Fall Fun in the Mountains

Brother Roger and his wife Laurie chose to take a longer vacation with us this year than they have in the past. Roger had some legal business work to take care of early in the week, but we managed to fit in some local sight-seeing. We didn't take many photos the first few days, though I did get this one of the quilt garden at the WNC arboretum.

I'm not sure which quilt block this represents - the Arboretum website is out of date and talks about the 2014-15 Rail Fence design.  But it could be Blockbase 1371b, a variation on the flying geese block called Banner Quilt. I colored the block and oriented 16 of them to see if it would look like the garden design -

Back to sightseeing, we took more photos starting on Friday, when we headed up to Mount Mitchell early in the morning.

It was cold and windy -

The angle the camera had in these two photos shows the only place where the sky looked sunny.  The clouds were not like anything we'd ever seen before, forming quickly behind where we were standing, and swiftly blowing over our heads only to be replaced by more clouds, while the skies behind them were blue.

We hiked the .7 mile marked nature look trail at the top. It was definitely winter on top of the highest peak in the Appalachians.

We had planned to hike another trail at the park there, but we decided to head down to a warmer climate.

We made a quick stop at the Glassmine Falls overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway - you can see it if you click on the photo, just to the right of Roger's shoulder.

We continued to move down, landing about a thousand feet lower than Mount Mitchell at Craggy Pinnacle - an easy .7 mile climb up from the parking lot for the 360 degree view.  That is the Asheville water system reservoir behind Roger and Laurie.

On Saturday, we had warmer weather when we headed to the Cataloochee area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Here are some photos we took along the Rough Fork hiking trail.  You can see we thought the creek crossings made good photo ops.

Here's Roger - no hands on one of those narrow foot bridges.

The main attraction at this far eastern edge of the park is the elk, reintroduced in 2001 and now thriving. (From the 52 animals brought in by the National Park Service in 2001, and 2002, there is now a herd of some 200 of them living in the park.) We saw a lot of elk but most of our pictures are about like this:

or like this next one. I included these photos so you could share the view of the open meadow and woodlands. October is mating season and we were actually witnessing an interaction between a large bull and a cow (though they resemble deer, the elk are called bulls and cows, or stags and hinds, but not bucks and does), but they had a slow courtship going on.

 

We were very pleasantly surprised to see the elk at all (and hear the bugling!).  The guidebooks explain that active times are early morning and late evening and we arrived shortly after noon.

This next photo is a digital zoom of a bull with several cows resting in the shade. You may be able to see them if you click on the image -

 A similar scene not far away

 But finally, on our way out of the park, this group was out in the sun and not far from the road.

Park visitors are strictly warned against disturbing the elk, and the park rangers were standing by to make sure everyone was behaving. We shared our views with large crowds of people whose cars lined the road at the edge of these meadows, obviously a great place for elk to hang out. More cars were pouring into the area as we left the park.

It was great to revisit places we've been and venture into some new ones with Roger and Laurie who both appreciate the natural beauty of our local mountains.