Author – Page 5 – mrfs.net – the little trips pages

Big East Fork Trail

This wasn’t our first hike of the year, but it was our first interesting hike – outside of the Asheville commuter section of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The Big East Fork trailhead is on 276 just north of the parkway.

There are a couple trails that leave from the area but we followed the Big East Fork trail which follows the Pigeon River all the way up to the headwaters of one particular branch. Just above that the trail meets the Mountains-to-Sea trail near the parkway.

Along the way are some great swimming holes. Since there was still snow in shaded valleys, we didn’t actually test this. Trout did though and he seemed to like it.

Snowshoe, West Virginia

Normally we don’t take the camera with us for day trips to nearby NC ski areas like Cataloochee and Sugar. We probably should. We did take it to Snowshoe though so we have pictures to post.

When we arrived at Snowshoe on Tuesday night it was -7 on top the mountain with an insanely cold wind. By the time we left Thursday afternoon it looked like this in the village square.

The skiing was fantastic on Wednesday. Uncrowded, good snow and everything was covered. The next day it warmed up to 50 and things got a bit slushy but in general we can’t complain about the skiing at all. We will complain a bit about Snowshoe’s management of the village though. When you check in, they give you a printout of all the stores, restaurants and bars in the village with opening / closing hours for that week. This printout is completely and utterly useless. We didn’t realize it the first night but since things were slow most places just closed when they felt like it. Furthermore, half the places on the list have hours like “open til close”. Very useful. The second night there were actually groups of people roving about on the shuttles trying to find open establishments. Information is generally hard to find at Snowshoe so it’s disappointing that the one thing they do give you is wrong.

You know you’re in West Virginia when the beer comes in mason jars. Actually, Melanie spent at least 45 seconds creating this still life so it had to be included on the blog. The local West Virginia beers are worth seeking out. In general, most places that advertise a wide selection of beer actually carry every brand that can be followed by the word “light”.

The Western Territory at Snowshoe is really two 1 1/2 mile runs. These are by far the longest runs at Snowshoe and they remain relatively uncrowded because only advanced skiers venture over here.

WNC Nature Center

We actually go to the WNC Nature Center fairly often since it’s located right here in Asheville, but we never post pictures from it, so here are a couple.

jumping wolf

In late afternoon before the nature center closes everything tends to be particularly active (it’s feeding time!). This wolf was doing laps, apparently to build up his appetite.

melanie_sheep

We also tend to skip the petting zoo portion but since we were with our 3 year old niece we stopped by. Now, Melanie has a new friend.

Max Patch

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.

Southern Brewers Festival

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.

Melanie, a beer and the Tennessee River

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.

N. Mills River Trail

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.

Mt. Craig

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.

TurkeyPen

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.

Big Ridge / SlickRock Trail

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.

Brown Gap to Max Patch

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.

Little River Canyon

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.

Huntsville, Alabama

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.

Hickory Hops

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.

Grassy Ridge in the Roan Highlands

Grassy Ridge is the oft-overlooked third peak over 6000 feet in the Roan Highlands area.

Climbing up from Carver’s Gap one first has to summit Round Bald and Jane Bald. The day before this hike it had been 65 degrees in Asheville, but it was spitting snow by the time we finished the hike. The snow on the west side of the conifers atop the balds was proof that it had been snowing recently as well. That is Grassy Ridge in the background of the first picture.

The views along this entire hike are spectacular. The Black Mountains including Mt. Mitchell are clearly visible on the NC side. The city of Roan Mountain, TN and surrounding area including Strawberry Mountain are visible to the west. From Grassy Ridge the ski areas around Boone and Grandfather Mountain are visible (including the horrendous bit of construction atop Sugar Mountain). Here are Melanie and Trout resting atop Jane Bald. We had intended to have a bit of a picnic atop Grassy Ridge originally, but once we got there the wind was so intense that we had to hide in the lee of rocks near the summit just to have a conversation. Three layers of clothing were apparently not enough.

One thing about hiking in the highlands north of Roan is that it isn’t hard to follow the trail. Here it can be seen stretching a mile or more towards Jane Bald (foreground), Round Bald (middle ground), and Roan High Knob (background, and an entirely different hike). We’d recommend this hike on a slightly warmer day.

Congaree National Park

A blog entry for a national park? Yes, I’m afraid so, although we intend to go back and spend some time on the rivers and make a full web page of it one of these days. Congaree is a relatively new National Park (previously just a National Swamp before the glorious promotion in 2003). There is a decent network of hiking trails through one section of the park, although much of it is only accesible by canoe during high water times. We did a 5 mile loop or so just to visit the park and collect information for a future trip. Hiking trails here are about as easy as they can get. There’s no elevation change, an excellent network of bridges over creeks and generally packed solid dirt on the trails. A few cypress roots are the only difficulty.

We didn’t see any wildlife (such as otters, mink, raccoons) but then we had a large clumsy dog and the boardwalk sections of the park were actually rather crowded.

