August 31st, 2008
Ok, so we were just at Max Patch a few months ago. However, since we were unable to get up the road to Snowbird Mountain, which was our intended hike, we came back to Max Patch.
As always, the views are superb. The meadows had recently been mown so there was more picnicking and camping than usual on the summit. We hiked up to Max Patch along the Appalachian Trail from where it crosses the forest road. After summitting, we followed the trail back down through a patch of forest. Ultimately it follows a series of meadows that make up an equestrian trail on a parallel ridge.
Roaring Fork Shelter is only a couple miles north of Max Patch Road. It doesn’t have direct access to the Roaring Fork river but you’ll have crossed the stream a couple times getting there and its a good place to stop for a snack.
On the hike back, we followed a combination of the equestrian trail and the Max Patch loop trail which stays below the summit but still crosses some big meadows and has excellent views into North Carolina. Trout found meadow hiking to be altogether confusing as it’s difficult to determine where the trail is.
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August 23rd, 2008
Beer festival season peaks in the southeast in September and October but there’s a few outliers. Chattanooga’s Southern Brewers Festival is one of those. It’s held in August when it is roughly 150 degrees in Chattanooga.
It’s a token-based beer festival, which means you have to buy a token for each beer. A token costs $3 so a beer isn’t really a trial size which discourages too much experimentation (only one of our beers ended up in the Tennessee River). Most of the festival is up along the edge of the city, but the river is more scenic so that’s what we have in the picture. A nice thing about this festival is that it runs for 11 hours! So, we arrived in Chattanooga, checked into a downtown hotel and came to the festival for several hours. In the afternoon we went back and took a nap and then came back for another round.
As beer festivals go, the entertainment was pretty good. In the afternoon things were pretty laid back. There was a qualifying round for the Krystals World hamburger eating championships. If you’ve ever seen any competitive eating on TV with that annoying announcer in the carnie hat, let me just say he’s 10 times more annoying in person. Incidentally, one has to eat 51 Krystals in 10 minutes in order to win a giant trophy. On the plus side, they handed out the uneaten Krystals afterwards and we can report that after several beers, Krystals actually taste pretty darn good.
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August 17th, 2008
This hike started and ended at the Hendersonville Resevoir parking area. If you head south from the trailhead, the Trace Ridge trail leads down to the N. Mills River. The last tenth of a mile or so of this trail is extremely steep. It meets the river trail near the confluence of Wash Creek at a very pretty spot.
The Nat’l Geographic Pisgah map shows the N. Mills trail ending here but it actually extends to the east as far as Yellow Gap Road. To the north and west, the trail runs for about 2 miles to meet a forest service road which connects back up to the trailhead. We did this hike during the drought (yet another drought) due to the high number of river crossings it entails. In fact, we counted 10 river crossings (11 if you start at Yellow Gap Road). One of these has a suspension bridge option, but the rest involving wading. A couple of the crossings were knee deep, even at very low water levels. There are quite a lot of good swimming holes along this trail and it’s a rather popular fishing spot as well.
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August 2nd, 2008
We’ve been lax about posting our hikes here lately, so even though this is a short one we’ll include it so we don’t appear to be dead or abducted by aliens.
The Black Mountain Crest trail is notoriously difficult. While we’ve hiked south from Mt. Mitchell back as far as the Blue Ridge Parkway, we hadn’t gone north on the BMCT yet. Our original intent was to travel several miles out. Upon leaving Mt. Mitchell the trail immediately drops several hundred feet. It then runs along a ridge before ascending up to Mt. Craig - the second highest peak in the Eastern US. This is where a rather sudden thunderstorm caught us. This picture is of the trail itself. Not a creek bed.
A 6000 foot ridge with sheer cliffs on either side is no place to be in a thunderstorm. With no better option we spent half an hour or more crouched in a grove of spruce trees. When the storm passed we were drenched. Worse than that, the already difficult trail was now slickrock with water streaming down it. We decided we should at least finish summiting Mt. Craig. It turns out that just 100 feet up the trail or so was a huge rock overhand that would be useful in future pop-up storms.
The view from Mt. Craig is worth the difficult, if short (1 mile each way) hike. From the top you can see… well, we could see cloud. Eventually the clouds cleared long enough for us to snap a few pictures and see the daunting line of thunderstorms across the western horizon making their way towards us. Reluctantly we decided that it just wasn’t a good day to be hiking on the highest ridge around and we headed back to Mt. Mitchell. We actually reached the car just seconds before driving rain started again, followed shortly by hail so perhaps that was a good decision.
Posted in Blue Ridge Parkway, Pisgah NF, SB 6000, hiking | No Comments »
May 26th, 2008
The TurkeyPen trailhead is in the southeastern corner of the Pisgah Ranger District. It’s got a couple advantages - first there’s a ton of interconnecting trails here so it’s pretty easy to customize a loop of the size you want. That’s actually a rarity in western NC. Secondly, many of the trails run along rivers and creeks so it’s a good area when it’s hot out, or when your dog wants to spend all day lying in rivers and creeks.
Our dog wanted to spend all day lying about in creeks. This is the Mills River. It’s an important feature of the Turkeypen area because several trails cross it. Most of them literally just run into the river and continue out the other side (see it over there?). If there’s been a lot of rain recently this can be a very wet proposition.
