6 Virginia Mountain Towns Locals Love (and 3 Tourists Overrun)

Think you’ve seen the Blue Ridge because you crawled down Skyline Drive one Saturday?

You haven’t.

The best of Virginia’s high country hides at the far ends of I-81, past the exits everybody already knows.

These are the Virginia mountain towns locals keep for themselves, and the crowded ones they’d tell you to skip.

1. Floyd

Floyd sits high in Virginia’s Blue Ridge. It has one traffic light and about 450 people at the last census.

One light.

It’s the only incorporated town in the whole county, so everything happens on the same few blocks.

Every Friday night, the Floyd Country Store clears its wood floor and the Jamboree takes over, with old-time string bands and neighbors flatfooting until the last tune.

The Blue Ridge Parkway curls through Floyd County on its way south, past the Rocky Knob overlooks most drivers never slow down for.

Come for the music, and stay because nobody’s rushing you out the door.

2. Damascus

Damascus barely clears 800 residents, and the Appalachian Trail runs straight down its main avenue.

Right through town.

Five long-distance trails meet here, enough to earn the name Trail Town USA.

The Iron Mountain Trail and U.S. Bicycle Route 76 cross through as well, so the sidewalks fill with hikers and cyclists half the year.

Every May, Trail Days brings more than 20,000 hikers back for the biggest gathering of Appalachian Trail walkers anywhere.

Bike shops hand you a helmet for the downhill coast from Whitetop Station along the Virginia Creeper Trail.

Then the crowds thin, and Damascus goes back to being a porch-swing town.

3. Abingdon

Abingdon holds down the far southwestern corner of Virginia, a brick-front town built around the Barter Theatre.

During the Depression, actors took eggs, ham, and garden vegetables in place of ticket money.

Hence the name.

Virginia later made the Barter its official State Theatre, and it’s been staging shows since 1933.

The Virginia Creeper Trail rolls to its finish here after thirty-five miles down from Whitetop Mountain.

Come August, the Virginia Highlands Festival fills the sidewalks with Appalachian crafts for the better part of two weeks.

4. Marion

Marion rides the I-81 corridor through Smyth County, an old county seat hikers use to resupply before heading into the high country.

Just outside town, Hungry Mother State Park has drawn swimmers and hikers since the 1930s, one of Virginia’s six original state parks.

Barely a crowd.

The lake stays calm on a weekday, ringed by forest and a sand beach that fills up only on the hottest afternoons.

Downtown stays walkable too, a few blocks of cafes and storefronts tucked under the ridgelines.

5. Monterey

Monterey counts about 165 residents, the seat of Highland County, the least populous county in Virginia.

Folks call it Virginia’s Switzerland for the steep ridges and the cold, high valleys.

Way up there.

Two weekends every March, the Highland County Maple Festival pulls more than 60,000 people in for syrup, buckwheat cakes, and sugar-camp tours.

The rest of the year, the elevation keeps the crowds thin and the woodstoves going.

6. Buchanan

Buchanan straddles the upper James River in Botetourt County, right where the Blue Ridge starts to climb.

State Route 43 leaves Main Street and switchbacks up to the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Peaks of Otter.

Steep grade.

Founded back in 1811, the town grew up as a river crossing, and barely twelve hundred people live there now.

Anglers still have long stretches of the James River mostly to themselves, while Parkway traffic hums somewhere on the ridge above.

Most travelers blow past on I-81 and never know Buchanan’s down there by the water.

3 Tourists Overrun

Now for the mountain towns Virginians love in theory and avoid in July, when the tour buses and cavern lines take over.

1. Luray

Luray built its name on the caverns beneath it, and Page County has cashed in ever since.

Down in Luray Caverns, the Great Stalacpipe Organ taps stalactites across three and a half acres, which Guinness ranks as the world’s largest musical instrument.

Worth seeing.

About half a million people file through the caverns every year, and the town is also the closest one to the Thornton Gap entrance to Skyline Drive.

So Shenandoah traffic pours through, and locals time their errands around the tour buses.

2. Front Royal

Front Royal marks mile zero of Skyline Drive, the northern gate into Shenandoah National Park.

From there the road runs 105 miles down the ridge at a strictly enforced 35 miles per hour.

Bumper to bumper.

The town also sits at the confluence of the two forks of the Shenandoah River and calls itself the Canoe Capital of Virginia.

So summer weekends stack tubers and paddlers onto the water on top of everyone headed for the park.

Great launch point, rough place to park.

3. New Market

New Market sits at an I-81 exit at the foot of Massanutten Mountain, and two things keep the buses rolling in.

One’s the battlefield.

On May 15, 1864, teenage cadets from the Virginia Military Institute charged across these fields in a Civil War fight the town still reenacts every spring.