It was a winter night, about 2 a.m., and Colt Nutter was alone in the building.

Historic Jordan Springs, an event center outside Winchester, covers 48,000 square feet. Nutter, then its executive director, had gone down to the lower level to turn on the heat for an event. That was when he heard loud footstep…

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Someone crosses the grass to find out what it is. He ends up at the foot of a bronze statue of a seated woman, and h…

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Some passersby say they have seen gray forms huddled in the courtyard of the old Frederick County Courthouse in Winchester, in the spot where Confederate prisoners were once kept.

Inside, the reports are of sound. In the old courtroom, voices have been heard, from faint whispers to obnoxious shouting, and the cries of …

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In the lobby of the Wa…

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During the restoration of Abram’s Delight, carpenters reported seeing a tall man in Quaker clothing and a hat walk up the front steps and into the house. About ten minutes later he walked back out.

Then he vanished.

That account appears in a Northern Virginia Daily article that appears to date from 1995, and it plac…

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Drive Interstate 81 before sunrise in October and the lowlands can vanish under a pale blanket as the ridgelines poke through, lit and clear. Meteorologists call it valley fog. WHSV’s weather team has described it as something that happens very often in the Shenandoah Valley, and the cause is ordinary physics working on an extraordinary landscape.

Cold Air Runs Downhill and Takes the Moisture With It

Start with the sky. On a clear night with no cloud cover, the ground gives up its heat quickly. The Cloud Appreciation Society explains that the long nights of autumn and winter make this loss greater, and that a starry night with barely a breath of wind is the ideal setup. The air touching the ground chills until some of its moisture condenses into droplets. The result is a cloud that sits at ground level.

Cold air is heavy. It does not hover where it forms. It drains downhill the way rainwater does, collecting in the lowest ground it can find. That drainage is why the fog pools in valleys and the slopes above stay dry and clear.

The Rivers Bring the Water

A valley with water in it makes better fog than a dry one. A University of Wisconsin satellite meteorology course notes that radiation fogs are frequent in fall in river valleys, where cold air settles to the bottom and the rivers and streams add water vapor by evaporation. From orbit, the same course says, valley fogs trace the contours of the river valleys beneath them.

Between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies, the lowlands are threaded with exactly that kind of water. The mountains add something else. According to WHSV, the air gets trapped between the ridges, and a fog can linger for several days.

Dew Point, Wind Speed and a Bet on Tomorrow

The Wisconsin course offers a guideline for predicting a fog night. If the dew point sits roughly 5 degrees Celsius (about 9 degrees Fahrenheit) below the air temperature at sunset, and winds are forecast to stay under 5 knots (about 6 miles per hour), a radiation fog has a good chance of forming overnight.

Any weather app that shows dew point and wind will give you both numbers. Check them in the evening. A narrow gap between air temperature and dew point, a calm forecast and a clear sky make a good bet for the next morning.

Why Some Fogs Linger for Days

NASA’s Earth Observatory, writing about fog in Australia’s Victorian Alps, describes the usual pattern. At low elevations radiation fog fades as the sun warms the ground, but in mountain valleys it tends to stay longer because the valley floors remain shaded. The physics is the same in Virginia, though the scale differs.

That timing is the reason to be out early. The best view arrives in the first hours of light, and the fog gives way as the ground warms.

Climb Out of the River Bottom Before Sunrise

Fog follows rivers and pools low, so the view belongs to higher ground. Any road or trail that climbs out of a river bottom gives you the angle. Scout the spot in daylight, since you will be driving to it in the dark. Bring a layer more than you think you need, because the same clear sky that makes the fog also makes the cold.

The fog makes no promises. It needs a still night, a clear sky and moist air to line up. When they do, the morning rewards the person who got up.

Walk the Cedar Creek Trail toward the Natural Bridge and a state park marker poses a question: fact or fiction? The marker says, according to local legend, that George Washington carved his initials into the stone in the early 1750s. It adds that Washington’s journals do not mention the bridge, and that the leg…

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Every October, the Shenandoah Valley’s ghost stories get passed around like family recipes. They are warmed over, adjusted a little each time, and nobody can say for certain who made them first.

This year we went looking for the first batch.

Starting today and running through Halloween, we will publish one ghost story a day. Five days. Five stories. Each comes from a different corner of the Shenandoah Valley, and each has been worked over by a reporter with a stack of old newspapers.

Ground Rules for the Dark

The stories follow a few rules we set for ourselves.

We went to the records first: archives, deeds, newspapers, the people who care for these places. Where a legend holds up, we say so. Where it falls apart, we say that too, and we think the truth tends to make the better tale. Nobody is trying to frighten you out of your wits. We would like to leave you with a good story.

You will also find practical details. If a story points you toward something you can see for yourself, we will tell you where it is and when. Check the dates and call ahead if possible. Ghosts keep odd hours, and so do the places they “live” in.

Something New Every Day Until the Last Night

We are not going to tell you where we are headed, whom we met, or which story comes first, last or somewhere in the middle.

A ghost story works best when you do not know what is behind the door.

The easiest way to keep up is to subscribe, so each story reaches your inbox the day it runs.

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Above ground, the lowlands look settled: pasture, corn stubble, a church steeple. Below it, the rock is full of holes.

Much of the region’s bedrock is limestone and dolostone, and both dissolve in slightly acidic water. A Washingtonian guide to the caves compares the lowlands to Swiss cheese and reports that Virginia holds more than 4,000 caves, most of them wild and untouched by development.

Slow Acid, Long Patience

Britannica’s entry on Luray Caverns gives the short version. Underground rivers and acid-bearing water seeping through layers of limestone and clay formed the chambers over millions of years. The clay washed out and left the limestone shell. Later, dripping limewater built the stalactites.

The slowness is the point. The Washingtonian reports that a formation can take about 120 years to grow a cubic inch, which explains the strict rule against touching: oils from skin can stop a formation’s growth.

The same chemistry works at the surface. Natural Chimneys Park in Mount Solon holds a 120-foot limestone formation that rain has sculpted for a very long time. The towers stand in daylight. The caves hold the rest of the story in the dark.

Six Caves With Lights and Handrails

According to the Washingtonian, six of the Shenandoah Valley’s caves are show caves with lights, paved paths and admission fees: Luray Caverns, Shenandoah Caverns, Endless Caverns, Grand Caverns, Skyline Caverns and the Caverns at Natural Bridge. Inside, the temperature holds around 55 degrees and cell phones lose their signal.

Each has a character of its own.

Luray is the giant. Its caverns were discovered in 1878 and cover 64 acres, Britannica says. In 1956 builders placed rubber-tipped plungers beside 37 stalactites to make a stalacpipe organ, which Britannica calls the largest natural musical instrument.

Grand Caverns in Grottoes holds an older distinction. The Washingtonian calls it the nation’s oldest cave concession, with part of it opened in 1806, and says its walls carry more than 200 signatures left by Civil War soldiers. Visit Shenandoah notes that its beds of rock run vertical, unlike the mostly horizontal layers elsewhere, and that it is known for its shield formations, whose exact origin remains uncertain.

Endless Caverns, discovered in 1879, sits at the foot of Massanutten Mountain. The same Visit Shenandoah guide says the name is not literal, though long sections of the cave have never been explored.

The Fall Swarm and a Hard Decade for Bats

Virginia has only 17 documented species of bats, according to the state Department of Wildlife Resources. In the fall, the agency says, cave bats gather around cave entrances during a period called the swarm, feeding heavily before hibernation.

October sits inside that window, and the news from the caves has not been easy. The Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation reports that white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that rouses hibernating bats and burns their fat reserves, reached Virginia in 2009. Between 2009 and 2013 it spread across western Virginia. Little brown, tricolored and northern long-eared bats suffered estimated mortality above 95 percent.

