ecospirit

 

I have driven the Blue Ridge Parkway to Mt. Mitchell many times over the 45 years I have lived across the adjacent South Toe River Valley.  Once, decades ago, I hiked off to the south in search of blueberries.  It was beautiful, a fresh new landscape.  Unfortunately, we were trailing a bear who reached almost all the berries before we did. But most of my hikes, both overnights and dayhikes, have been in the Black Mountain range.  It feels like my mountain home.

Earlier this summer, our friend Michael suggested we hike the old toll road that accessed Mt. Mitchell from Montreat and Black Mountain, built in 1925, before the parkway was built as a WPA project.  We quickly accessed the first peak, aptly named Pinnacle, climbing steeply up from the toll road. Once we summited, we had stunning views of Mt Mitchell, the Black Mountain range, and many other peaks.  As we arrived, a fiftyish man came up from the other direction.  It was late morning, and he had already hiked up the toll road from Montreat, a total of 11 miles.  He was on his way to Mt. Mitchell, planning to hike back home after summiting.  Hale and healthy, he had a substantial daypack; no provisions for camping. He said he had made this roundtrip a few times before.  After he left, we stood on the Pinnacle summit under  high winds.  The winds were strong enough to topple me from the peak.  Thick heath and Michael broke my fall.  On our way up, we heard the hermit thrush’s haunting call, and Michael noted the vegetation was a lot like Vermont or Maine.

The descent, looping back to the old Mt Mitchell Toll Road, was the richest part of our first ascent.  I have seen the yellow birch along the Parkway many times, since it is the dominant canopy vegetation in the 4500-5000 foot range. But the specimens on the back side of Pinnacle were spectacular, gnarled old individuals, many several hundred years old, going back into Cherokee time. Several of them had roots reaching into stone outcroppings, some of them quite striking.  One had a buttressed root with a thin stone outcrop inches away that precisely mirrored the tree root.  You had to get really close to see the difference between stone and wood. It all came down to the granular texture of the stone.

This loop rejoined the toll road about a mile down, and we proceeded to walk the road for several miles, picnicking by a stunning patch of fly poison lilies. As we approached our break, we started noticing the flowering mountain laurel, which towered in full bloom.  Looking upridge, we observed  waves of them as far as we could scan.  As we hiked on towards our goal, Mt Graybeard, we saw more and more laurel, by far the greatest amount of flowering laurel I’ve seen in my blessedly long life. 

And then came the galax.  I’ve always been fascinated by galax in bloom, the high projecting stem with rows of white petals like tiny popcorn, above those dark green glossy leaves.  It may just be the time of year, but I’ve never noticed more than a few hundred blooms.  Today, Michael and I estimated that we were observing areas with hundreds of thousands of blooms, perhaps over a million.  It was awe-inspiring. 

Michael is a naturalist, and I have the same bent.  We frequently stopped to examine plants and trees.  In a day filled with botanical wonders, one of the most unusual was seeing two Gray’s Lily plants, four blooms, reaching high under the forest cover for sunlight. Usually they grow on high balds. Indeed, my only previous siting was on Roan Mountain, where they are listed as endangered.  Geeta, on the other hand, is goal-oriented, so she walked ahead at a strong, steady clip all day long.  We would never have made it to Graybeard without her unflagging encouragement to keep moving, with a minimum of rest breaks. 

We encountered a truck toiling up the rough gravel and stone road, a man and his wife inside.  He told us that he was an employee of the town of Montreat, whose job was to maintain the toll road.  He also had the task of feeding the bears at intervals along the road, in an effort, apparently successful, to keep them out of town. When I apologized for not staying to hang out more, saying that my wife was trying to run away from me (she had a sizable lead on us after this encounter), he smiled and said, “Maybe a bear will catch her.”

On the footpath that left the toll road to ascend Graybeard we started to encounter other hikers, most of them coming the other way, up from Montreat.  We also saw a remarkable number of fly poison lilies, whose white flowers complemented the profuse covering of galax. We also saw many flame azaleas of varying hues of yellow and orange.  They were near the end of their peak, but it was nice to have some color to contrast with the many white blooms.

Our trip back after summiting Graybeard was arduous, more a forced march than our exploratory ascent.  In all, we hiked 12 miles, with a lot of elevation change.  But the views from the peaks, and most of all the botanical wonders, made this day one of the most amazing hikes in a lifetime of hiking five continents.

Note: photos courtesy of Michael Fishbach