Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

I mentioned the other day that rmy anniversary with Hawk was about a week ago. Often we travel to celebrate our anniversary. This year we took our anniversary trip early, visiting the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia and North Carolina  at the start of September. It's good that we took that trip then, because if we'd traveled the week of our anniversary we'd have been hit by Hurricane Helene pummeling western North Carolina. Boone, the town we stayed in for 5 nights, was among the towns that suffered severe damage. Floods washed out at least one of the main roads into and out of town.

This isn't the first time that violent weather has hit places we've traveled for our anniversary. Two years ago we made a short trip to Florida's Gulf Coast for our anniversary. Thunderstorms on the trip out there caused flight diversions and multi-hour delays that stranded us overnight at Midway airport. Even the next morning with clear skies we had to rearrange flights to land a 3 hour drive from our destination. And our suitcase landed at yet-another airport, 24 hours later.

We had a nice few days after that... until Hurricane Ian started bearing down on the area as we were wrapping things up! Our last day there, locals warned us there were lines for gas all the stores were selling out of basics like milk and bread. Hawk got out okay the next morning, but I was staying on in Florida to staff my company's trade show. By the following morning, the whole show had been canceled and my explicit instructions from my VP were "Get out ASAP. Do whatever it takes." By then flights out of Orlando were already sold out for the day. Rather than chance it staying another day or two— the airport wound up closing the next day at noon— I found a flight at Jacksonville, 170 miles away, and rented a car to drive there.

These aren't the only cases where a bad storm or even a hurricane has struck a place around the time of our anniversary. Another memorable one was when we getting ready to move out of North Carolina after I finished my graduate studies. Hurricane Fran made landfall on the NC coast and took an improbable path toward the Triangle, hitting the cities of Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. The community I lived in was spared damage, but many of my friends and colleagues lost power and face boil-water advisories for several days.

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #31
Old Fort, NC - Sat, 7 Sep 2024. 1:30pm

Our hike up to Catawba Falls in western North Carolina today was enjoyable. The hike wasn't too bad of a climb, especially with a wide trail the whole way. And the falls were beautiful. For a long time that was the end of the line for most hikers. The brave few knew there was another falls high up above the main one. The even fewer brave dared to climb up the canyon to it, pulling themselves up on ropes hung over the cascades of the lower falls or looping around over the mountain ridge to descend from the top. Now there are stairs.




Within the past few years the Forest Service built an elaborate set of stairs to guide hikers up the canyon. These stairs are great in that pretty much anybody can climb them. ...Well, anybody who can climb more than 500 stairs, that is.



Fortunately this is a situation where hard work pays off. Not only did climbing the stairs afford us different views of the main falls as we ascended, it led us to this beautiful spot with the upper falls. Before the stairs were built, this spot might've seen a few visitors on a Saturday afternoon. Today it's seeing hundreds. Making the photo above I shared above was challenging.... Challenging to capture the whole falls while not including kids in diapers peeing in the water, young women stripping down to their bikini tops and posing for cheesecake pictures for their social media, and at least one guy who was either recharging his Ki or in full-blown mental health crisis suffering flashbacks to being bombed in Afghanistan. Well, it's their great outdoors, too.

From these falls there are two routes back to the trailhead. One, we could have retraced our route back down the stairs past the falls. Two, a trail continues up over the ridge to the east then snakes down the ridge to the trailhead. We hiked the ridge trail thinking we might see long distance views from atop the ridge. And even if we hadn't decided on that in advance, the fact that 2/3 of our fellow hikers were heading back down the stairs would've inspired us to take the path less traveled. Alas, there were barely any view from the trail over the ridge. And it wasn't even a particularly nice trail. It was a fire road with an ugly cut as it ascended the near side of the ridge. It was like the Forest Service decided, "Let's run a bulldozer through here and be done with it."  But at least we had the memories of those beautiful falls to tie us over. In beauty I walk.

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #29
Back at the hotel in Boone, NC - Fri, 6 Sep 2024. 8pm

We enjoyed a taking-it-easy afternoon in our hotel room today, just kind of vegging on the sofa and bed after getting back from Green Mountain Falls. It's not that that hike was difficult— I mean, Green Mountain Falls wasn't even a hike, it was a drive-to spot— or that our hike this morning at Glen Burney was that tough. Glen Burney was a legit hike, it just wasn't tough. Or at least it shouldn't have been. What's really kicked our butts is the cumulative effect of all the hiking we've done the past few days.

