Weekend Trip to the Blue Ridge and Valley & Ridge Provinces

Overlook from Little Devil's Stairs Outlook.  Photo courtesy of  Laura Snyder.

On April 20th and 21st, my structural geology class took a weekend trip to the Blue Ridge and Valley & Ridge provinces.  We met at 9am at Lot C with all of our field equipment in tow.  After somehow managing to fit all of our stuff in three vans, we departed towards Stanardsville.  Our first stop was to the Heavenly Acres campground to set up our tents.  We then drove to our first field area, the Garth Run high-strain zone.  I'll go into detail about each field area in separate posts. Afterwards we met up with Rick Diecchio, the sedimentary petrology professor at GMU, to go to our second field area, the Swift Run Formation outcrop.  We made an extra stop after to see a Harper's formation outcrop because there was still plenty of sunshine left.  We then headed to dinner and back to the campgrounds to retire for the night.  The next morning after packing up, we drove up Route 33 to Skyline Drive into Shenandoah National Park.  Driving north on Skyline Drive got us to field area 3A, Limberlost trail, where we saw some columnar jointing.  We drove to field area 3B, Compton Peak.  After a strenuous hike off the beaten path, we saw some more magnificent examples of columnar jointing.  We left the park to make our way to our last field area of the day, Veach Gap.  It was at this point that the rain started to come down pretty steadily.  The class took a vote and decided to head back to Northern VA instead of camping another night in the rough weather.