Archive for May, 2007

Buck Creek

Saturday, May 26th, 2007

We’re pretty much willing to do anything that involves messing about in rivers or streams, so it seemed worthwhile to spend a few hours on our way through Macon County hunting for garnets in Buck Creek.

Buck Creek

It’s not really hunting.  Generally if you reach into the silt along the river you’ll pull out a dozen or so, although they’ll be so small it’s hardly worth isolating them.  Buck Creek is in Nantahala National Forest, just west of where US 64 crosses the Appalachian Trail.  We spent about an hour or so fishing around for some big enough to save before we started to lose interest and just ended up playing around in the creek.  Besides the garnets there is an old corundum mine on the hillside above the creek, and also some fairly large chunks of talc lying about the area.

Garnets

Here’s a pile of almandine garnets we found.  It’s traditional to include a coin in pictures like this to show scale but well, it’s more impressive if we don’t.

Posted in Nantahala NF, Rockhounding | No Comments »

Craggy Pinnacle

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

Craggy Trail

With mom recovering from back problems, naturally we dragged her up a reasonably large mountain.  Actually, we’d never been up Craggy Pinnacle before but it was reportedly an easy hike with a good view.  Unfortunately the rhododendrons were not blooming yet.  The hike is about 3/4 of a mile, fairly steep.  I’m told that if you’re recovering from back problems it is quite challenging.

Craggy Dome

The summit of Craggy Pinnacle has several observation decks with good views in all directions along the Blue Ridge Parkway and back towards Asheville.  The Craggy Mountains are a small sub-range of the Blue Ridge which feature Craggy Pinnacle (we’re standing on it in this picture), Craggy Dome (that’s it across the parking lot from here), and Craggy Mountain (behind us).  Besides being creatively named, these peaks are all near 6000 ft although only Craggy Dome (the lump out there) is over 6000 ft.  We hiked it previously for the South Beyond 6000.  It looks gentle from here but there’s no real trail to the top so it involves foraging through blackberries and rhododendrons.  The summit does not have much of a view.  In fact, it looked vaguely like this up there when we previously visited:

Craggy Dome Summit

Posted in Blue Ridge Parkway, SB 6000, hiking | No Comments »

McDowell Woods Score-O

Saturday, May 5th, 2007

McDowell Woods

We were in Charlotte for a couple reasons.  First – we had to pick up a refrigerator so that we can brew lagers as well as ales, but that’s probably a whole separate entry.  The other reason was the Carolina Orienteering Klubb’s Score-O meet in McDowell Nature Reserve.  There was a two-hour limit on it but it’s still good practice for some of the 24-hour races we’re planning to do later this summer.

orienteering flag

It had been raining all morning so pushing through the foliage left us drenched fairly quickly.  Generally we weren’t real fast but I think our route choices and navigation were good.  We ended up in 4th place overall, including a stumbling sort of sprint through a swamp at the end to get back to the finish line inside the 2 hour time limit (actually it was more like right exactly at the 2 hour limit).

Bridge’s

Having already involved beer (or beer-related acquisitions) and orienteering in the day, there was nothing left to do but go visit a new site (for us) on the North Carolina BBQ Trail.  This is Bridge’s in Shelby, NC.  Here you can find, well… pork.  Bridge’s has a fairly strict interpretation of the NC BBQ menu with pork and slaw dominating (although the deviled egg sandwich is vaguely intriguing).  The pork is chopped, the sauce is a warmed tomato-vinegar concoction and the hush puppies are particularly good in pimiento cheese.  (That was sort of an accident originally but it worked out well.)

Posted in barbeque, orienteering | No Comments »