Friday, July 30, 2010

The Past 5 Days (Pisgah Forest, NC)

We completed our 3 days of "work" i.e. volunteering at the Cradle.  The truth is our work is pretty uneventful.  It's quite pleasant, slow paced and oh so easy.  Our tasks are very simple and often the only real challenge is keeping it interesting.  Consequently, I will resist any great impulse to bore you too greatly with the details of "work."  Having said all that, we're still very glad that we're here.  We enjoy our coworkers and we really enjoy the area!

Monday evening, after work, Debbie and I drove to Asheville to pick up Debbie's new camera at Best Buy.  The best deal was order it on line on sale and pick it up at the store.  So we did.  Tuesday evening we joined our new friends Mike and Debbie and cruised down the mountain.  We hit Bilo, Lowes and ate at Hog Wild.  I enjoyed the ribs there and throughout the night.  Wednesday evening we stayed home.

Yesterday we spent the early part of the day cleaning the camper and then we went hiking.  We headed out to DuPont State Forest, about 20 miles away.  We hiked to two different waterfalls.

High Falls - DuPont State Forest

 
Triple Falls - DuPont State Forest

Here we are at the top of Triple Falls.  



They both were magnificent.  It's pretty impressive that, with very little effort, we can get to such great locations.  Down another trail we came to a  world class covered bridge.


The brochure of the area indicates there are 90+ trails.  We'll go back soon.  
We stopped at Domino's on the way home and had dinner at about 10pm that included pizza and MandM's.  TOO GOOD! (Debbie skipped the MandM's.)
Today was another great day of hiking!  We started with  a short hike at the Devils Courthouse off the Blue Ridge Parkway (BRP).

It's only 1.6 mile round trip but it climbs 1400 feet in .8 of a mile.  The view at the top is spectacular!  

Top of Devil's Courthouse.  We hiked from the road below you see in the picture.
                           
Duane at the top

From there we traveled a few miles north on the BRP to the Graveyard Fields. 
There we hiked about four miles to two different waterfalls.  They both were nice but neither was spectacular.  However, often it's the journey that is most important.  The Graveyard Fields is in a 25,000 acre valley.  The valley is ripe (pun time) with blackberries and blueberries.  Lots of folks were picking blackberries.  We ate some as we hiked.  The blueberries will be ripe at the end of August. 



The only down side of the day was that Debbie tripped and fell like a tree.  She skinned her knees, sprained one wrist and came so close to eating the trail that she scraped her chin as well.  It was a tense moment but soon we composed and concluded that she wasn't badly hurt.  Debbie's first concern, amidst her few tears, was if she damaged her new camera.  It appears she did not.


My description of our hikes the past few days wouldn't be complete without mentioning the many beautiful wildflowers we have been fortunate enough to see. We haven't done any studying of mountain wildflowers yet, but I'm sure it's in the future. For now we just describe them as "pretty". Thought you might like to see some.

                                                                                                                                                                                             


We got home about 5pm. Debbie showered, got her jammies on and had a drink.  She'll likely be sore tomorrow but, as always, it could have been much worse.
The hummingbirds are still with us.

Talk to you soon.

Duane

1 comment:

  1. Oh Man! I'm glad Debbie is ok! The fall sounds brutal! And the pictures look great so doesn't seem that the camera was injured.
    The blackberries look yummy! Too bad you couldn't get blueberries. Why aren't they ripe now? We've been buying them in the store for months!
    OK onto the next post! :)

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