There is a small turn in the record. The same agency says little brown and tricolored bats persist and appear to be slowly increasing in number.

Hands in Pockets, Boots Clean

Visitors can help. The department advises avoiding disturbance of hibernating bats and asks anyone who enters a Virginia cave to assume they may carry spores of the fungus on their gear and clothes. On a commercial tour, that means following the guide’s rules about where to step and what to touch. In wild caves it means leaving them alone through the hibernation season.

Hours, ticket prices and seasonal tour offerings change, so confirm them with each cave before you drive out. Dress for 55 degrees, wear shoes with grip, and keep your hands to yourself.

Heather McCoy stayed after class one afternoon in high school to talk with her art teacher about a project that she couldn’t get right. She had spent weeks on the design, and had worked it, in her words, to death. Oil pastel was the last medium she tried, and still she could not find the correct one for what she saw in her head.

She was close to tears.

Her teacher patted her arm and said, “Honey, there is no perfect answer in art.”

McCoy has carried that sentence for nearly forty years.

She remembers her reply too. She could not handle that, she said. There had to be a right answer somewhere.

She quit the class on the spot.

A scholarship, declined

The semester without an art class changed her mind. As college applications came due, Heather felt the pull again and began to wonder whether art might be her career after all. She took her portfolio to a college known for its art program, and a professor offered her a scholarship on the spot.

She panicked. Saying yes meant committing, and she could not see how she would survive as an artist, so she turned it down. She ended up in biology, and she spent the next thirty-plus years mostly away from art.

She never quit it entirely. Heather dipped back in from time to time and made a line of gouache greeting cards, figurines based on storybook characters, and a small collection of quilting illustrations. About three years ago she returned for good and started Trinity Point Designs.

A photograph on a dead Flickr account

Three mediums define her work now, and she reached each by a roundabout route.

Oil pastel was the medium of that last piece in high school. Gouache was what she used for the greeting cards, and she did not like the result. Pyrography, the craft of burning designs into wood, was the one she says she truly hated. The traditional method of line and shading never held her attention.

Then she found a photo on an old Flickr account that no longer exists. A college student had burned a table for an art thesis, and had done it differently. Rather than drawing with the burn, the student burned the background away and left the image standing in smooth relief. “The light came on for me,” McCoy says, and she had to try it.

She has been pushing at that technique ever since.

After a few years working only in monochrome, she wanted color. She went back to gouache and oil pastel. She now paints several color versions of each gouache design and loves it. “There is no right answer,” she says.

Oil pastel stays hard. She cannot work it in stages, because stopping breaks the flow, so each piece demands one long, draining sitting. About half of her attempts succeed. The failures get scraped off and thrown away. She pairs the successes with burned frames, which raises the stakes on every attempt, and those pieces have become her favorites.

Twenty hours before the first burn

McCoy does not design with pencil and paper. A composition lives in her head for months, shifting and settling, before she moves it onto an iPad in Procreate. She says the app, which cost her $13, was the best money she ever spent, and she calls its erase brush a game changer.

She cannot do thumbnails or rough sketches. She draws the design in near-finished form, the way she sees it, then erases, adds, cuts, pastes and nudges layers until it holds. A composition takes at least twenty hours, and some take twice that. The results look rough on the screen. All she needs is an arrangement she believes in.

From there, a free online program sizes the design, her home printer outputs it in sheets, and she tapes them together. She transfers the outline to wood or paper with graphite paper. She calls this the most boring part of the whole process.

Then the burning begins, thousands upon thousands of small taps of the pen, one point at a time. She posts burn hours on her website because people seem more interested in those, though she calls the design phase the poor ignored stepchild nobody wants to talk about. A side table took 75 hours. A single Fire+Steel piece takes 20 to 25. Gouache moves faster once the design is done, and she can finish one in a few days.

Steel, cypress and a first table

Her newest addition is a set of steel frames for the Fire+Steel pieces, which she and her husband make from scratch. They cut, weld and grind the metal themselves. Heather finds the physical labor a balance to the stillness of burning. She says she is getting bit by the furniture bug again, and furniture is where she wanted to start. A table was the first thing she ever burned, if she leaves out a gourd birdhouse and a cheap craft-store pen she would rather forget.

Her bald cypress slabs were harvested in eastern Virginia. The soft maple and poplar for her tabletops come from a local lumber yard that she believes sources its wood in Virginia, though she says she is not certain.

Three peaks and a river

Trinity Point is a loose geographic patch of Augusta County in Swoope, where three peaks surround the meeting of the Middle River and Buffalo Branch. An old fort stood in the field next door. McCoy chose the name early in her return to art, when she thought she might add ceramics or fairy houses to the lineup and wanted a name roomy enough for all of it.

Heather’s Fire+Steel designs and gouache paintings lean on Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau. The folklore, fantasy and Arthurian pieces show up in her burned slabs. Four Fantastic Beasts owes something to Harry Potter and Philip Pullman. Wisdom in the Water, her favorite woodburn, is a water dragon that took shape in her mind over six months. Coming of the Cosmic Firebird belongs to the same group. She loves these medieval, Tolkien-esque designs best, but they are not easy. They take a long time to develop.

The slow route to an audience

McCoy spent her first three years under the Trinity Point name building a body of work she liked. A year ago she began entering open art calls and winning some awards. A couple of months ago she decided to sell directly to buyers through her own website.

She tried the usual routes first: traditional galleries, social media, Etsy. None felt right to her or the work, which falls between fine art and illustration. A direct-to-customer site is slower, she says, but so are her mediums. She is content to be the tortoise.

Life as an artist in a rural county has its own difficulties, and McCoy calls herself a fringe artist. Her work falls between categories, her subject matter runs a little outside the mainstream, and woodburning is not widely known. Original pieces that take this many hours also cost enough that not everyone can take one home. By her own account she is a severe introvert, and mostly her closest neighbors know what she is doing. They have been encouraging. The internet, she says, is what lets rural artists find an audience beyond their own region.

Right now her work is available online only. She had a solo show in Richmond recently, and nothing local is in the pipeline. Anyone curious to see the pieces in person can ask about visiting her home studio, where they hang, and join her for a cup of tea.

Her teacher told her there was no perfect answer in art. Nearly forty years later, McCoy has stopped arguing.

Trinity Point Designs is based in the Trinity Point area of Swoope, in Augusta County. Work is sold online at TrinityPointDesigns.com.

Shenandoah National Park staff confirmed Tuesday evening that human remains were found in the Naked Creek backcountry on Sept. 22, WHSV reported. The confirmation came three weeks after the discovery.

Allysah Fox, a visual information specialist with the park, told the station by email that the remains were found near a tent. A hiker was reported missing that same evening, which set off a search and rescue operation with the Virginia Department of Emergency Management. The reporting available so far does not say whether the two events are connected, and no one has been publicly identified.

Fox said investigators noticed evidence of wildlife in the area but have not determined whether it relates to the case. The cause of death is still unknown.

A closure that came two weeks later

The National Park Service lists the Naked Creek backcountry zone as closed until further notice, effective Oct. 7. WUSA9 reported that the closure came 16 days after the remains were found and that it covers the Naked Creek Overlook. The park has not said publicly why the closure followed the discovery by that interval, and it has given no reopening date.

For anyone with a backcountry trip planned

Overnight stays in the park’s backcountry require a permit, and permits are issued year-round through Recreation.gov. The site tells campers to check the park’s website for current closure areas before they go. Questions about a permit or itinerary can go to the park’s backcountry office at 540-948-1143 or shen_backcountry@nps.gov.

The park’s standing food rules apply in every zone. Food, garbage and cooking gear must sit in a bear-resistant container or hang at least 12 feet off the ground and 6 feet from the trunk, according to the same permit page. In an emergency, the park’s line is 1-800-732-0911.

Much remains unanswered here: who the person was, how they died, and what the investigation will find. Shenandoan will update this story when the park or the medical examiner releases more.

Most people driving I-81 through the Shenandoah Valley keep their eyes on the Blue Ridge. That’s where Skyline Drive runs, and where Shenandoah National Park draws its crowds. Look the other way, toward the long ridges stacked along the West Virginia line, and a different kind of mountain country comes into view. Much of it belongs to George Washington National Forest, and on a fall Saturday its overlooks hold a fraction of the people you’d meet at Stony Man.

The forest covers about 1.1 million acres across Virginia and West Virginia. The Forest Service manages it together with the Jefferson National Forest to the south, and the combined holding reaches 1.8 million acres. Shenandoah County alone claims 178 miles of trail inside the forest. The Lee Ranger District oversees the stretch closest to Woodstock, Edinburg, and Luray, which takes in the Great North Mountain ridgeline on the state border and Massanutten Mountain, the long spine separating the Shenandoah Valley from the Page Valley.

The trailheads in this article charge nothing. Shenandoah National Park charges $30 per vehicle for a seven-day pass. The trade-off comes in maintenance and signage. Blazes fade, junctions go unmarked, and cell coverage drops out across much of the backcountry. Download your maps before you leave the pavement.

A Castle on the State Line

Big Schloss | Wolf Gap Recreation Area, Shenandoah County | 4.4 to 4.5 miles round trip | About 1,000 feet of gain | Moderate

German settlers looked up at the white sandstone crown on this ridge and saw a castle, which is what schloss means. The summit stands at 2,964 feet on the Virginia and West Virginia line. Stand among its boulders and the name makes sense.

The hike begins at Wolf Gap Recreation Area. From I-81 Exit 279 at Edinburg, the Forest Service sends drivers west on SR 675, across VA 42, and up the mountain to the entrance, a drive of roughly 10 miles. The route follows the Mill Mountain Trail, and the work comes early. Grades run between 11 and 23 percent through the first half, easing near the two-mile mark once the path gains the ridge.

Glimpses of Virginia open through the trees along the crest. At the top, a footbridge spans a crevasse in the rock, and the outcrop offers roughly 270 degrees of view across both states.

Wolf Gap keeps a small campground at the trailhead. The Forest Service lists it as open year round, with no fee and no potable water, so carry in what you’ll drink. A night there puts you a little over two miles from the summit at sunrise.

Tibbet Knob, Across the Road

Wolf Gap Recreation Area | 3.1 to 3.2 miles round trip | 830 to 1,090 feet of gain | Moderate to Hard

The trailhead sits across Route 675 from the campground, which makes Tibbet Knob an easy second hike on the same morning. Yellow blazes lead about a mile and a half to the top. Within the first half mile, an overlook frames Big Schloss and Mill Mountain from the opposite side of the gap.

Near the summit, two short scrambles of 20 to 30 yards each may call for hands as well as feet. Families with small children will find Big Schloss the gentler choice. The view from the knob spans a little more than 180 degrees of ridges and hollows in both states, and far fewer people make the climb to see it.

Strickler Knob and the Pink Blazes

Scothorn Gap trailhead, Massanutten Mountain near Luray | 5.5 miles round trip | About 1,600 feet of gain | Hard

Virginia Tourism’s bucket list hikes guide does not soften this one. Strickler Knob, reached from an area known as Scothorn Gap, is “not maintained and not suitable for dogs or young children.” Getting there means turning off Route 211 near Luray onto Crisman Hollow Road, also signed as Forest Road 274.

The route follows orange blazes on the Scothorn Gap Trail for close to two miles before branching onto the Strickler Knob path. From there the markings get creative: pink paint on rocks, red or purple rectangles on trees, and stretches where the next blaze takes some hunting. A rock scramble covers the final tenth of a mile. Bring a downloaded map and the skills to read it. A screenshot of a trail app is not enough.

The top delivers a 360-degree view of New Market Gap and the Luray side of the mountain, with the Blue Ridge rising beyond. Most visitors to Luray never see their surroundings from this angle.

Halfmoon Mountain’s Long Approach

Lee Ranger District, Hardy County, W.Va. | About 6 to 6.6 miles round trip | 1,200 to 1,300 feet of gain | Moderate

Halfmoon Mountain sits on the Great North Mountain ridge in Hardy County, West Virginia, close to the Virginia line. Its summit reaches 2,836 feet. Summitpost describes two ways up. The Halfmoon Mountain Trail runs 6.6 miles round trip with about 1,200 feet of gain, following yellow blazes for 2.5 miles before a white-blazed lookout trail and a steep final tenth of a mile. The second option links the orange-blazed Bucktail Trail to the pink-blazed German Wilson Trail and the lookout spur, about 6 miles round trip with 1,300 feet of climbing.

The lookout faces Mill Mountain, Long Mountain, and Trout Run Valley, with ridge after ridge folding west. Getting there takes most of a morning. The reward is an overlook you may have to yourself.

Notes From the Trailhead

The national forest asks more of hikers than the national park does. Parking can mean a gravel pullout with no sign. Springs and streams run through these mountains, but filter anything you plan to drink, and remember that Wolf Gap has no potable water at all.

Massanutten carries motorized traffic too. The Peters Mill Run and Taskers Gap trail system near Edinburg runs 36 miles of routes for Jeeps, ATVs, UTVs, motorcycles, and e-bikes from early April through early January. Those trails belong to machines. Hikers after quiet should choose a different corner of the mountain during riding season.

For closures and current conditions, the Forest Service’s George Washington and Jefferson National Forests site has the final word, and the Lee Ranger District office takes questions at 540-984-4101 on weekdays. Shenandoah County’s tourism office keeps its own trail page for anyone planning a weekend in the county’s share of the forest.

Every winter, a closure alert goes out for Skyline Drive, and a fair number of would-be hikers cancel on the spot. They don’t have to. The Drive is a road through Shenandoah National Park, and when ice shuts the road, the trails stay right where they were.

When the Gate Comes Down

The Park Service keeps Skyline Drive open through winter and closes it only for snow or ice. Reopening is rarely quick. Cold settles hard on the ridge, and the park says crews can need several days to reopen the Drive after a storm.

During those closures the Appalachian Trail stays reachable from the park’s entrance stations, and hikers can walk to many other trails from the park boundary. Allysah Fox, the park’s public information officer, told WHSV in 2024 that people can still enter on foot when the Drive closes to cars, and called the opposite belief a common misconception.

Walking in on ice carries its own risk. During a 2021 closure, park spokesperson Sally Hurlbert said hikers were parking at the entrances and walking through, and the park warned that ice can make hiking very dangerous.

Everything You Need Comes In With You

The biggest shift for a first winter visit has little to do with weather.

Commercial services shut down for the season. Fox put it bluntly: the wayside and the lodges close, which leaves “not any food or water sources up inside the park.” Pack as though the only water on the mountain is the water on your back, because that’s true.

Drivers face a version of the same problem. The park’s one fuel station sits at Big Meadows, and Fox said power outages hit it often in winter. The park’s 2024-2025 winter guide adds that weather can disrupt fuel deliveries to Big Meadows Wayside at mile 51, and the gas may run out. Top off in Luray, Elkton, or Waynesboro before you head up.

Ten to Twenty Degrees Colder Than Town

By the Park Service’s count, the ridge runs 10 to 20 degrees cooler than the lowlands, and “what comes down as rain in the valley below can be ice and snow on the mountain.”

That gap fools more people than anything else in this guide. A mild, bright morning in Luray or Elkton says almost nothing about conditions on the crest.

