VAVirginia Geography

Two Virginia counties, Accomack and Northampton, cannot be reached from the rest of Virginia by land without either driving through Maryland or paying a toll to cross open water. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, opened in April 1964, carries US 13 for 17.6 miles from Virginia Beach to Cape Charles and drops into two mile-long tunnels so that Navy ships and container traffic can pass overhead. Before it was built, the Eastern Shore was a ferry ride from its own state capital.

Five provinces between the surf and the Cumberland Gap

Virginia contains every physiographic province the eastern United States has, and it fits them into roughly 430 miles of driving. Begin on the Coastal Plain, unconsolidated sand and clay barely above the tide. Climb the Fall Line at Richmond onto the Piedmont, a belt of worn crystalline rock. Cross the Blue Ridge into the Shenandoah Valley, then into the Valley and Ridge province with its long parallel folds, and finish on the Appalachian Plateau among the coal counties of the far southwest.

The Fall Line explains where the old cities sit. Alexandria, Fredericksburg, Richmond and Petersburg each grew at the head of navigation on a different river, the exact point where ocean-going boats had to stop and where falling water could turn a mill.

At the far end, the state narrows to a wedge in Lee County that reaches farther west than Detroit. Its tip holds the Cumberland Gap, a notch about 1,600 feet up in Cumberland Mountain where Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee meet, and the pass that funnelled settlers into Kentucky before any road existed.

Four rivers cut the Tidewater into fingers

The Potomac, Rappahannock, York and James all run southeast into the Chesapeake, and between them they slice the lowland into peninsulas that Virginians still call necks. The Northern Neck lies between the Potomac and the Rappahannock, the Middle Peninsula between the Rappahannock and the York, the Virginia Peninsula between the York and the James. Where the James meets the bay it opens into Hampton Roads, one of the deepest natural harbours on the Atlantic coast and the reason Norfolk grew where it did.

The Chesapeake is the largest estuary in the country, running roughly 200 miles from the mouth of the Susquehanna to the Atlantic. It is a drowned river valley, the Susquehanna's old channel flooded when sea level rose after the last ice age. Something older sits underneath the lower bay: an impact crater about 53 miles across, buried under sediment, mapped by drilling in the 1990s and dated to roughly 35 million years ago. Groundwater in that corner of the state is unusually salty because of it.

Tangier Island, out in the middle of the bay, has been losing shoreline for over a century to erosion and rising water, and its remaining ground is measured in acres rather than square miles.

A state line down the middle of a street

Virginia's northern boundary does not run down the centre of the Potomac. It runs along the low-water mark on the Virginia bank, an arrangement inherited from the colonial charter and confirmed by the Black-Jenkins Award of 1877. The river itself belongs to Maryland. The Supreme Court revisited the question in Virginia v. Maryland in 2003 and allowed Virginia to draw water without Maryland's permission, but left the line exactly where it was.

The Tennessee border produced something you can stand on. The line runs down the middle of State Street in Bristol, so one side of the road is Bristol, Virginia and the other is Bristol, Tennessee, with two municipal governments facing each other across the asphalt. The North Carolina boundary was meant to follow 36 degrees 30 minutes and still carries visible jogs where colonial surveyors drifted and later crews corrected them.

Virginia also divides its map differently from anywhere else. It has 38 independent cities, municipalities that sit inside no county at all, more than the rest of the country put together.

Mount Rogers, and two lakes nobody built

The highest ground is Mount Rogers in Grayson County at 5,729 feet, capped by a spruce and fir forest of a type that otherwise belongs a thousand miles north. Whitetop Mountain next door reaches 5,520 feet, and the open balds of the Grayson Highlands between them are grazed by a free-ranging pony herd. Sea level on the Atlantic is the low end, so the state covers a vertical range of 5,729 feet.

Nearly every body of standing water in Virginia is behind a dam. The exceptions are Lake Drummond, sitting near the centre of the Great Dismal Swamp on the North Carolina line, and Mountain Lake in Giles County, held by a natural rockslide and prone to draining itself down to mud for years at a time. Natural Bridge in Rockbridge County, a limestone arch 215 feet high, is the surviving roof of a cave that Cedar Creek dissolved out of the rock.

Heat on the plain, cold on the ridge

The record high is 110 degrees at Balcony Falls on July 15, 1954. The record low is 30 below zero at the Mountain Lake Biological Station on January 22, 1985. Both sites are within about 120 miles of each other in the western half of the state.

Hurricanes usually arrive here already weakened, which does not make them harmless. The remnants of Camille stalled over Nelson County in the Blue Ridge on the night of August 19, 1969 and dropped more than 27 inches of rain in a few hours onto steep, saturated slopes. The debris flows that followed killed over 100 people in a county that had assumed mountains meant safety from hurricanes.

All of Virginia keeps Eastern Time, from Chincoteague to the Cumberland Gap, even though the sun sets more than half an hour later in Lee County than it does on the Eastern Shore.

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