The Scottish-Irish settlers who followed the Great Wagon Road into this valley in the 1740s found blue mountains on every horizon and stayed. What they couldn't have known is that the mountains would outlast everything else — the salt licks, the railroad boomtown, the locomotive works. Roanoke exists because of location, and its backyard is the proof. McAfee Knob, a flat rock ledge at 3,197 feet, is the most photographed overlook on the entire 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail — thru-hikers call it the emotional midpoint of the Virginia section. Dragon's Tooth, a 35-foot spire of Tuscarora sandstone, demands hands on rock to reach the top. Apple Orchard Falls drops 200 feet down a cliff face near the Parkway's Virginia high point. Tinker Cliffs runs a mile along the ridge at 3,000 feet. The railroad shaped the city. The mountains were already here.
