North Carolina Hodgepodge

Greetings and possibly salutations! (I’m not exactly sure what salutations are, so I don’t know whether they are appropriate at this stage of our relationship.) Welcome to this week’s ThrowBack Thursday! This week’s episode is a hodgepodge of photos from three day trips. Let us ~~eat lettuce~~ start things off with fall foliage along the Blue Ridge Parkway in October 2016. I believe I started at Devils Courthouse and slowly oozed eastward. That would mean this first batch of pics is from just east of the junction of the Blue Ridge Parkway and North Carolina state highway 215 (between the towns of Canton and Rosman):

Autumn foliage along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina (17 October 2016)

These two were taken from the East Fork Overlook. Here you’re seeing the headwaters of the Pigeon River, which is what Interstate 40 follows as it passes just north of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This is the same Pigeon River what gave its name to Pigeon Forge, home of insane traffic congestion and Dollywood (not pictured).

At this point, I turned onto the dead-end Black Balsam Knob Road, and followed it to the Art Loeb Trail. Here are a few pics from that little side journey:

The reds in this view really “pop”. So I had to see close-up…were these leaves? Flowers?

Next, I returned to the parkway for a few final pics before heading home:

About a month later, I headed the opposite direction out of Charlotte to visit the 19th-Century mining town of Gold Hill, North Carolina. There, I produced these nuggets of photographic joy:

This appears to be the remains of an arrastra, or maybe a Chilean mill.

Our final stop this week is Crabtree Falls, which I visited with two nieces in tow in April 2017. The trailhead for this waterfall is on the Blue Ridge Parkway, about midway between Mount Mitchell and the Museum of North Carolina Minerals. NOTE: There is also a Crabtree Falls in Virginia, which is also quite near the Blue Ridge Parkway. The photos below are from the Crabtree Falls in North Carolina. I have not yet been to the Crabtree Falls in Virginia. It’s on my list, though.

Visiting North Carolina’s Crabtree Falls requires a three-mile round-trip hike. And it’s very much worth it! But before I provide the photographic evidence to back that up, here are some encounters we had along the trail: