The Geology of the Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina and Virginia

The Blue Ridge Parkway is the longest road in the United States designated as a single park unit, running a scenic 756 km (470 mi) through North Carolina and Virginia. The National Park Service's Geodiversity Atlas, drawn from its Geologic Resources Inventory, summarizes its rocks, landforms and soils for education, geoconservation and management.

The road

Authorized as a park unit on June 30, 1936, the parkway links Great Smoky Mountains National Park with Shenandoah National Park, tying together high passes, lush vegetation, waterfalls, water and wind gaps, forests and upland meadows. Construction began in the Great Depression to create jobs in an impoverished region. The parkway is considered an engineering marvel, with 26 tunnels and 168 bridges designed to fit the local bedrock.

Linville Falls on the Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina. NPS.

A billion years in the rocks

The parkway's rocks form the core of the Appalachian Mountains and date back more than one billion years. They record an early supercontinent, Rodinia; the opening and closing of an ancient ocean that assembled another supercontinent, Pangea; and the rifting that opened the Atlantic Ocean.

Driving the parkway means, by design, following the Blue Ridge physiographic province through the core of a huge ancient mountain range. The parkway also touches the Piedmont and Valley and Ridge provinces, sharing their history and some characteristic formations.

What to look for

• the Blue Ridge, Black, Great Craggy, Pisgah and Great Balsam Mountains
• gaps
• faults and folds
• exposures of sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic bedrock
• surficial deposits left by processes at the earth's surface
• wetlands

Managing it

The same features bring management challenges for park staff:

• geologic hazards, including slope movements and earthquakes
• abandoned mineral lands
• restoring disturbed lands and keeping the parkway structurally sound
• inventorying, monitoring and protecting paleontological resources

The Geologic Resources Inventory's maps and report for the parkway, and a completed NPS Soil Resources Inventory, are in the NPS DataStore.

Sources

Rewritten from the National Park Service article "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Blue Ridge Parkway, North Carolina and Virginia" (public domain), drawing on Thornberry-Ehrlich (2020), in hubnx's own words. The source spells Piedmont "Peidmont"; the report cover it shows is not reproduced.