound: Ramsey's Draft Wilderness protects a rare stand of old-growth forest, and other wilderness areas such as Saint Mary's and Mountain Lake preserve the roughest ground. The forest also cradles the high headwaters of the James River, feeds tributaries of the Potomac, and runs through the upper reaches of the ancient New River.

Cool to know

• Those are not lost livestock. The semi-wild ponies you meet on the balds around Mount Rogers were brought in to graze the mountaintop meadows and keep them from growing over into forest. The herds have roamed the open high country ever since, making this one of the only places in the eastern U.S. where you can share a trail with a wild pony.
• Both halves of the forest are named for Virginia-born founders and U.S. presidents -- George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The George Washington side was actually called the Shenandoah National Forest first, and only took Washington's name in 1932 so people would not confuse it with the brand-new Shenandoah National Park.
• In 2014 the revised plan for the George Washington forest closed most of it -- around a million acres -- to new federal oil and gas leasing over the Marcellus shale, protecting the bulk of the forest from future fracking leases while allowing limited work only where drilling rights already existed. An outright ban had been floated a few years earlier and was a national fight at the time.
• A lot of what looks like timeless wilderness here was farmed, logged, and burned over a century ago. These forests were bought back into public hands under the 1911 Weeks Act specifically to heal worn-out eastern land, and most of the towering woods you camp under today are second-growth that grew back after the Forest Service took over.
• The grassy, treeless balds around Mount Rogers are a genuine ecological puzzle -- nobody is fully sure why open meadows sit atop mountains that should, by rights, be forested. Grazing, old fires, and climate all get some of the credit, and today the Forest Service works to keep them open on purpose.
• Climb Mount Rogers and you leave the South behind: the summit is cloaked in a red spruce and Fraser fir forest -- a cool, damp, Canada-like woodland left stranded on the high peaks since the last Ice Age.