What Goes in the Pack

Start with layers instead of one heavy coat. You’ll build heat on the climb and lose it fast at the first long stop. Carry more food and water than a summer day would call for. The park advises bringing extra layers, water, food, flashlights and a map in case a storm catches you out.

The flashlight earns its place even on a day hike. Short winter daylight leaves little room for a late start or a slow descent, and the park’s winter guide warns that “darkness can sneak up quickly.” Look up the sunset time before you leave the car.

If you buy one piece of gear for the season, make it traction. The Park Service tells hikers to carry microspikes or traction coil devices for their boots. Frozen waterfalls and glazed overlooks draw people up the mountain in January, and that same ice turns a steep descent in ordinary boots into a rescue call.

Plan for No Signal

Cell phones don’t work in most areas of the park, and winter does nothing to help. Coverage is generally available at some west-facing overlooks, which is no comfort at a trailhead tucked into a hollow.

Download offline content in the official NPS App before you arrive. Then tell someone your plan: the trailhead, the route, and when you expect to be back. It takes a minute, and in winter it may be the most useful minute of the trip.

Sleeping Out in the Cold Months

The park’s developed campgrounds run from early spring until late fall, so a winter overnight means the backcountry. That takes a permit bought ahead of time through Recreation.gov, and the permit carries a fee. Campfires are not permitted in the backcountry, so bring a stove and a sleep system rated for the cold.

Check Before You Go

No article, this one included, should be your last word the morning of a hike. Text SHENALERTS to 888777 and the park will send a text any time closures or reopenings happen. The park’s website carries current alerts and conditions as well.

The Payoff

Winter strips the ridge down to its bones. Bare trees open views that summer leaves hide, the parking areas empty out, and a frozen overlook at first light holds a stillness July can’t match. The season requires more planning than a summer hike, keep that in mind.

Skyline Drive conditions change quickly in winter weather. Check current status on Shenandoah National Park’s website or text SHENALERTS to 888777 before heading out.

Ask a farmer in the Shenandoah Valley how the year has gone, and lately the conversation turns to rain before it turns to almost anything else. Not enough of it, not for long enough, and not for the first year running. Virginia is in the middle of what state officials are calling a rapidly intensifying, statewide drought, and the Shenandoah Valley has sat near the center of it since the pattern began.

A Deficit Two Winters in the Making

The current drought didn’t arrive suddenly. Virginia’s farmers have been contending with dry conditions since 2025, and those conditions grew measurably worse through 2026. From October 2025 through April 2026, much of Virginia experienced a ten-inch precipitation deficit compared to normal, the second-largest such deficit on record since the state began keeping this data in the early 1890s.

The Shenandoah Valley hasn’t just shared in that shortfall; it’s been among the hardest-hit parts of the state. Shenandoah County itself ranked among the driest in its own recorded history, placing 20th driest for April and 22nd driest year-to-date out of 132 years of comparable data, part of a pattern that has repeatedly put the Shenandoah Drought Evaluation Region, covering Augusta, Rockingham, Shenandoah, Frederick, Page, Warren, and Clarke counties, under DEQ drought advisories through the current drought cycle.

“Drought Warning”

Virginia’s drought monitoring system, run by DEQ’s Drought Monitoring Task Force, tracks conditions across thirteen regions statewide and issues advisories in escalating stages, from watch to warning, based on precipitation, stream flow, groundwater levels, and reservoir conditions rather than rainfall alone. As of a May 2026 task force report, drought warning advisories, the more serious of the two designations, applied to the Shenandoah Drought Evaluation Region along with eleven other regions statewide, while only the Southeast Virginia region carried the lesser watch designation.

The task force’s own guidance addresses a question a lot of residents ask honestly: it’s been raining, so why is there still a drought. The answer, according to DEQ, is that precipitation is only one of several factors the task force weighs; deep soil moisture and groundwater levels recover far more slowly than surface conditions do, and a few inches of welcome rain doesn’t undo months of accumulated deficit. Weedon Cloe, manager of DEQ’s Office of Water Supply, has attributed the broader pattern partly to an unusually dry winter that left the state starting the growing season already behind.

The Farmers Feeling It Directly

For Valley agriculture, a drought stretching across two growing seasons isn’t an abstraction; it shows up in the barn and in the hay wagon. Virginia’s Secretary of Agriculture and Forestry, Katie Frazier, has said the drought’s impacts are visible across fields, orchards, and forests statewide. Cattle and hay producers have been forced into an uncomfortable position: feeding hay during months when pastures should be lush and self-sufficient, with some producers trucking hay in from outside Virginia entirely to make up the shortfall.

Scott Sink, president of the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation and himself a beef cattle and hay producer in Franklin County, has spoken candidly about what’s at stake if the state moves toward mandatory water restrictions, warning that such measures would directly affect agricultural livelihoods rather than simply inconveniencing lawns and gardens. The USDA’s Farm Service Agency has responded with drought disaster designations covering more than seventy-five Virginia localities, a formal designation that opens the door to emergency low-interest loans for affected producers.

A Pattern Virginia Has Seen Before, Just Not Often

Virginia is not historically a drought-prone state; the Commonwealth typically receives more than forty inches of precipitation annually and is generally considered water-rich by national standards. But droughts do recur here in multi-year cycles, and the current stretch joins a list that includes record-breaking droughts in 1999 through 2002, 2007 through 2008, and 2010 through 2012, along with a serious 2023 drought that contributed directly to wildfire activity in the Jefferson National Forest.

That history offers a measure of grim reassurance: droughts of this scale have hit Virginia before and eventually broken. It also offers a caution, since several of those historical droughts stretched across multiple growing seasons before conditions genuinely recovered, and the current one, having already carried over from 2025 into 2026, is following a similar shape so far.

What to Watch For

Farmers and residents alike can track the same data DEQ itself uses through the state’s public drought dashboard, updated regularly with regional advisory statuses, precipitation totals, and streamflow conditions. For a region where agriculture remains central to both the economy and the identity of the Valley, that data isn’t background noise. It’s the same information shaping decisions about hay purchases, herd sizes, and planting timelines being made on farms across Augusta, Rockingham, and Shenandoah counties right now.

Current Virginia drought conditions and regional advisory statuses are available through the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s drought monitoring page and through drought.gov’s Virginia dashboard.

Every autumn, somebody posts a single date online and calls it peak. It never quite works that way here. Shenandoah National Park runs roughly seventy-five miles along the crest of the Blue Ridge, and the color doesn’t arrive all at once so much as it rolls downhill, starting at the highest ridgelines and working its way toward the valley floor over the course of about a month. Understanding that movement, rather than chasing a single magic weekend, is the difference between a good trip and a disappointing one.

Elevation Runs the Show

Cooler temperatures at altitude trigger the chemical shift inside a leaf earlier than the same shift happens lower down, so the highest points along Skyline Drive typically turn first. Guides who track the park closely describe fall color showing at the higher elevations before it reaches the valley floor, with the park’s central and southern districts generally getting there ahead of the northern end, which sits closer to Washington, D.C., and tends to hold its green longer into the season.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac places the park’s brightest window between roughly October 10 and October 20 in a typical year, while noting that mountain destinations tend to reach peak before the valleys around them. That’s a useful anchor, not a guarantee. A hot, dry September can push things back. An early frost can pull them forward. Nothing about foliage forecasting is exact, and any guide claiming otherwise is guessing with more confidence than the data supports.

Reading the Park Like a Local

Skyline Drive tends to show its first real color along the highest overlooks, the stretches near Hawksbill and Stony Man, well before the lower approaches do. One frequent visitor’s account puts it plainly: the upper ridges along Skyline Drive often peak in mid-October, with color then dropping in elevation and moving south toward the Blue Ridge Parkway as the month wears on.

