Too Many Humans!

To put it mildly, I don't like crowds. All of my life, places like rodeos, fairs, circuses, festivals, parades, marches, zoos, amusement parks...pretty much any kind of gatherings over a dozen people give me the creeps. I do like state parks and National Parks, because while the areas around the roads and parking lots can be crowded, I know that all I have to do is hike half a mile from the main arteries and I will find solitude and silence and peace.

Usually.

Carole and I had decided to drive up to Roan Mountain where some of the best natural rhododendron gardens on the planet can be found. I've lived here in North Carolina for more than three decades and every year when the flowers are at their peak I have missed the show. I can't say why. So, this year we decided to drive up to Roan on Saturday, June 17 to see the flowers in what we'd been told were their peak.

We got to the area about 9:30 in the morning and immediately hit a traffic jam in Elk Park, TN. Why? Because the area was holding a RHODODENDRON FESTIVAL over the weekend. And we're not talking about a few hundred people. No. Tens of thousands had arrived as a mass to see the flowers and to attend a craft fair being held in Roan Mountain State Park. Bumper-to-bumper traffic. It was maddening stop and go as we approached the craft fair near the state park office.

After we passed the craft show, traffic opened up and got light the final ten miles to the trail head we wanted to use. Our plan was to park in Carvers Gap and hike a few miles up the Appalachian Trail to Grassy Ridge Bald where the best of the flowers were said to bloom.

Uh-uh. Wasn't going to happen.

Carvers Gap had become a mass traffic jam. The closest spot to park was about a mile either side of the Appalachian Trail. So a round trip distance of two miles would be added to any hike, and Carole was not up to that ridiculous shit. Truth to tell, even if I'd been alone I wouldn't have done it. The Appalachian Trail was like a human freeway. Hundreds of people were moving in a steady line headed for the ridges to see the rhododendron.

Shit.

We stopped at a road block and spoke to a ranger and he suggested that we might be able to park and view the rhododendron at the old Cloudland Hotel site up on Roan High Knob. So we did this, only to find that the crowds were almost as bad there. The parking lots were almost full, but we found a spot to leave the car and began to hike the short loop trails near the summit. Only to find that they, too, were uncomfortably packed with humans. We often had to quite actually wait in line to walk past knots of people clogging the trail!

Yeah. It was about as close to a nightmare for me as it gets. Here I find myself in a place of natural beauty, but it's so crowded with goddamned people that I almost can't breathe.

With no other option, we chose to leave the area and head over to the Blue Ridge Parkway to hit Mount Mitchell State Park. Carole had not been there in a while and I had not made any backup plans for secondary hikes. Yes, I should have done a little more research, but I hadn't done that. If I'd known, we could have gone hiking somewhere else that was not being used by tens of thousands of people for a damned rhododendron festival.

We ended up on Mount Mitchell in alternating passing clouds and mild rain showers. Fortunately, the weather was good for some atmospheric photos (59 degrees!) and we ended up having a decent time, stopping to grill burgers and hot dogs at a picnic area. All in all, we did manage to salvage the day, which is a good thing. You know what they say: a bad day in the mountains is better than the best day in town.

Carole hiking at the old Cloudland Hotel location. Only two other humans visible in this shot, which amazes me. I got lucky and was able to avoid the several hundred others wandering around stinking up the joint.

I have to say, the flowers were gorgeous and most of them were either in, or approaching, full bloom.

This is the kind of crowds that make my skin crawl when I go to the mountains.

We found a nice picnic area and grilled out.

Lighter hued rhododendrons at lower altitudes.

Lots of flame azalea, also.

And plenty of Mountain laurel were still in full bloom, too!

The modern handicap accessible lookout on the summit of Mount Mitchell. A couple was sitting on Elisha Mitchell's grave (he's buried on the summit) having a good ol' time, I reckon.

Clingman's Peak from the summit of Mount Mitchell.

The Old Tower

I miss the old viewing tower on the summit of Mount Mitchell, the highest summit in the eastern USA. It was a curious building constructed of native rock with a unique timber framing supporting the platform at the top. There was something strange about it...the tower collected dampness inside the stairwell and climbing to the top was always a kind of moist, claustrophobic experience.