As it started to get dark this evening we decided we should get dinner. We weren't sure we deserved a full meal after a big lunch after hiking Glen Burney and then taking it easy the rest of the afternoon. So we decided we could order light, like I'd get a small burger and share fries with Hawk, at the Come Back Shack.

While dining out the past few nights in Boone I've been struck by how cheap prices are. We don't have spendy tastes in dining to start with. We've eaten twice at a burger shack and once at a diner the past three nights. But even so we've been pleasantly surprised how the bill has come in well under what we're accustomed to from living in California.

Gas is cheap, too. We've filled up the past few days at $3.09/gal. Some places we drove past in less touristy areas 3 nights ago were as low as $2.89. Back home the cheapest gas is $3.99/gal, and that's at Costco. Conventional discount gas stations are probably $4.39 and name-brand stations likely around $4.79.

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #27
Blowing Rock, NC - Fri, 6 Sep 2024. 2pm

Today we got out of the hotel even earlier than yesterday. Today we were on the road before 10am. 😅

There's a waterfalls hiking trail that starts right in town in Blowing Rock, NC. And it's not just some walk-in-the-park bunny trail, it's a genuine hike with an ascent of over 600' on the return. How cool is that?



The first falls on the Glen Burney Falls trail isn't Glen Burney Falls. It doesn't really have a name. It's not even a falls. It's just "Cascades". Okay, but it's more than 4' tall, like the photo above implies. There's actually a pretty good drop here....



What I usually say about the view from atop a falls not being very enjoyable is different here. These falls— I mean, cascades 😅— are horizontal enough that there's a good view from above. And it's nice with the view of the trail around to the left and the canyon dropping away below us. Oh, and the fact there's no way to stand at the bottom of the falls without trampling a restoration area.



Further down the canyon is the namesake of this trail, Glen Burney Falls. It's taller than this photo (above) gives it credit for. Like the cascades, these falls are horizontal enough that the view from below doesn't show everything. And the water flow today is light. I wonder what this was like 4 days ago, after rain the day before.



There's a bonus falls further down on the Glen Burney Falls trail. It's Glen Marie Falls. This falls is actually the tallest of the three, by fair margin. I figure it's over 60' tall. But it falls in kind of a crooked path over the uneven rock face, and at a low flow time like this it doesn't show well. As much as I don't like hiking in the mud, hiking this trail a day, maybe two, after a rain is probably the best way to enjoy it.

The return hike up the canyon was tough. I felt badly winded getting up past the three falls. The trail gets a lot easier above that, though. Even though there were another 300 vertical feet past that I was able to pick up my pace substantially.

Back at the trailhead we discussed what to eat for lunch. There actually aren't a ton of restaurants in this touristy little town of Blowing Rock. We didn't French cafe food (too French), we didn't want a brewpub (too early for beer), and we didn't want Mexican (too inauthentic— like, they use American cheese in enchiladas 🤢)... so we went back to the pizza place we visited a few days ago. Hawk's rarely in the mood for pizza, but they actually offer a style she enjoys— and the cook nailed it with her special requests. Plus I had a beer, because screw it, it's not that early. 😂

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #24
Linville, NC - Thu, 5 Sep 2024. 7pm

In beginning this hike toward the end of a long day, we hoped we'd get a good view of Linville Falls after the first 1/2 mile of Linville Gorge trail. Alas, it was not to be. The upper viewpoint was directly above the falls. Above the falls is almost never the vista you want for appreciating the falls. Fortunately the trail continued to two more viewpoints, at least one of which seemed sure to offer a good view. But would we have the stamina for the extra distance and ascent?

We first walked out the to the most distant of all the viewpoints. It seemed like it was actually easier, as a hiker near the intermediate viewpoint , the Chimney View, cautioned us that the it was steep and narrow. It was so steep and narrow that she'd noped out of it, opting to wait up on the canyon rim while her partner risked life and limb climbing below. So we continued on to the far viewpoint. It was... too far. Yes, we could see the falls, but only in the distance. We returned to the Chimney View... and found that the trail down was nowhere near as tough as that one hiker opined. There were lots of stone steps, and a wooden staircase in the steepest part, but we've hiked far worse.



From the Chimney lookout we enjoyed a pretty good view of the falls. Would it be better from closer up and down in the canyon? Sure, but it's prohibitively difficult to get down in the canyon. There is a trail that descends around the other side, but it approaches the falls from an angle far to the side that makes it not a great view. I know, because I now remember hiking that trail 30 years ago when I came here with a grad school friend.



Of course, if it's not reasonable to hike closer to the falls, I can get closer to them, virtually, with the help of a zoom lens. Yes, I carried my long zoom lens, the one I use for close-ups of birds and flowers, on this hike. It was part of the tradeoff I chose to make back at the trailhead.

The other part of that tradeoff, BTW, was not carrying any water. 🥵 Hawk had one bottle of tea in her sling, and she agreed to share it with me. I rationed my sips carefully to help make it last for both of us on a hike that ended up being 2 miles roundtrip.



Linville Gorge isn't just about Linville Falls. There's also, well, the gorge. In places it's over 1,500' deep. The photo above shows a stretch of Linville Gorge just below the falls.

After resting at Chimney View for a while we began the hike back to the car. It was late, and we were tired after a long day. We were in the mode of just putting one foot in front of the other. Back at the parking lot it seemed almost comical how ours was one of about 5 cars in a huge lot built for well over 100. I'm glad we were here at a sparsely visited time. Places like Chimney View would have been a lot less enjoyable with dozens of people lining up and waiting turns to cram into a narrow spot.

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #22
Jonas Ridge, NC - Thu, 5 Sep 2024. 4:30pm

Upper Creek Falls turned out to be more than we expected— both in terms of the size of the main falls and the length/strenuousness of the trail. At the bottom of the big falls we weren't thinking about the latter, though. Yet.



Yes, this is the same falls I finished with in part 1 of this hike. Here I'm photographing it with my ultra-wide zoom lens. This is at 10mm with my camera's APS-C sized imager; it's a 15mm equivalent on a traditional 35mm camera. I slowed the shutter speed down to 1/5 second with a neutral density lens. And, yes, the camera is hand-held because I didn't lug a tripod down here and didn't even have my hiking pole monopod to use.

As you can see in this photo versus those in my previous blog entry the sun was in and out of clouds, but mostly behind the clouds, this afternoon. Changing light makes photography challenging... but also more fun, as it exposes different views of the same scene.



Soon enough it was time to head further downstream. There are more falls down there and a pretty clear path, marked with reflector blazes on trees, to get there.

On the way to these falls (photo above) we saw the couple who were previously enjoying the big falls 50' away from us coming back up the trail. Why come back up the same way? The trail loops around back to the parking lot. We said as much in chatting with them, wondering if maybe the creek crossing was too dangerous to ford.

"Oh, the trail crosses the creek?" they responded. "We didn't even think of that!"

"Yeah, it shows it right here on my GPS-enabled trails app," I said, pointing to AllTrails running on my iPhone.

"Oh, I'm using AT, too," one of the hikers said, showing me his phone with the same app open.

How can you use the same app and not see the trail marked in bright green?! I wondered to myself. This dude is literally holding the map in his hand and can't figure it out. Sheesh, it's like holding in your hand a device with access to the sum total of human knowledge does not make everyone smarter, it just makes the average person more confident of their dumb ideas.

Anyway, back to the falls. 🤣



At the crossing there were more falls both above and below. I explored down the creek a bit further, but not too far as I was starting to get a sense of how much climbing out there'd be. And, more importantly, Hawk was already aching pretty badly from a long-term issue flaring up. I wasn't going to leave her in the middle of the wilderness to go hiking on my own.



We enjoyed the falls at the crossing a bit more before beginning the arduous climb up out of the canyon. And yes, it was arduous. It was 8-10 long switchbacks up the canyon's sloping side.

Back at the car, now, we're discussing what's next. Earlier in the day we were thinking to do a bit more driving to another remote falls but at this point, with the clouds overhead, it looks like it might get dark too early to want to do a lot of driving before a hike. There's just enough signal here at the trailhead to search for other trails on AllTrails, so I'm checking out Linville Gorge and Linville Falls. That's a big falls, and it's really not that far from here; maybe just 15 minutes of driving.

