Category: Charlottesville

• August 22, 2015
• 17 Days Before Departure
• Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia
• 10 miles, total assent 2,118 feet

Preparing for the St. Francis of Assisi pilgrimage.  When the parks were formed in the 1930’s, not all the displaced families disappeared from the mountains. They left their dead. 

1. Cemetary
2. Gravestone
3. Chimney

In the 1930s, Shenandoah National Park was pieced together from over 3,000 individual tracts of land, purchased or condemned by the Commonwealth of Virginia and presented to the Federal Government. In the process, at least 500 families -described as “almost completely cut off from the current of American life” were displaced in what was considered by some to be an humanitarian act. To restore, or rather create, a ‘natural’ landscape out of the patchwork of recently abandoned settlements, Civilian Conservation Corps volunteers dismantled buildings and obscured the detritus of human habitation with the purity of imported vegetation.

August 17, 2015

22 Days Before Departure

Charlottesville

Preparing for the St. Francis of Assisi pilgrimage.  Fortunately Rick ‘n’ Roll didn’t happen along Doyle’s Fall Trail on the Appalachian Trail or Anne would have become the next Flat Albert.

August 17, 2015

22 Days Before Departure

Charlottesville

Preparing for the St. Francis of Assisi pilgrimage in the Old World Growth, Jones Run, Shenandoah National Park. Tulip Poplar Tree.