Photo Essay: Fall Can Take Your Breath Away

This classic view at Virginia Blue Ridge Parkway Milepost 83 shows Sharptop Mountain reflected onto Abbott Lake on an October morning. The lake is named after Stanley Abbott, first landscape architect of the parkway.

Autumn takes colorful root with these trees rising out of Parksville Lake near Ocoee, Tennessee.

Left: Perspective is from the the upper floor looking out of the window at the water wheel in the Hagood Mill, Hagood Mill Historic Site, Pickens, South Carolina. (Photo by Pat & Chuck Blackley) Right: Fall foliage glows around the swinging bridge at Babcock State Park, West Virginia. (Photo by Ed Rehbein)

Mingus Mill, in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, was built in 1886 and still located on its original site. The mill uses a water-powered turbine to power its machinery.

A cow seems to be pondering the view from along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Central Virginia.

Crisp Fall mornings often mean rising fog off of the calm sections of the Chattahoochee River in North Georgia.

A setting sun spotlights fall colors along Rough Ridge, a boulder-strewn summit near Blue Ridge Parkway Milepost 303. The 4,773-foot mountain top is less than a mile walk from the parkway.

Sunburst Falls, on the West Fork of the Pigeon River, flows under the arched North Carolina Highway 215 bridge near Canton, North Carolina.

This view of Wear Cove is from the recently completed section of the Foothills Parkway, Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

This fog-shrouded old building is in Linville, North Carolina near the Blue Ridge Parkway. Its original use was for a mill house where the owner ground corn.