Stay tuned; the adventure continues!

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #20
Newland, NC - Thu, 5 Sep 2024. 2pm

After hiking at Otter Falls this morning we drove west, around the base of Grandfather Mountain— which we hiked yesterday afternoon. Grandfather's nearly 6,000' peak was shrouded in clouds at noon. It's a good thing we were only looking for lunch. As we ate at a restaurant in nearby Banner Elk the clouds burned off— not just around Grandfather Mountain's summit but those over pretty much everything in the area. We enjoyed a sunnier drive as we headed to our next hiking destination, Waterfalls Park.



Otter Falls was in the oddly named town of Seven Devils. This time we're in a blandly named town of Newland (but at least it's not named Bland) at the oddly named Waterfall Park. ...Okay, that's more bland than odd, too. The town has a small set of waterfalls on a creek, and they've nicely made a small park around it. There's also a grave memorial in this park, so possibly the land for the park used to be privately owned but then was donated.



A short trail leads up past various small tiers of waterfalls. Signs indicate that Boy Scouts built it and the fire department maintains it.



The trails continue farther up the canyon around the stream. We explored them for a bit but realized they were all diverging from the creek, and returned back down to appreciate the falls again.



This little park in an out-of-the-way small town had a decent number of visitors this afternoon. There were two other small groups when we arrived, and it looked like 3 more by the time we left. The visitors split into two categories: Those who, like us, were there to see the falls by hiking the trails; and those who were just there to sit at the picnic tables on the grassy lawn below, content to enjoy the falls as background sound. There may come a time in my life when I can't to venture further than the gravel path to a picnic table.... I plan for it not to be anytime soon. In beauty I walk.

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #18
Boone, NC - Wed, 4 Sep 2024. 11pm

Once we got back to Boone this evening, after a satisfying long day out, our first order of business was finding dinner. It's surprising for a college town that Boone doesn't have more local, casual eats; mostly it's chains here. But we did find a well reviewed local burgers place call the Come Back Shack. The food was... college town eats. Which is to say, good but not great food with a fun, younger-oriented vibe. And it was less than half a mile from our hotel, so that was a win, too.

One of the things that comes along with a younger oriented vibe nowadays is no physical menu. There are no menus at the tables, no lighted menu board overhead, and not even a cashier to order from. You scan a QR code with your phone and order through their website, or you use an ordering kiosk at the back of the dining room.

I'm not a Boomer, but I agree with Boomers on this: We hate QR code menus. Just give us a physical menu! I like being able to see the menu all at once instead of having to scroll, scroll, scroll through pages of stuff on my tiny phone screen. Oh, and the fact it's seldom well lit in such restaurants anymore makes it even more of a challenge. Thankfully this restaurant did at least have that ordering kiosk at the back, so we could page through the menu in a reasonable font size. We ordered there. Though we noted that all the Boomer customers were having trouble with it, so if we found ourselves stuck behind one... shit, we'd probably just leave and go somewhere else.

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #17
Grandfather Mountain State Park, NC - Wed, 4 Sep 2024. 5pm

Continuing in the vein of taking it easy today we decided to do an easy-hiking drive out along the Blue Ridge Parkway to Grandfather Mountain State Park.



Grandfather Mountain is a kind of touristy place. There's a big fee to get in, and once in there's a fancy visitors center with displays and a cafe selling overpriced bland food. There are a handful of drive-to spots to see some of the park's main features, including a tiny zoo that has a few black bears. It feels kind of like a place schoolkids might go on a field trip. But it's also a real hiker's park, with easy, moderate, and strenuous trails to really see the park's main outdoors features. Today we're kind of splitting the differences between "schoolkids on a field trip" and real hikers.

One of the big features I really wanted to see is the Mile-High Suspension Bridge.



It is literally what its name implies. It's a footbridge between the distinctive twin peaks of Grandfather Mountain. (You can see the twin-peaks shape in the first photo.)

Information signs in the second visitors center, the one at the start of the bridge, note that the bridge was modernized in 1999. Prior to that it was apparently a wooden plank bridge with chain-link sides. It probably swayed and bounced a heck of a lot more than this sturdier, all metal bridge deck does.

