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Category Archives: Mountains

Items of interest from the southern and northern mountain regions

Fog rivers

Got up early and watched fog rivers rolling from the little porch off our room off the Parkway.

Fall color series

Traveling again at last.
Am recently returned from a long day in the upper mountain counties with a botanist friend. Posts coming about that, but first a few examples of this fall’s color and other sundries collected on Saturday and on a Parkway drive last weekend. Up first, the rose hips of Rosa palustris Marshall [...]

Black and White Forest

This August, during a visit to Tater Hill Bog, just outside of West Jefferson, I headed up the hill and into the woods with a couple of botanists in search of a seep. It was an eerie place with large boulders and lots of moss, lichen and various other growth affixed to the trees and [...]

Bogs, savannas, mountaintop mining and Land for Tomorrow

Cross-posted from Exile, this on bogs and savannas and more from my column.
This week’s column takes you to a couple of the state’s new Natural Areas and why we need to keep efforts like Land for Tomorrow moving forward. Also, check out I Love Mountains. I shoulda added a shout out to Mathew Gross who [...]

Parkway rockslide

Looks like a stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway near Maggie Valley is going to be closed for quite a while. A recent rockslide near the Cranberry Overlook means a lot of work ahead to shore up the mountain and reopen the road.
Link to the Citizen-Times‘ slide show.
National Park Service news

Bog heaven Rhodo hell

Posting from near West Jefferson.

Well, coulda sat around and listened to the end of the legislative session, but I had one of those rare opportunities to crawl around through a rhododendren hell with a couple of botanists in search of rare plants populations in a soggy, thick mountain bog. The official description of where I [...]

If I wasn’t stuck at home I’d be . . .

Watching the trout race at Great the Smoky Mountain Trout Festival in wonderful Maggie Valley.
We’ve got quite a trout heritage here in the Old North State and some fine remaining streams. But those TVA and Ohio Valley smokestacks keep cranking out the acid rain-causing hydrocarbons and people keep building right up on the buffers. Then [...]