That gives you a rough strategy rather than a single date to circle on the calendar. Early October, plan on the highest overlooks and the southern district of the park, where cooler temperatures at elevation get a head start. By the third week of October, shift your attention toward the northern district and the lower valley approaches, where the show tends to arrive last. If you can only make one trip and want to hedge your bet, the middle of October gives you the best chance of catching color somewhere along that seventy-five-mile stretch, even if the very peak has already passed at the highest points or hasn’t quite arrived at the lowest ones.

Sources to Trust

One travel writer who tracks the region closely points to a better real-time resource than any single blog post, including this one: the Virginia Department of Forestry’s weekly fall foliage updates, which are built on field reports from working foresters rather than a purely predictive algorithm. Checking that report the week before a trip will tell you more than any elevation chart written in July.

Page Valley, on the park’s western flank, markets its own foliage season running from roughly late September through early November, which lines up with the elevation pattern: the mountains catch fire first, the valley below follows a few weeks later.

Planning Around the Uncertainty

Rather than betting an entire trip on one weekend, the more resilient plan treats the season as a six-week window rather than a single date. If your schedule is flexible, aim for the second or third week of October and build in a backup plan. If it’s a hard weekend on the calendar and it turns out to be early or late relative to peak, remember that Shenandoah rarely disappoints outright. Even a week before or after true peak, the mix of oak, hickory, maple, and sourwood across the park’s elevation range means there’s usually color worth seeing somewhere along the drive; it just might not be where you expected to find it.

The lower Shenandoah Valley and the Piedmont beyond the park tend to run later still, often glowing into early November, which means a foliage season that starts along the park’s highest ridgelines in late September can still be delivering color down in the valley towns a month later. Patience, in this case, buys you options.

Peak foliage timing varies year to year based on temperature and rainfall. For current conditions, check the Virginia Department of Forestry’s weekly fall foliage report before planning a trip.

There’s a version of corruption most of us picture from movies: a briefcase full of cash, a handshake in a parking garage.

What’s happening in Washington right now looks nothing like that, and that’s part of what makes it hard to see.

It’s paperwork. It’s a financial disclosure form filed in March, a contract awarded without competition, a fired inspector general nobody replaced. None of it makes for a great headline on its own.

Put together, it adds up to something the people who track this stuff for a living say they haven’t seen before, and it’s already showing up in a fertilizer bill on a farm outside Harrisonburg.

The Paper Trail

In March, ProPublica published the results of a year-long review of nearly 3,200 financial disclosure records covering more than 1,500 Trump administration appointees, including the president and vice president. The method was almost boring: pull the disclosure forms every senior official has to file, then see whether the numbers on those forms lined up with the calls the same people were making.

Some of what turned up: Steve Feinberg, the deputy secretary of defense and the Pentagon’s second-highest-ranking official, ran Cerberus Capital Management before taking the job. He still has an ongoing financial relationship with the firm for accounting, tax, and health care services, one that Defense Department officials extended past its original deadline at his request. Cerberus companies, meanwhile, hold Pentagon contracts tied to programs Feinberg has a hand in overseeing.

Todd Blanche, now the number two official at the Justice Department, held at least $159,000 in cryptocurrency while his department halted investigations into crypto firms. Attorney General Pam Bondi sold securities shortly before markets dropped following tariff announcements. Across the administration, ProPublica found more than 200 appointees who collectively held between $175 million and $340 million in crypto assets while helping shape the rules that govern it.

None of this is alleged. It comes from the officials’ own required filings, reviewed independently and confirmed by the Pentagon and Justice Department, which called the arrangements compliant with ethics law and dismissed criticism as “fake news.”

The people whose job it was to catch this are gone

Here’s the part that matters most for whether any of it gets fixed. Late on a Friday night in January 2025, four days into the new administration, at least 17 Senate-confirmed inspectors general were fired by email, with no cause given and none of the 30 days’ notice to Congress the law requires. A federal judge later ruled the firings unlawful. He declined to order the officials reinstated anyway.

One of those officials was Phyllis Fong, the USDA’s inspector general since 2002, first nominated by George W. Bush and kept on by every president since. Fong refused to leave, arguing the termination notice didn’t meet the legal standard, and was escorted from her office by security. Her old post oversees more than $200 billion a year in USDA spending, the crop insurance, conservation payments, and disaster aid programs that Shenandoah Valley farms run on, along with food-safety enforcement; her office was mid-investigation into the Boar’s Head listeria outbreak when she was removed. USDA now has a Senate-confirmed inspector general again, John Walk, sworn in more than a year later. For that stretch, the office charged with catching fraud in farm programs ran without permanent, independent leadership.

Virginia’s own senators didn’t stay quiet. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine joined 37 colleagues in a letter to the White House calling the firings unlawful and demanding reinstatement, pointing to inspector general work that had directly served Virginians, including oversight of the Postal Service and the investigation into the Envigo beagle-breeding facility in Cumberland County. “Removing these non-partisan watchdogs without providing a substantive and non-political reason is not lawful,” they wrote, “and undermines their independence, jeopardizing their critical mission to identify and root out waste, fraud, and abuse within federal programs.”

A few weeks after the IG firings, the administration removed David Huitema, director of the Office of Government Ethics, the agency responsible for reviewing the very disclosure forms ProPublica later combed through. He hadn’t been in the job three months. The office has run without a permanent director since. Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, has said the ongoing financial ties between regulators and the industries they oversee are exactly the kind of thing an intact ethics office exists to catch early. Right now, nobody’s catching them early. Reporters are catching them a year later, in a spreadsheet.

What he said he’d do

None of this arrived by accident, and none of it was hidden from voters beforehand. Trump built his 2024 campaign on the promise to root it out. At a Wisconsin rally that August, he vowed to “cast out the corrupt political class” and to “cut the fat out of our government for the first time, meaningfully, in 60 years.” The same speech announced what became the Department of Government Efficiency, pitched explicitly as the tool for “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” to root out waste. It was a repeat of the line that had carried his first campaign in 2016: drain the swamp.

The inspectors general were the government’s own standing version of that audit, nonpartisan by design, already inside every major agency, already doing the work Trump promised a new commission would do. He fired them instead. The Office of Government Ethics was the office built to stop officials from mixing public duty with private profit. He left it without a director. What replaced the watchdogs wasn’t a leaner, more accountable government. It was a Pentagon official with an open-ended contract with his old private equity firm, a Justice Department official holding crypto while his department eased off crypto enforcement, and a USDA with more than a year’s gap in independent oversight of the programs Valley farmers depend on.

The waste, fraud, and abuse Trump ran against didn’t disappear under this administration. Watchdogs who track this for a living, across think tanks, government-accountability nonprofits, and ethics offices from both parties, describe conflicts of interest at a scale and openness without real precedent in the modern presidency. That’s not a matter of interpretation. It’s a matter of which promise got kept and which got buried, and the paperwork shows the difference.

From a Trade Memo to a Feed Bill

This is where the story stops being a Washington story. Tariff policy set at the top has moved through trade negotiations and landed on farms in Augusta, Rockingham, and Shenandoah counties, and the people documenting the damage aren’t opposition researchers. They’re Virginia Tech agricultural economists and the state’s own Farm Bureau.

Potash, a fertilizer input, comes more than 85 percent from Canada. Tariffs on it raise costs for any farm relying on tight, just-in-time delivery, according to Virginia Tech trade policy analyst Xi He, who told reporters the disruption “can then ripple through rural economies, in regions like the Shenandoah Valley.” More than 90 percent of Virginia’s farms are classified as small operations. They don’t have much room to absorb a cost spike that starts as a line in a trade memo.

