Shenandoah

Park 26 | Multiple visits

Planned Second Visit | August 2026

March 2026 update: Tickets have been purchased and lodging has been secured! We’re looking forward to (hopefully) exploring this park with more time, thoroughness and attention than the first time we visited — and at a very different time of year. We plan to spend a night at Big Meadows Lodge and hike the iconic Old Rag Circuit over a weekend before I attend a work conference in DC and we visit friends in Maryland. Fingers crossed it all works out as currently planned!

First Visit | November 2022

We embarked on a day trip to Shenandoah during a visit to see friends in Maryland. It was cold, quiet, and a bit barren; it likely would have been more impressive if we’d visited a month earlier to see the trees ablaze with their autumn leaves. It was still pretty, but it felt we were missing some of the real beauty of this place. With over 500 miles of trails to explore, leading to countless waterfalls and views of the surrounding mountains, we could imagine this would be a much different place in another season.

In addition to not getting the best taste of this place from a natural beauty standpoint, we also found ourselves frustrated by the visitor center we stopped at on our way into the park from the north. When discussing human inhabitants of the park, it focused entirely on the displacement of coal mining communities that was undertaken in order to build the park. This is certainly a sobering bit of history, but there was no acknowledgement of the first inhabitants of this land or their displacement from the region, which felt like a big miss to us.

Would we go back? We’d be open to it, particularly at a different time of year, but wouldn’t plan an entire trip around a visit.

Pictured below:

• Views from overlooks along Skyline Drive, the main road that snakes through the 105-mile length of the park.