Palmetto Pig Pick’n

Our first BBQ contest as certified KCBS judges, the Palmetto Pig Pick’n is held in Ladson, SC – just a bit outside of Charleston.
Overall, a pretty interesting experience. KCBS rules mean that we each judge 6 samples of each of the four meats (chicken, ribs, pork, beef). It ends up being quite a lot of food even with relatively small sample sizes. In fact after the judging we pretty much went back to our hotel and collapsed in a meat coma.
Here is Melanie in her sporty competition apron.

BRP in Skyland

The first hike of the year, most of the Blue Ridge Parkway was still closed due to recent snows so we just went to the section of the Mountains to Sea Trail that parallels the Blue Ridge Parkway through Asheville. This section, from I-26 to US 25 is not exactly wilderness but it’s very close to town. It’s 3.5 miles between the two big roads but it’s such easy hiking that it seems substantially shorter.

Dogfish Head Brewery on New Year’s Eve

Ok so this isn’t really local but we don’t actually intend to do a full page on one brewery (sorry). Actually, Rehoboth Beach is within a day’s drive from Asheville so it counts as local by our standards.

Anyway, we spent New Year’s Eve in Delaware at the Dogfish Head Brewery. Why? Well, because they had an interesting five course beer pairing meal planned, and because it was festive, and because we already liked their beer.

When we arrived we promptly ordered beers, mostly because they asked us if we wanted one. This was a stupid thing to do considering each course came with a beer and despite the menu claiming they would be half-pints, they were generally all pints. This is the first course, a deconstructed Tuna Nicoise salad with an unbelievably fantastic aioli and a glass of Pangaea (brewed using ingredients from all 7 continents, because the Dogfish Head brewers have too much free time).

Here’s course 4 which was duck cassoulet. Obviously a bit deconstructed yet again, but still good. There’s a pint of pale ale, with what might be an Indian Brown behind it. It’s hard to drink a full beer with each course so we were running about 2 beers behind through the middle section of the meal. Don’t worry though, we caught up in the end.

As you can see, we have many beads. Melanie gets feathers too for some reason. We’re not actually as drunk as we might look here, my cheek looks like that because one day earlier Trout clawed me there while I was trying to teach him how to toboggan. (no, really, honest that’s what happened.) After the meal, there was a band, more drinks, fireworks, and a short taxi ride through outlet malls to our hotel.

Walnut Cove to Chestnut Cove

The Shut-In Trail (from the Biltmore Estate to Mt. Pisgah) and the Mountains to Sea Trail run together along the Blue Ridge Parkway west of Asheville. This is the Sleepy Gap parking area. From here it’s about a mile west to Chestnut Cove, not the most scenic hike but there are some camping areas near Truckwheel Knob and those are rare things along the Blue Ridge Parkway trails.

East from Sleepy Gap the trail goes out and around the north side of Grassy Knob where these cliffs are. The parkways tunnels under the far side of the mountain so this section is peaceful and relatively quiet. There are also a couple unofficial trails from here that lead down into the Bent Creek bike trail system although we saw no evidence of mountain bike usage on the MST.

For the most part this is only a good hike if you happen to live in or near Asheville and don’t decide to go for a hike until 3 hours before sunset. Or if you happen to be section hiking the Mountains to Sea Trail. Or if you like the sound of hordes of motorcycles on the Blue Ridge parkway during fall foliage season.
This last picture is apparently some sort of gentian. We spent quite a while trying to convince Melanie’s camera to focus on it before we gave up and continued on.

Latta Plantation / Carolina Raptor Center

Our trip to Charlotte started with a stop at the Carolina BBQ in Statesville, NC. Carolina BBQ is the 6th location on the NC BBQ Trail we’ve been to and it’s definately one of the best. The chopped pork is incredibly smoky and the sides, which are often just an afterthought, are good as well.

Our trip had two main purposes. One of those was Charlotte’s Oktoberfest which is where we spent most of Saturday afternoon. This year it was held at an ‘expo center’ which seems to be the term for a bunch of quick construction metal warehouses in a parking lot. Compared to the 2006 rendition (which merited part of its own webpage) the location left something to be desired. We also went to Latta Plantation on Saturday morning for a canoe orienteering race. Latta Plantation is a restored home from the settlement days of central Carolina.

On Sunday we returned to Latta plantation. We had primarly seen it from the water during the canoe race, with a few forays into the woods. Besides the plantation, the area has a nature center, horse and hiking trails and is the home of the Carolina Raptor Center. The Raptor center is really a recovery center for injured raptors that also works as a specialized zoo of sorts. There are about 25 or so exhibits, including this quirky little owl who refused to leave the fencing.

If you like owls, hawks, falcons, eagles and so on it’s a great place to spend an hour or two. There is an enormous two-part enclosure for Bald and Golden Eagles. Among the more interesting birds: this is Honeysuckle a semi-albino hawk. She’s not quite a true albino but that doesn’t really detract from the visual appeal she has.

Just down the road from Latta is Lancaster’s BBQ in Huntersville, NC. It’s not a member of the BBQ trail because I don’t think it’s been around quite that long but it’s also a worthwhile stop.