Escaping the Heat Part II

On Sunday we escaped the heat of Charlotte for the high country near Mount Mitchell. One place that we had visited briefly in the past but never stopped to enjoy was the Carolina Hemlock Recreation Area. It's on NC 80 a few miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway. It was developed many years ago by the Civilian Conservation Corps, in the days when socialist programs could be enacted and put in place without too much screaming and stomping by right wing elements in the government. Those were the days, by gosh!

The main reason for this spot being placed here by the CCC boys is that this particular area on the South Toe River has a few very nice, very deep swimming holes. One of these has a set of rock stairs and a retaining wall so that it serves now as a kind of beach. When we arrived, we were the only ones there, but we knew that would change as the day progressed. So in short order we paid our $3.00 day use fee and picked out a picnic spot all to ourselves and prepared the grill with charcoal and the table with food and such. While Carole was getting the grill ready for cooking, I explored the river and searched out the various swimming holes.

Once upon a time the recreation area was green with the namesake hemlock trees. But now the only healthy hemlocks are the ones that have been treated against adelgid infestation by the application of insecticides. You can tell by the health of the various stands of trees how much money the National Forest Service had to spend at each step of the insect plague. The hemlocks closest to the bathrooms at the campsites look like hemlocks are supposed to appear--fully green with thick needles and lots of new growth. Hemlocks further out from there look sick, but perhaps in a state in which they can survive if the nicotine-based chemicals have been applied in time. And farther away than those, you can see the trees that are a lost cause, although some of them have been marked as having been treated--too late. And, of course, there are the dead hemlocks standing bare and ghostly everywhere around where no one had the funds or foresight to treat them.

After I explored a bit and we took some photos, we just relaxed and talked. In time, we cooked up some Polish sausages with sauerkraut and mustard and had potato salad with them. They were delicious. After that, we packed up our stuff and drove a few yards to the beach parking and walked down to the water's edge and jumped into the cool waters of the South Toe River. We had a great time just soaking up the sun and swimming back and forth and up and down the swimming hole. The water is deep enough so that you can safely jump and dive into the pools. As we knew, the crowds grew as the hours passed until at some point the beach was packed from end to end with families and couples doing as we were--enjoying the recreation area.

Toward 2:00 pm the numbers of people were grating on our need for solitude, so we gathered up our stuff, took a few last photos, and then headed up the road to see a couple of other places that were on our agenda. More on that tomorrow.


Minerals Museum and Blue Ridge Parkway Visitors Center at the intersection of the Parkway and NC 226. I like this spot and almost always visit it on drives along the Parkway.

The rhododendron was in full bloom. I took this shot almost as soon as we pulled in to the Carolina Hemlock Recreation Area.

My simple Canon A1100IS isn't the best camera on the market, but sometimes I can capture a nice shot or two when I'm playing around with the macro settings. This blossom was busy with these tiny black bumblebees. These are the type of bee that stung me on Wilson Creek last year and caused me to drop my camera into a waterfall.

This is the picnic pavilion at the recreation area. You can rent this for the day. The barbecue pit on the right is double sided and you could likely grill up some huge sides of beef or pork on those babies. They keep this place very clean and in good order.

Stairs leading down from the pavilion to the South Toe River.

From the river's shore looking back up at the pavilion.

Each hemlock tree that has been treated against Hemlock wooly adelgid has these little tags nailed on them. In some cases, the trees were dead anyway.

Carole roasts yellow corn for lunch! Yum!

This was our picnic spot right by the South Toe River.

Carole took this of me in the deepest pool. You can see people leaping into the water behind me, and kids sitting on a boulder in the middle of the river.

This was the big swimming hole above the official beach area.

Nice Ron Paul article for those of you still too stupid to see how evil he and his son are.

Some Waterfalls from 2007.

Not too much work on the novel today. Work was high pressure due to the retirement of our longest serving letter carrier at the station. Archie Smith is calling it quits after more than forty years working for the USPS. Yep, 40+ years. There was a huge going-away party for Archie which put us (appropriately) off schedule, thus making for a longer day and correspondingly tougher work. I had to walk a lot faster to try to make my normal leave time. But the celebration was the best one in a while. Our station is currently experiencing a high level of retirements since we have more than our share of employees who have more than thirty years of work in at USPS. We've seen quite a few retire this year with more scheduled to cash in their chips before December. It's sad to see them go (especially when I have to stay).

Here are some of the waterfalls Carole and I visited (or sometimes just me) in 2007.

This one, I assume, has no name. It's a falls located in the Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington in New Hampshire.

Also on Mount Washington just a short hike above the Joe Dodge Lodge.

I shot this one with the telephoto lens from the opposite side of the Blackwater Canyon in West Virginia. Notice all of the living hemlocks in this shot. I wonder if they're still alive?

This isn't really a natural waterfall. But this old footbridge on the Toe River below Mount Mitchell in North Carolina makes for a great swimming hole. We had a good time there in the summer of 2007.

I found this waterfall by accident when I took the wrong road and trail trying to find the Woody Ridge Trail in the Black Mountains of North Carolina. I think it's called White Oak Falls.

Probably one of the strangest waterfalls I've ever seen. It's called Virgin Falls and is located in the Virgin Falls Pocket Wilderness in Tennessee. The hike down into the valley was hot and muggy. This waterfall appears out of the mouth of a cave and drops down into a sinkhole and then vanishes into the earth again. The amazing thing about the sinkhole was that the temperature PLUMMETED when I hiked down into it. Which was a very refreshing relief from the heat through which I'd been hiking. This is the only waterfall I've ever seen that seems immune to drought. I visited this wilderness in the midst of one of the worst droughts in the past 200 years and while all of the other waterfalls in the area were either dry or nearly dry, this one was chugging away at its normal rate.

Burgess Falls in Tennessee. This waterfall was doing okay during the drought because it's partially fed by a dammed lake above it.

Another, lesser falls, in Burgess Falls State Park in Tennessee.

This is Twin Falls in Rock Island State Park. Although it's not advertised as such, this is an artificial waterfall created by an impounded lake on the other side of the ridge.

Another waterfall in Rock Island State Park.

Blackwater Falls in Blackwater Falls State Park in West Virginia. There have been efforts for years to turn this area and the gorge around it into a new National Park. However, the coal, timber, and gas industries in West Virginia have fought this effort relentlessly. This is why it's important to keep government stronger than corporations. Without government, the population of the USA is at the complete a total mercy of greedy, rapacious, jackass industrialists.

Fall Creek Falls in Tennessee. Again, in the midst of a hideous drought. This waterfall is normally a thundering sight. But the days we were there it was reduced to almost a slight mist filtering over the precipice.

I stitched this together from shots I took from the base of Falls Creek Falls. Technically, this is the single highest drop for a waterfall in the eastern USA. There are higher falls, yes, but none with a higher single unhindered drop.

Hot and Cold

Here are a pair of short videos from two different trips to the Black Mountain Campground.

The first, very brief one is my nephew, Mark, doing a back flip into the swimming hole on the South Toe River just a few yards from our campsite.

The second video is of the same swimming hole two years later. The only reason I wasn't swimming in there on the second visit was the vast difference in temperature. In June of 2006, it was in the 80s. In September of 2008, the temperatures were in the low 60s. Alas, it was too chilly to go swimming.

But still nice for lookin'.