Canada is Virginia’s largest export market, accounting for $2.9 billion in goods in 2025, roughly 15 percent of the state’s total exports. When Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on a range of Canadian goods this year, Canada answered with retaliatory tariffs on American dairy, steel, agricultural equipment, and paper, set to begin in September. Scott Sink, president of the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation, told Senator Tim Kaine this year has been “the perfect storm” of drought, spring freezes, fuel costs, and tariffs, all landing on the same operations at once.

Then in late August, the administration eased tariffs on imported beef, allowing up to 300,000 metric tons of lean beef trimmings into the country starting September 1. Maple Springs Farm owner Jeff Slaven, already dealing with drought and rising feed costs, said the imports worried him less than the chance that packing plants would use the moment to consolidate, buying leverage over local producers by shrinking the number of places a farmer can sell cattle at all.

Governor Glenn Youngkin’s successor, Governor Abigail Spanberger, put the throughline in writing in a letter to the Commerce and Agriculture secretaries this August, stating plainly that the administration’s tariff policy has “directly contributed to a marked decline” in Virginia’s agricultural and forestry exports, and that the state’s small businesses have “very little capacity to absorb sustained cost increases.”

A War Nobody in Washington Voted On

Farm costs aren’t the only place a Washington decision has shown up at the pump this year. In late February, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran without a vote in Congress beforehand. The Constitution gives that power to the legislature, not the president, and lawmakers in both parties said so at the time. Senator Kaine co-sponsored a war powers resolution with Kentucky Republican Rand Paul aimed at reining in further action, telling NPR that troops’ lives were on the line and Congress needed to “come back to Washington right away to vote on this.” The administration notified Congress of the strikes in early March; under the War Powers Act, that notification started a 60-day clock for lawmakers to grant formal authorization. That deadline passed on May 1, and Democrats in Congress said at the time that the administration was now “operating in clear violation of the law.” By September, Senate Democrats had brought seven separate resolutions to curb the president’s war-making power. All seven failed, the closest by a single vote.

Whatever the legal outcome of that fight, the price at the pump moved fast and moved hard. The conflict disrupted tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, the channel that carries roughly a fifth of the world’s oil, and Brent crude spiked to around $118 a barrel within weeks of the first strikes. In Harrisonburg, the average price of a gallon of gas was $2.81 in late February. By early May, Virginia’s statewide average had crossed $4, the highest the state had seen in four years. Asked about it directly, the president didn’t deny the connection. “We are really doing well,” he said. “Now, gasoline is high. Other prices are way down, but gasoline is high.” He framed it as a worthwhile tradeoff for keeping Iran from a nuclear weapon. For a Harrisonburg commuter, that tradeoff worked like an indirect tax, one levied without a vote, for a military campaign their own elected representatives never got to approve.

Two stories, one thread

It would be easy to treat the disclosure filings and the fertilizer bill as unrelated news items. They’re not. An ethics system built to slow down self-dealing has been hollowed out at exactly the moment officials with direct financial stakes in defense contracts and crypto policy are making decisions that touch those stakes. The same administration setting trade policy that Virginia Tech economists and the governor’s own office say is squeezing Shenandoah Valley farms is the one that fired the inspector general whose job was watching over the USDA programs those same farms depend on. And the same administration that skipped the constitutional step of asking Congress before striking Iran is the one whose own senator had to fight, and lose, seven separate votes to bring war-making power back under the roof it’s supposed to live in.

Set the two sides next to each other and the trade is plain. Officials with the most to gain from weaker oversight got it, in writing, through fired watchdogs and a vacant ethics office. Farmers and drivers with the least room to absorb a bad year got a fertilizer bill that went up, a beef market that got more crowded, a trade war with the country that buys more Virginia goods than any other, and a gas pump that jumped more than a dollar a gallon for a war Congress never approved. One side spent the last year and a half filing disclosure forms about crypto holdings and defense contracts. The other spent it filing insurance claims after a frost and watching the number on the pump climb.

None of this requires speculation to establish. It’s on the record, in disclosure forms, court rulings, war powers votes, a letter signed by both of Virginia’s senators, and the president’s own words from the campaign trail and the podium. The paperwork made the outcome close to inevitable. The rest of the Valley is simply paying the tab.

Sources: ProPublica, “Documents Reveal a Web of Financial Ties Between Trump Officials and the Industries They Help Regulate”; Investigative Post; Associated Press; Partnership for Public Service; Farmers Advance / Reuters, on Phyllis Fong; House Appropriations Committee, USDA OIG oversight hearing remarks; Sen. Tim Kaine, joint letter with Sen. Mark Warner; WISN, Trump Wisconsin rally remarks; Virginia Tech News; Augusta Free Press; Virginia Mercury; WHSV; Office of the Governor of Virginia; WAMC/NPR, on the Iran strikes and Congress; Eastern Progress, on the failed Senate war powers votes; Wikipedia, “2026 Iran war fuel crisis”; WSLS, Virginia gas prices; WHSV, Harrisonburg gas price economic report

Diane Kearns used to manage roughly three thousand acres of orchard in Frederick County. Today her company, DST LLC, works something closer to five hundred fifty or six hundred. That’s not a slow season or a bad year showing up in the numbers. It’s the shape of an entire industry contracting around her, one parcel at a time, and she’s watched it happen firsthand over roughly a decade.

An Industry Older Than the State’s Roads

Virginia’s colonial General Assembly required landholders who obtained patents for at least a hundred acres to establish a garden and an orchard as early as 1639, and by the 1650s, orchards holding hundreds or even thousands of trees were being planted specifically for cider production, since drinking water of the period often wasn’t safe on its own.

The industry’s center of gravity shifted westward as railroads reached into the interior in the late nineteenth century. Research from Virginia’s Department of Historic Resources documents that as coastal orchards declined, new orchards planted in the western mountains increased sharply, and by 1890 the state had attracted what one historian called a genuine delirium of apple planting. The Shenandoah Valley, and Frederick County around Winchester in particular, became and remains Virginia’s apple epicenter. More than a hundred commercial orchards covering upward of sixteen thousand acres still operate across the state today, producing several million bushels a year, and the Valley accounts for the largest share of that total.

The Math of a Fifty-Percent Decline

The scale of the industry’s contraction has been documented in academic detail.

A 2012 doctoral dissertation examining what researchers call the Shenandoah-Cumberland Valley Fruit District, the connected apple-growing region spanning parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia, and Virginia, found that apple acreage across the district declined by nearly 50 percent between 1982 and roughly 2007, a twenty-five-year span. The decline hadn’t been uniform. Some parts of the district held on better than others, shaped by local land prices, proximity to expanding towns, and how individual growers chose to adapt.

Frederick County sits close to the sharp end of that trend, precisely because it sits close to Winchester, a city that has grown steadily and pushed development pressure outward into what used to be exclusively orchard land. Mark Sutphin, an agriculture and natural resources extension agent with Virginia Cooperative Extension’s Frederick County office, has pointed to that dynamic directly, telling the Winchester Star that the county is experiencing continued urbanization and pressure to develop, on top of an industry that already runs on thin profit margins.

Showing the Data

Kearns’s experience lines up with statewide numbers that have alarmed farm advocates in recent years. According to the 2022 U.S. Census of Agriculture, Virginia lost more farmland between 2017 and 2022 than it had lost across the entire previous fifteen years combined, more than 488,000 acres converted to other uses, alongside roughly ten percent of all Virginia farms ceasing operation entirely during that same five-year window. Rockingham County specifically, in the heart of the Valley, lost around 304 farms over that period, one of the sharper county-level declines statewide.

Wayne Pryor, president of the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation, described nearly 500,000 acres lost in five years as land that people should stop and reckon with. Much of that conversion, according to research from the American Farmland Trust, comes from the same steady pressure Sutphin described locally: suburban and exurban development creeping into agricultural land, along with a newer competitor for acreage in utility-scale solar development.

