Today I got a chance to hike Old Rag Mountain in the Shenandoah National Park, and everything about it was phenomenal: yellow butterflies so heavy they wobbled in their paths, mountain laurel and tulip poplar in bloom, full streams feeding the spring life. The Old Rag Trail is most famous for the rock scrambles up to the summit, popular with hikers who enjoy a challenge. You can see the exposed rocks in these pictures.
Indeed, these rocks and mountains create awe in multiple ways. Besides their beauty, they are some of the most ancient materials on the planet. Old Rag is named after the Old Rag Granite that appears all around, and this stone formed about a billion years ago: almost a quarter of the age of Earth! Most materials from that time have long since been covered by other deposits or swallowed in the churning subduction of the planet’s crust. This happened to Old Rag too: the Old Rag Granite had greenstone, and then quartzite and sandstone, and finally limestone layers added atop of it over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.
That is, until about 300,000,000 years ago, when the process of shifting plate tectonics thrust Old Rag and the Blue Ridge Mountains (of which it is a part) up onto the exposed surface once again. Old Rag lies only 3,284 feet (1,001 meters) above sea level, but its modest height belies its antiquity.
