The Gorge! Part One.

My son and I went to the Linville Gorge Wilderness today. I wanted to walk around in the forest and find a little solitude. Great day for seeing the mountains (cool temperatures and clear skies), but a bad day for solitude. Lots of other people were tramping around in the hills. That'll teach me to head up there on a Sunday.

I'll post details about the quick trip as the week progresses.

Looking into the Gorge from near the peaks known as The Chimneys.

American chestnut leaves. The common belief is that the American chestnut is extinct. It isn't, though. Not quite. You can often find them in the southern forests, sometimes fairly tall ones of twenty or even thirty feet. Almost all of these trees are sprouts from still-living root systems that send up shoots from time to time. Unfortunately, the fungal blight that destroyed our American chestnut forests is always waiting to strike, killing such trees before they can get very old. I saw--quite actually--hundreds of American chestnut trees today in the Gorge.

I found one fairly large American chestnut. Standing well over twenty feet. So I walked into the forest to see if it showed signs of the blight. As you can see, it does. The splitting bark is a signature of the deadly disease.

American Chestnut Tree

Every year when I go hiking in the southern Appalachians I'll stumble upon some American chestnut trees. It's really not all that unusual to see some of the legendary trees--they often sprout to the surface from root systems that are still active.

The thing is, eventually, the invasive chestnut blight finds them and kills them back. Often before they can reach a large enough size to start bearing nuts. There are, of course, exceptions. To date, there have been no blight-resistant native chestnut trees found. They always get the blight, and they always die.

A few years ago I did stumble upon one that had gotten fairly large (by modern standards) and was producing nuts. (I looked, but all of the nuts were gone--just burrs were left). I need to go back to this one to see if it's still there.

American chestnut tree leaves.

Burr of American chestnut.

This tree was part of a really huge grove of little American chestnut trees that I hiked through at the Sherando Lake Recreation Area in Virginia. None of them were very big though--nothing over a few feet tall.

Sherando Lake Recreation Area

 Carole and I took a short vacation to northwest Virginia. She wanted us to see a spot called Sherando Lake Recreation Area. We're always looking for new places where we can take our travel trailer, and this National Forest site seemed to have the things we like in a campground and forest setting. But reading about it on the Internet and seeing it up close and in person are different experiences. So we opted to make the four-hour drive north to check the place out.

It actually ended up exceeding our expectations. The campground itself is very nice and some of the sites even have electric hookups. We like this option, as it means that we don't have to carry our generator along with us. In addition, each camping loop has bathrooms with hot showers, which is another thing we look for since it means we don't have to tap into our onboard water tank to use for our trailer's shower.

And, of course, the presence of a lake makes for a good place to go swimming, paddling, and fishing.

What I had no knowledge of at all before we arrived was the quality of the hiking trails around the lake. I needn't have worried about that, since there is an extensive system of trails that lead from the Recreation Area up to, and beyond, the nearby Blue Ridge Parkway. There are any number of trails one can use to create a vast combination of hikes of various lengths and levels of challenge.

After we ate lunch Carole went back to the lake to swim and I headed off to do a loop hike of about five miles. The hike I picked combine three different trails and a very brief road hike that would take me around the lake, up the heights of Torry Ridge, and back down to the lake. I was only expecting an average hike with average views, but I was rewarded with a loop that was far more spectacular than I had thought.

The trail follows the even terrain along the lake shore and then tackles the steep slopes of Torry Ridge. After a tough climb you come to the first overlook called, appropriately, Overlook Rock. This is a big quartzite cliff that affords a really impressive grandstand over the gorge and toward the high peaks surrounding the area. You look down from a considerable distance down on the lake.

After that, I headed on down the trail and came to the Torry Ridge junction and the high point of the hike. This spot was a forested spit of rock that was kind of neat, but I quickly headed on after making sure I'd hit the high point.Within about a half mile, though, I came to what I really wanted to see--a vast talus field that leads up from near the shores of the lake all the way to the top of the ridge. This talus field of shattered quartzite rock is impressive, and walking along it was a lot of fun.In addition,  it offered even better views than I'd seen from Overlook Rock.

From there I only expected a typical hike through second-growth forests back down to the lake but I was again surprised to find that the trail follows a very long cliff as it initially only slowly descends the mountain slopes. For about a mile one is rewarded with great views from pale quartzite spots along the trail before it finally begins to head down the mountain and into the valley.

My final surprise of the day was when I began to notice some vaguely familiar leaves in the forest around me. At first I barely noticed them, but then I realized that I was probably looking at American chestnut leaves. So I stopped to examine them more closely. Sure enough, I was pretty darned sure I had stumbled upon a patch of our native chestnuts. This isn't as rare as you would think, as the trees do occasionally pop up from root systems that have managed to survive over the decades since the chestnut blight killed off the vast chestnut-dominated forests of the Appalachians. But what did surprise me was how many of the trees that I was seeing. In quick order I counted a dozen or so of them, most of them less than ten feet tall. I have no doubt that this young grove will eventually succumb to the blight, but it was nice to see so many of them growing so thickly.

Sherando Lake Beach.

First good overlook.

Self-portrait standing at the big talus field.

Looking down from the talus field toward Sherando Lake far below.

Standing at the top of the talus field.

Great signage and infrastructure along the trails.

Along the line of cliffs on the way down.

Mushrooms.

American chestnut trees.

And the mountain laurel were in bloom.

Not Quite Gone

Every once in a while in my hikes around the southern Appalachians I'll happen upon a tree that I suspect is an American chestnut. Contrary to popular belief, the species is not quite extinct. Occasionally one will be found in some isolated place. This was one that I found near in the Pisgah National Forest along the crest of a high mountain--somewhere between 4,500 and 5,000 feet above sea level. The photo of the seed burr was on a part of the tree that was dead...but not because of blight, but because a bit of the tree had been snapped partially off either in a high wind or when a large branch fell from another tree and broke it. The main part of the tree was full and healthy.

Since my tree knowledge is horrible, I'm not always sure what I'm looking at. I could remedy this by taking a few classes at a local college or finding a study partner. My own ability to learn this stuff is a lost cause. Outside of my writing, I don't have the discipline to teach myself such things--my mind constantly wanders. It's at times like finding this tree that I regret not paying attention to my dad when we'd go hiking in the woods when I was a kid. He knew every tree we'd see. It didn't matter if we were in the low country or in the mountains--he knew them all. He'd point out a tree, tell me how to identify it, and the information would go into one ear and quickly out the other.

Alas.

Seed burr on part of the tree that had snapped off some time before.

Shot of the leaves on the majority of the tree that was intact and, apparently, healthy.