There is one suspension bridge over the river. Dogs apparently are not fond of swinging bridges. There were quite a lot of people in the area during our hike. Probably more than half of them were fishing along the Mills so we only saw a handful of other people along the trails.
We did come across this snake though. It’s impossible to tell from this picture but this was actually about a 4 foot long snake. We think it was a racer and it was probably either pregnant or it had just eaten one of those annoying yap dogs we’d passed earlier. Kudos to the snake either way.
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May 24th, 2008
This was actually sort of a composite day in the Pisgah Ranger District. We started out hiking along the MST from Big Ridge Overlook. It looks pretty impressive and much like most of the overlooks around here.
After this hike we went down to Slick Rock Falls which is an easily accessible waterfall. It’s visible from a dirt road in the Looking Glass area. In fact the trail (which we also hiked) goes up to several of the rock climbing routes on the west side of Looking Glass rock.
Posted in Blue Ridge Parkway, Mountains-to-Sea Trail, Pisgah NF, hiking, waterfalls | No Comments »
May 10th, 2008
Before our hike we spent a little time along Cold Creek in the Harmon Den area. There were hundreds of butterflies drawn to the salt deposits along the road so we have a few dozen pictures that look like this.
Mid-May is a great time to hike in the area because of the wildflowers. We headed north bound on the A.T. from Brown Gap, which starts with a decent climb but is relatively gentle and rolling after that.
The trilliums were particularly abundant. They’re a bit hard to see in this picture but all those specks of white and pink are trillium. It was pretty much deserted on this part of the mountain until we reached Max Patch. We decided not to climb to the top on this particular day. Instead we let Trout lie in a stream and cool off while we studied the map.
We decided we could take an alternate route back to Brown Gap. This started by taking the A.T. southbound for a quarter mile or so to the junction with the Cherry Creek Trail. We then took the Cherry Creek trail for maybe a half mile or so until it intersected an old forest service road (named 3533 on some maps). We left Cherry Creek Trail and followed the road along the ridge. This worked out great for a while at least. The road was broad and easy to follow and it was paralleling the A.T. about 200 ft below it. This is how it looked with a dog in the middle:
About halfway back to Brown Gap the road ends. This was not entirely unexpected as our A.T. map also showed the road ending. Our plan was to orienteer from here by following the 4000 ft. contour line around the ridge until it intersected the A.T. which would be descending towards Brown Gap at that point. Even in May the forest was pretty thick and there was a lot of sharp foliage (blackberries in particular). So when we encountered a really old road bed we decided to follow that instead. This road bed was long unusued and had substantial trees growing in it as well as fallen across it. It was quite clear that bears and deer used it though. Melanie’s theory was that it would connect directly into Brown Gap as we had noticed an old road leaving from a campsite there on our way out. In the end, she was right although it’s a bit of a circuitous route it takes to get there. We did it all with the A.T. map, a compass and an altimeter but I think if we did it again, a better topo map might help. On the other hand, it would be hard to get seriously lost in this area since everything on this side of the Appalachian Trail drains down to Harmon Den Road.
Posted in Appalachian Trail, Pisgah NF, cherokee NF, hiking, orienteering | No Comments »
May 4th, 2008
Little River Canyon has two components. The falls here are sort of in the middle. The northern section has no road access so we didn’t explore it on this trip. The southern section has a road running along the west side of the canyon. Also - we don’t have kids, but if we did, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t let them stand on the edge of these falls - although they’d be allowed to kayak it if they had a good roll 
Elsewhere in the canyon are numerous cascades and small waterfalls. Grace’s High Falls (shown here) are the highest in the canyon.
Little River Canyon has only been part of the National Park system for 8 or 9 years. Signage is not particularly good. There are a few overlooks along the canyon and some very select spots where hiking trails descend to the canyon floor. There’s also about two dozen unmarked pull-outs used by kayakers and climbers. The only place to get an actual map of the park is at the Canyon Mouth Park which is at the south end. The road up the rim from Canyon Mouth park is covered in warning signs, but other than being steep and full of switchbacks (as you’d expect), it’s not that bad.
From the canyon mouth you can hike up the river. There’s an assortment of good swimming holes and it was pretty crowded on a Sunday. About a mile or so upstream we stopped passing other people and eventually spent some time in the river. Trout in particular was happy to get in the water.
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May 3rd, 2008
Huntsville isn’t really a daytrip from Asheville but it’s an easy weekend trip. Our primary reason for going was the Whistle Stop Barbeque Competition where we happened to be judging the KCBS event.
This picture is the historic Huntsville Depot where the judging was based. As BBQ festivals go, this one had a very nice atmosphere with a well-attended amateur division and a busy entertainment schedule.
After the BBQ festival we went up to Monte Sano State Park which overlooks Huntsville and has some nice hiking trails. It’s a semi-urban setting for a state park, but if you’ve just eaten a pound or so of smoked meat it’s a good place to burn some of it off.
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April 12th, 2008
Hickory Hops is the first relatively local beer festival of the year. It’s basically a ring of thirty or so breweries around one tiny little park.
This has never been much of an issue in the past but Hickory Hops has been growing rather quickly and I suspect they may need more space in the near future. One nice aspect of Hickory Hops though is that it is right downtown and you’re free to come and go (as long as your beer glass is empty). This allows you to eat at some of the local restaurants which is good filler in between 10 or 20 samples of beer.
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