Photos on Friday: Autumn sunrise in Shenandoah National Park

With October quickly slipping away, I realized we hadn't made our annual fall trip to the Shenandoah National Park. In recent years we had been heading to the park more often during the summer months to see the butterflies and wildlife, however, we like to at least try to see the beautiful foliage at least once. We made what is likely to be our last trip of the year to the park last weekend. Decided the day before to make it an early day and get out there before sunrise.

We just about made it to Mary's Rock Tunnel (a hop, skip, and a jump past mile marker 32) when we began to see glimpses of daylight, which was perfect since I was hoping to stop at the overlooks between here and mile marker 36 for the day's trip. Here are some photos we captured in that stretch of Skyline Drive.

This was taken a few minutes after we arrived. That white spot next to the tree we believe is Venus after checking Google Sky. It was shining very brightly that morning.

We were the second car to arrive, within minutes several other cars pulled up to enjoy what looked like was going to be a spectacular show.

And here comes the sun! At this point we had moved a bit further south.

A few minutes later

Peaceful morning in the mountains. We parked in a lot across the street at one of the gaps and stood on a rock wall to watch the rest of the sunrise.