The Growers Choosing to Stay In

Not every orchard story in the Valley is one of retreat. Shenandoah Valley Orchards, headquartered on more than fifteen hundred acres near Timberville, has expanded and modernized under general manager Jamie Williams, who has run the operation since 1998. Williams has spoken about staying in orchard production as a deliberate choice against the pressure to sell, telling one interviewer that he takes real satisfaction in riding across the property and knowing he’s keeping it as farmland rather than watching it become something else. He’s also been candid that the balancing act isn’t simple, that growth and sustainability compete with residential development pressing in from the edges of the property, the same dynamic Sutphin and Kearns describe roughly sixty miles north in Frederick County.

Some growers are scaling back. Others are doubling down. The land hasn’t disappeared, but the acreage under cultivation keeps shrinking around whoever chooses to keep farming it, which is a contraction that shows up first in county-level data and eventually in how many roadside stands are still selling Virginia apples come October.

Data on Virginia farmland trends is drawn from the U.S. Census of Agriculture and reporting by the Winchester Star and Virginia Mercury. Historical detail on Virginia’s apple industry is sourced from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.

The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has spent the past two months hearing from Waynesboro residents who have already made up their minds.

At issue is a permit request from Northrop Grumman, the defense contractor that opened a 315,000-square-foot facility on Shenandoah Village Drive in 2024. The company wants permission to release up to 24.9 tons of volatile organic compounds into the air above Waynesboro every year.

That number sounds abstract until you learn what it includes. Among the compounds named in the application are MIBK, a solvent linked to cancer, toluene, which the Occupational Safety and Health Administration associates with organ damage and pregnancy loss, and xylenes, tied to respiratory and neurological problems.

Northrop Grumman leases the property from Shenandoah Village Drive Investment Partners LLC, a Pennsylvania company, and will use these chemicals to build electrical components for aerospace and defense hardware.

The park next door

The plant sits against Coyner Springs Park, 145 acres of woods and streams that feed into Waynesboro’s municipal water supply. People walk their dogs there most mornings. One woman who spends her days at the park with her puggle told WMRA she was born at the old Waynesboro hospital and has lived in the city her whole life. She wonders what she’s supposed to trust anymore. Big companies, she said, have flattened small towns like this one before, and nobody in her circle at the park believes the permit gets denied. A billion-dollar company builds first and asks forgiveness later, in her view, and the state hands out a pat on the head once construction money has already changed hands.

That skepticism has roots that go back nearly a century.

From 1929 to 1950, the DuPont plant that once operated in Waynesboro used mercury to manufacture rayon, and wastewater from the process drained into the South River. The Bay Journal has reported the contamination stretched more than 100 miles downstream through the South Fork Shenandoah, and it never fully left. Fish and snakes in the river still carry traces of it. DuPont eventually paid $50 million in 2017, the largest natural resource damage settlement in Virginia history, and yet a later restoration plan left Waynesboro itself without a direct share of the money. Locals remember that outcome. It shapes how they read every new promise from every new manufacturer that shows up wanting a permit.

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A company with a long paper trail

Residents skeptical of self-reported emissions numbers do not need to look only at DuPont’s history to make their case. Northrop Grumman itself carries a record from the other side of the country, one that predates its current name.

Beginning in the 1970s, the aerospace manufacturer Grumman contaminated groundwater beneath its Bethpage, New York, plant with the degreasing solvent TCE, and a 2020 Newsday investigation built on internal company records found the company knew about the spreading contamination for years and publicly denied responsibility during that same period. Confidential consultant memos going back to 1976 warned that the pollution could migrate into neighboring wells, and it did. Company spokespeople told the press the water was safe to drink around the same time federal regulators were privately telling the company otherwise, according to internal meeting notes Newsday obtained.

The Bethpage plume, now roughly four miles long and up to 900 feet deep, sits in the sole aquifer supplying drinking water to a large swath of Long Island. New York’s cleanup plan, unveiled after the state stopped relying on Grumman’s own pollution models, projects the effort will run $585 million over its first thirty years, with full remediation more than a century away. Northrop Grumman has told the state it spent $200 million on cleanup but has declined to itemize the figure, and it fought and defeated a lawsuit seeking to recover more than $30 million in costs that Long Island taxpayers had already covered.

None of that history involves the Waynesboro facility, which manufactures different products under different environmental rules and opened decades after the Bethpage contamination began. But it is the reason a segment of Waynesboro residents object to letting the company track and report its own emissions, rather than paying for an outside monitor. The Bethpage case shows what a company can know internally, and how long it can take that information to surface.

What DEQ has said so far

A first hearing in July, covered by WVTF, drew a packed room of residents pressing DEQ on how the agency would monitor a facility it does not physically staff. DEQ followed with a written response running fifteen pages, addressing public comments point by point. One line in that document has become a rallying point for opponents: the agency acknowledged the permit appears structured to keep the facility classified as what regulators call a synthetic minor source, a designation that lets a plant stay just under the federal threshold that would trigger tougher monitoring and pollution controls. DEQ’s position is that the company’s own emissions tracking, reviewed against that cap, satisfies the law as written.

Northrop Grumman has told reporters it expects its real emissions to land well below the 24.9-ton ceiling and has called itself committed to being a responsible neighbor.

Who’s pushing back

Carrie Eheart grew up in Waynesboro and now lives in nearby Stuart’s Draft. She has spent recent weeks organizing water testing across four sites in Coyner Springs Park, work she’s doing alongside a small group pushing DEQ to either reject the permit outright or require Northrop Grumman to fund independent, third-party emissions monitoring rather than reporting its own numbers. She put the stakes plainly to WMRA: once contamination sets into groundwater, there’s no calling it back. Everything downstream of it goes too.

Waynesboro Vice Mayor Lorie Jean Akanbi represents the ward where the plant sits, and she has broken from silence on the issue. In a statement, she said the city has lived through what environmental damage looks like a generation later, and that independent monitoring would give residents a level of confidence in the numbers that self-reporting alone cannot provide.

DEQ has said it will announce a final decision on the permit by October 22.

Sources: WMRA, WVTF, Bay Journal, Newsday, Virginia DEQ public hearing calendar.

Wooly worms, persimmon seeds, corn husk thickness. Every fall, the Valley runs its own informal winter forecast, and none of it holds up to scrutiny. This year there’s a real signal instead, and it comes from the Pacific Ocean.

NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center has been tracking one of the strongest El Niño events on record, and its reach extends to Massanutten and the Blue Ridge. The winter ahead looks wet but warm, and whether that produces snow on Reddish Knob depends almost entirely on timing.

Three Degrees Above, and Climbing

El Niño is a warming of surface waters in the central and eastern Pacific. NOAA’s latest diagnostic discussion, issued September 10, shows the current event still strengthening. Sea surface temperature anomalies in the eastern equatorial Pacific now exceed 3.0 degrees Celsius. NOAA’s model synthesis puts the odds at 75 percent that this event surpasses every El Niño on record dating back to 1950. The agency’s headline figure, a greater than 90 percent chance of a “very strong” event this fall and winter, has held for months and is now close to certain in NOAA’s own internal tables.

Michelle L’Heureux, a physical scientist with the Climate Prediction Center, told reporters this month that a stronger El Niño increases the odds of certain outcomes without guaranteeing them. That distinction is important for Virginia, where the numbers point in two different directions at once.

Wet, but Not Here Specifically

NOAA’s seasonal outlook, issued August 20 and covering September through November, favors above-normal temperatures across the Mid-Atlantic. On precipitation, the strongest wet signal in that outlook sits over the Southwest and the coastal Southeast and Gulf. Virginia’s interior isn’t part of that strongest band. The state sits in more ambiguous territory on NOAA’s own precipitation map, a detail that gets lost in national headlines built around the Southwest ski season.