That's interesting to me because I tried to visit Grandfather Mountain in 1996... which would've been back during the time of the more primitive suspension bridge.

What was 1996? 1996 is when my partner and I made a cross-country drive from Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Cupertino, California. We'd finished with school, I had a great job offer from Apple, and we were moving out to California to start our new lives together. Most of our meager, student/grad student level possessions were sent ahead in a moving van while we drove my car, loaded with about 2 weeks of clothes and our hiking gear, 2800 miles across the country. We made a number of sightseeing and hiking stops along the way. Grandfather Mountain and its mile-high suspension bridge were meant to be the first sightseeing/hiking stop.

Alas, while the weather was beautiful in Chapel Hill the morning we left, the weather thousands of feet up in the mountains was completely fogged in. We drove past the entrance to Grandfather Mountain without bothering to stop. Instead, when we got to our hotel for the night near Knoxville, TN we spent time wandering around downtown Knoxville.

So, here I am, 28 years later. And today the weather's beautiful.



Across the bridge is the lower of Grandfather Mountain's two peaks. I'm standing on the lower one in this photo (above). You can see Grandfather Mountain itself in the distance back across the bridge.

There's not much out here on the lower peak. There's not even a trail, really. There's a sitting area for tourists at the end of the bridge, Past that it's a scramble across rough bare rock to the summit.

I wasn't the only one out here. In September and through much of October there are volunteers out here counting hawk migrations. This is apparently a huge fly-over spot for East Coast migratory birds. TIL the entire population of Broad-wing Hawks migrates every year. On a busy day thousands of them can pass this point. Alas there were no birds in the sky this afternoon. The volunteers out on the rock were packing up and calling it a day, having spotted pretty much nothing all day. Well, peak migration generally isn't for another two weeks, anyway, and there's apparently something about the weather conditions today— something we don't understand, because to us humans the weather looks freakin' perfect today— that's telling the birds not to fly today.

Blue Ridge Trip '24 #14
Blowing Rock, NC - Wed, 4 Sep 2024. 12pm

We're taking a take-it-easy day on our vacation today. "Wait," you might ask, "Isn't ‘taking it easy’ what vacations are supposed to be about?" Haha, not ours. Ours are typically go-go-go with activity. And we've been go-go-go for the past 4 days, starting with leaving home well before dawn on Saturday up through driving hundreds of miles last night after going on a full hike in the mountains.

So, today we're hundreds of miles away from where we were yesterday. We're staying at a hotel in Boone, NC now for last night and the next 4 nights.

"Boone?" you might ask. "Is that like ‘In the boonies’ or the boondocks?" Yes, because it's a town of about 20,000— small by my California standards— in the Blue Ridge mountains. But also no, because it's named for famed American pioneer Daniel Boone. And despite its smaller official population the town punches above its weight because it's a college town. Appalachian State University, part of the UNC system, is there and enrolls almost 20,000 students.

This morning we slept in a bit after a late night and long day yesterday. That's part of why today has become a taking-it-easy day. The other part is that we didn't do enough planning ahead of time on exactly what to do once we're in Boone. Oh, we know we want to go hiking in the mountains. At waterfalls. And there are plenty of them here. And we even researched lots of hiking trails. But we didn't cue up a list of them like we did for the previous few days in Virginia. So this morning we started doing that. And along the way we realized we don't really have the energy for another aggressive day of hiking today.

Our plan so far for the day has been simple: Get lunch. 😅 We drove to the town of Blowing Rock, about 7 miles from Boone, as there's a canyon hike starting right here in town we could do after we eat lunch. We thought that maybe lunch would help us perk up. Haha, no. We're still feeling fatigued. And now we've got a bit of food coma, too. 😂

Blowing Rock, NC is a small tourist town named for a striking rock ridge on the edge of town. The town itself is perched atop this mountain ridge, at elev. 3,500-3,600'. Below the ridge the land drops away 1,500' into a river valley. Because of the shape and orientation of the ridge, wind currents blow into the ridge and create strong updrafts. Light objects thrown off the ridge may fly back up. Native legend says that when a young man was told he'd have to leave his lover because their two tribes were going to fight, he was distraught and threw himself off the cliff. She prayed for him to be brought back to her, and the gods answered her prayer with a gust of wind that blew him back up the cliff before he could die from the fall.