9 Best Spots Along the Blue Ridge Parkway

The Blue Ridge Parkway runs 469 miles along the spine of the mountains, from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia down to Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina, and if you have driven even a stretch of it, you know it is less a road than a long, slow reason to keep pulling over. Begun during the Great Depression and built by the National Park Service with New Deal work crews, including the Civilian Conservation Corps, it crosses just those two states, with concrete mileposts counting up from zero at Rockfish Gap near Waynesboro. The 105-mile Skyline Drive picks up where it ends and carries north through Shenandoah. These nine stops are the ones worth building a day, or a weekend, around. One note on timing: the highest point, at Milepost 431 and 6,047 feet, and most of the overlooks are at their best in October, when the foliage turns and the air goes crisp and clear.

Peaks of Otter (Mileposts 84 to 87)

People have been climbing to these three peaks for thousands of years, and it is easy to see why the view still pulls traffic off the road today. A mountain resort has operated here since the 1800s, and the modern Peaks of Otter Lodge sits right on the shore of Abbott Lake, a 24-acre lake named for Stanley Abbott, the Parkway's first landscape architect. The flat, one-mile loop around the lake is the easy option, with the peaks doubled in the water on a still morning. For more, the two-mile loop out to the Johnson Farm walks you through a restored 1930s mountain homestead, and the climb up Sharp Top, at 3,875 feet, opens onto one of the best panoramas in this part of Virginia. If your legs are tired, a shuttle bus runs most of the way up Sharp Top in season. The visitor center, open May through October, has restrooms, water, and exhibits on the local wildflowers and wildlife.

Mabry Mill (Milepost 176)

There is a decent chance you have already seen Mabry Mill even if you have never stood in front of it, because this old gristmill and its reflection in the millpond make up one of the most photographed scenes on the entire Parkway. Ed and Lizzie Mabry ran the mill, a blacksmith shop, and a sawmill here in the early 1900s, and the site still works as a living-history stop, with costumed interpreters doing blacksmithing, weaving, and basket-making on summer weekends. The Mabry Mill Restaurant next door is the real institution, known up and down the mountains for its sweet-potato and buckwheat pancakes served all day. From here it is roughly 40 miles to the Virginia and North Carolina line at Milepost 216.9, where the Parkway climbs into its highest and most rugged country, the Black Mountains and beyond.

Rough Ridge (Milepost 302.8)

Rough Ridge packs about the best payoff-per-effort ratio on the Parkway. From the overlook parking at Milepost 302.8, the trail climbs roughly a third of a mile to a wooden boardwalk laid across the fragile summit heath, and the view from up there takes in the Linn Cove Viaduct curling around the mountain below and Grandfather Mountain rising behind it. Push on another half mile and you reach the 4,773-foot summit, a jumble of bare boulders where anchored cables help you scramble onto the highest rock. It is a favorite sunset perch, so on an October weekend, get there early. The whole hike is one small piece of the 13.5-mile Tanawha Trail, and the artsy town of Blowing Rock, ten minutes back up the Parkway, is the natural place to grab lunch on either end of the walk.

Linn Cove Viaduct (Milepost 304)

The Linn Cove Viaduct is the shot everyone knows: 1,243 feet of roadway curving out from the face of Grandfather Mountain, seemingly hung in midair. It was the very last piece of the Parkway to be finished, opening in 1987, decades after the rest, because engineers refused to blast a shelf into the mountainside and instead built the S-shaped bridge from 153 concrete segments, all but one of them curved, to spare the boulder field below. Stop at the visitor center at Milepost 304 for the story of how they pulled it off, then take the short paved path underneath the viaduct for the view looking up. If you want more, the Tanawha Trail runs 13.5 miles along the mountain from here, its name a Cherokee word for a great hawk or eagle.

Linville Falls (Milepost 316.4)

At Milepost 316.4, the Linville River throws itself down a series of drops totaling around 150 feet and vanishes into the Linville Gorge, a canyon deep enough that locals and guidebooks alike call it the Grand Canyon of the Appalachians. It is the most photographed waterfall in the Blue Ridge, and the land around it was preserved in the 1950s with money from John D. Rockefeller Jr., a big reason it still looks so wild. From the visitor center, the Erwins View Trail is the classic walk, an easy couple of miles out to a set of overlooks that stack the upper falls, the main plunge, and the gorge into a single frame. This is also the doorstep of Grandfather Mountain, the craggy massif whose flanks you have already been driving across back at Rough Ridge and the Viaduct.

Mount Mitchell (Milepost 355.4)

At Milepost 355.4, a spur road turns off toward the roof of the eastern United States. Mount Mitchell, at 6,684 feet, is the highest peak anywhere east of the Mississippi River, and on a clear day the view from the summit observation deck runs 85 miles in every direction. You can drive almost all the way up through Mount Mitchell State Park and walk the paved final stretch, or earn it on foot from the Parkway, but either way, pack a jacket: it runs 15 to 20 degrees colder up top than down in the valley, and the summit is often socked in with cloud. The state park keeps a small museum on the mountain's natural history and the spruce-fir forest that makes the top feel more like Canada than Carolina.

Craggy Pinnacle (Milepost 364)

Craggy Pinnacle is the sunset hike. From the parking area at the Craggy Dome Overlook, Milepost 364, a well-worn path climbs about two-thirds of a mile through a tunnel of wind-bent rhododendron to a bald, 5,892-foot summit with a 360-degree view, the Parkway threading off through the mountains in both directions below you. This is Craggy Mountains country, part of Pisgah National Forest, and less than an hour from Asheville, so the overlook fills up on clear evenings. Come with a jacket and a headlamp, stake out a rock, and watch the light go down over the ridgelines. It is one of the finest sunset spots in western North Carolina, and it costs nothing but the drive.

Craggy Gardens (Mileposts 364.4 to 367.6)

Just down the road from the Pinnacle, Craggy Gardens is the reason people time a June drive up here. The high, exposed slopes hold natural gardens of Catawba rhododendron that erupt into pink and purple bloom in the middle of the month, usually peaking around mid-June, one of the great flower shows in the southern mountains. Start at the Craggy Gardens Visitor Center at Milepost 364.4, then walk the short Craggy Gardens Trail from the picnic area up to Craggy Flats, where the shrubs close in overhead like a tunnel. Even outside bloom season, the elevation up here, around 5,500 feet, keeps things ten to twenty degrees cooler than Asheville, so it is a dependable escape from a muggy summer afternoon in town.

Waterrock Knob (Milepost 451.2)

Near the southern end of the drive, Waterrock Knob makes a fitting last big stop. Its visitor center, at about 5,800 feet, is the highest on the Parkway, and even from the parking lot you get a long view west into the Great Smokies and east across range after range of the southern Appalachians. It is the classic place to watch a sunrise or a sunset from up high. If you have one more climb in you, the paved-then-rocky trail to the 6,292-foot summit is only about a half mile up, steep but quick, and the payoff is a full sweep of the Plott Balsams and the Smokies. From here, the Parkway winds its final miles down toward Cherokee and the southern entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Planning the Drive

You do not have to run all 469 miles in one shot, and honestly you should not try. The Parkway breaks naturally into day trips: the Virginia sections around Roanoke and the Peaks of Otter, the Grandfather Mountain cluster near Boone, and the high country around Asheville and the Smokies, any one of which makes a full and satisfying day. The speed limit tops out at 45, most visitor centers and facilities run May through October, and storms and winter weather can close sections with little warning, so it is always worth checking the National Park Service conditions page before you set out. Pick a stretch, leave early, and give yourself permission to pull over at every overlook that catches your eye. That is the whole point of the road.