The state park service decided to tear it down sometime...I think around 2005 or 2006 (I've forgotten). For some reason I never took any closeup photos of the tower with my digital camera. Not sure why I didn't. Perhaps I thought it was here to stay. Unfortunately, apparently there were enough complaints that it wasn't handicap accessible, so it was demolished and a newer design was installed to replace it.

The new platform has a long, low ramp that allows wheelchairs easy access. However, the new tower is not very tall and it won't take long for the recovering balsam forests to block out the views. So the park service will probably have to chop down a whole bunch of fraser firs to allow all of those wheelchair-bound people to continue to enjoy the view.

Anyway, here are a couple of photos that I took of the tower from the summit of nearby Mount Craig, the second highest peak in the eastern USA. What a difference a few feet makes. Because Mount Craig is only the second highest, it didn't have a roadway carved into its flanks and a tower placed on its high point. Thank Jove for that difference, else it would be Mount Craig with its highest real estate raped by the hand of Man.

The old tower as it appeared from Mount Craig.

A cropped image. I think I have some old film photos of the tower up close. I'll have to dig through them to see.

On that day in November of 2004 I snapped this shot on the way back to that parking lot. I had almost bitten off more than I could chew. The long hike to Winter Star and back to my truck was more than I had bargained for. I barely got back to my vehicle before nightfall when the gates were locked. You can see all of the dead balsam trees in this shot...the forest had been devastated by an invasive pest (balsam wooly adelgid). These days the forests at the top have largely recovered.

Gone Forever

I was sifting through older digital photographs today and happened upon a number from hikes at one of my very favorite places: The Black Mountain Crest Trail along the spine of North Carolina's Black Mountains. These are the highest mountains in the eastern United States. This particular trail is one of the toughest I've ever hiked. It's only about twelve miles long, but all of the constant ups and downs and the extremes of topography means that it has never failed to take me to the limits of my physical abilities. I generally end up all but crawling back to my starting point.

One of the very few photos I have of the old lookout tower on Mount Mitchell. I took this one from near the top of the second highest peak in the eastern USA, Mount Craig.

For some reason, in most of my hikes there, I would generally stop off at the lookout tower on the summit of Mount Mitchell (the highest point in the range), but I never took a good photo of the old tower! It was a strange design for a tower, and rather unique in its way. However, it was apparently pointed out somewhere along the way that it was not user-friendly for disabled people. And so the decision was made to tear it down and rebuild a lookout tower that was more accessible to people who can't walk.

Now, my own opinion about such things is basically that life isn't fair. And our high points are not curiosities for those who can't or shouldn't be there in the first place. Almost every high point in the eastern USA has had a road carved to its summit so that lazy people can drive there. It's a travesty. I would love to see the auto roads carved into places like Brasstown Bald, Clingman's Dome, Mount Washington, etc. to be torn up, filled in with native earth and replanted with native trees and shrubs so that such roads would--in time--become bad memories on the faces of these great peaks.

Hiking with lardasses. (Theme for a later blog.) One of my pals chooses carefully when he goes hiking with groups, trying to avoid hikes that include a bunch of lardasses. My own weight fluctuates wildly. Sometimes I'll weigh as much as 240+ pounds, as I did on this backpack on the Black Mountain Crest Trail. Other times I'll weigh around 185 or so. Fortunately for me, even when I'm a lardass, I have always been able to hike on steep mountain slopes. But, yeah, I prefer not to be a lardass.

So, to get back to the point, the old tower was removed from Mount Mitchell. It was slowly torn down, rock by rock, until the old surface was revealed and the new lookout point was put up--also slowly. Weather on Mitchell can be tough (to make an understatement) and it finally was completed. Today, folk in wheelchairs and on crutches can roll and hobble up a slight incline to a wide concrete surface to take in the view. Indeed, the new tower is less harsh against the skyline than the old one. It has that going for it. I don't know what plans the park service has for the day when the recovering balsam forests begin to rise up and block the views. For such a day will surely come if the acid rain and balsam wooly adelgid do not once again combine to kill off these forests as they did in the 1980s and 1990s. I fear they'll cut down the recovering trees so that the lazy and the disabled won't be inconvenienced.