The Coin Flip Over Wintergreen

OpenSnow’s 2026-27 winter forecast, built from historical analog years for strong El Niño events, draws a line across the Mid-Atlantic. West Virginia, Maryland, and western Pennsylvania, home to Snowshoe and Canaan Valley, carry a below-normal snowfall signal. Virginia carries an “equal chances” designation instead. OpenSnow names Wintergreen specifically, alongside Beech Mountain and Sugar Mountain in North Carolina, as terrain that benefited in past strong El Niño winters when cold air and an active storm track lined up at the same time.

A warmer winter can turn a wet storm into cold rain at valley elevations without much trouble. The open question for this region is whether the air is cold enough when the moisture arrives.

OpenSnow’s analog data points to January and February as the strongest window for snow in the Southern Appalachians, the stretch from North Carolina through Virginia and West Virginia. Early and late season lean neutral to below normal by comparison. A Christmas snow looks less likely than one in late January.

Boom or Bust

Multiple forecasters, including OpenSnow and the Farmers’ Almanac, describe East Coast snowfall in strong El Niño winters as boom or bust. Coastal storms and Nor’easters track farther north than usual, and when one lines up with a cold snap, a single storm can carry an entire season’s snow total. When it doesn’t line up, the season passes with almost nothing.

Washington, Baltimore, and Philadelphia have the same reputation in past El Niño winters, and the interior Valley isn’t exempt from the same math. One well-timed system could outproduce the rest of the winter combined. Or the pattern stays too warm too often, and most storms fall as rain even in January.

The Farmers’ Almanac calls the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic “changeable” this season, and notes the El Niño signal weakens once you cross the Appalachians. That tracks with OpenSnow’s read on Virginia: real upside, no guarantee.

The Orchard Problem

NOAA’s own outlook backs the warmer lean directly. Strong El Niño winters still produce sharp, short cold intrusions. They arrive less often than in a typical or La Niña winter, when Arctic air pushes south more easily.

That pattern, mild stretches broken by hard freezes, has caught Valley orchards before. A warm February followed by a March freeze is a known risk in El Niño years, and growers should plan for it rather than assume a mild winter means an easy spring.

When to Actually Watch the Sky

Virginia’s higher terrain has real potential this winter, even without a strong precipitation signal from NOAA’s own maps. January and February carry the best odds, so a flexible plan will serve hikers and photographers better than one built around the solstice.

For anyone who dreads ice more than snow, the uncertainty runs the other way. A warm, active winter means slush and freezing rain are just as likely as a clean snowfall, and those conditions tend to cause more trouble on Valley roads.

NOAA’s full Winter Outlook, the flagship seasonal product with a public briefing, has landed on the third Thursday of October for the past several years. That puts this year’s release at October 15. Check it directly once it’s out, at cpc.ncep.noaa.gov.

Until then, a ten-day forecast will tell you more than any seasonal outlook, especially in a winter this likely to swing between extremes.

Virginia students have been taught for generations that the Shenandoah Valley was essentially uninhabited when European settlers arrived, a convenient story that helped justify what happened next. Carole Nash, Director of the Environmental Archaeology Laboratory at James Madison University, has spent much of her career challenging that narrative with evidence rather than sentiment.

“So folks would look at the Valley Road Route 11 and talk about the Valley Road as though it was the warrior path, and that there were Iroquois or Haudenosaunee who were coming down through the valley and were controlling this territory — and that completely renders invisible the native people who were here,” Nash told WHSV in 2024. The invisibility, she argued, was not accidental. European settlers benefited from the idea that the Valley was empty, and the colonial record was shaped accordingly.

A Presence Dating Back 15,000 Years

Nash’s research, which builds on decades of archaeological work and a 2020 paper titled “Native American Communities of the Shenandoah Valley: Constructing a Complex History,” documents indigenous occupation of this region stretching back approximately 15,000 years, to the end of the last Ice Age. The earliest inhabitants were Archaic-period people who moved through the Valley seasonally, hunting large and small game and gathering wild foods. By the Woodland Period, communities had developed more settled patterns organized around cultivated food sources and increasingly complex relationships with neighboring groups.

The Monacan Nation, whose ancestral territory extended across western Virginia including the Blue Ridge and much of the Shenandoah Valley, traces its roots back roughly 10,000 years in this landscape. The Monacan are an Eastern Siouan-speaking people, closely related linguistically to neighboring tribes including the Manahoac, who occupied territory along the Rappahannock and its western tributaries, the Occaneechi, the Saponi, and the Tutelo. Sacred burial mounds, dating from roughly 1000 to 1400 A.D., are scattered across the Shenandoah Valley as lasting, physical markers of their presence; Nash has described these as “above-ground cemeteries, very sacred places.”

The Manahoac and the Colonial Catastrophe

The Manahoac people, who appear on colonial-era maps occupying territory between the Blue Ridge and the Piedmont east of it, met their end through violent destruction. Virginia colonial records document a pattern of armed slave-raiding by rival tribes armed with English weapons in the mid-to-late 1660s, raids that devastated Siouan-speaking villages in the interior. By 1669, the Manahoac presence had been reduced to a handful of survivors, and they disappear from the documentary record entirely by 1728, according to research on Virginia’s indigenous history.

Treaties negotiated between European colonial governments and the Iroquois Confederacy during the early 18th century further erased local peoples from official awareness. Those agreements transferred land claims and hunting rights, but did not include the local Siouan-speaking tribes who had actually occupied the territory, leaving the Monacan and their neighbors without legal standing in land negotiations that determined their own homelands.

The Shawnee and the 18th-Century Valley

The Shawnee, an Algonquian-speaking people whose range covered much of the Ohio River Valley and extended into the southern Appalachians, maintained a presence in the Shenandoah Valley in the period of early European settlement. A band of Shawnee was living near present-day Winchester when the first English settlement was established in the area in 1744; the band departed roughly around that time. The relationship between Shawnee communities in the Ohio River Basin and the Valley settlers that followed was repeatedly violent: border warfare and raids marked the years from roughly 1754 through the early 1770s, a conflict running parallel to the French and Indian War and its aftermath that shaped the region’s early European character as much as any other single factor.

The Monacan Nation Today

The Monacan are not a historical relic. The Monacan Indian Nation, now centered in Amherst County in the piedmont foothills east of Lynchburg, has an enrolled membership of roughly 1,600 to 2,000 people and is one of six Virginia tribes recognized by the federal government. The tribe’s ancestral museum, located in a former Episcopal church building that was designed to serve indigenous people, began collecting artifacts after the Episcopal Diocese returned 75 acres of land to the Nation in 1995. It remains one of the few places where the long history of Siouan-speaking peoples in this part of Virginia is formally preserved and interpreted.

Buried in Plain Sight

The burial mounds Nash references don’t announce themselves. They’ve weathered centuries, been built over, farmed around, and in some cases deliberately obscured. The Valley’s indigenous history has never entirely disappeared; it’s encoded in place names, embedded in the archaeological record beneath farm fields, and carried forward by communities like the Monacan that have survived everything the colonial and post-colonial record tried to do to them.

The name Shenandoah itself is indigenous in origin, derived from a word from the language of the people who lived here long before any road ran through the Valley or any county was carved out of it. The precise translation is debated by linguists, but the presence it records is not.

Carole Nash’s research on Native American communities in the Shenandoah Valley is available through the James Madison University Libraries. The Monacan Indian Nation’s ancestral museum is open to visitors in Amherst, Virginia. Further information on the Monacan Nation is available at monacannation.gov.