2005/04 Deep South trip - Stone Mountain |
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We took it easy on Wednesday morning with just a little shopping and then headed north to Stone Mountain, a North Carolina state park. This is less famous than the other Stone Mountain near Atlanta, Georgia. That one has the big 
sculpture of the Civil War Confederate generals on its face. The sculpture was started by Borgland, the guy that did Mount Rushmore, but the organizers fell out with him, and dynamited his work off the face. It was finished by Ziolkowski, the sculptor that started the Crazy Horse sculpture. I’d intended going to the Atlanta mountain until I found out it was now a theme park, but while investigating I’d found out about this other one in North Carolina, which looked a lot more interesting to us. It has no sculpture or theme park, but it’s a great mound of streaky, rugged granite, with a thin layer of trees on top and some great hiking trails. See the tiny figures climbing up the centre of the streak. (Not us!)
That evening I took an exploratory run along the park road around the mountain, and found that there’s little flat land in this park. The road repeatedly plunged downhill, too steep to run easily, and of course I had a long grind uphill on the way back. The park is very pretty. Down below the granite faces, lit by the setting sun, is an oak and pine forest with an understory of rhododendrons, crisscrossed with burbling streams. The rhododendrons would not flower for a few weeks yet, but there were daffodils and forsythia already in flower. As I began the climb back uphill, I had over a dozen vultures floating above me, taking advantage of the updraft from the mountain.
There was a strong smell of cigarettes from passing cars the whole way along the road. Residents of North Carolina grow up in tobacco country and are probably expected to smoke. We were only an hour’s drive from Winston-Salem, and we’d earlier passed the town of Woodbine.
Thursday March 31st
I took an early morning walk hoping to get some dawn light on the mountainside, but it was too cloudy. The forecast was for rain, but we disregarded it and set off to hike the loop trail around the mountain. The first stop on the trail was at Stone Mountain Falls, which should really be called a water slide rather than a falls. It begins with a sequence of small chutes that look ideal for sliding down on a tube, but the next chute drops 200 feet onto rocks! People have died here and it’s easy to see why.
The trail continued around the west side of the mountain, almost a tunnel through the rhododendrons. 
It would be gorgeous here in a few weeks. We stopped at the Hutchinson Homestead, a restoration of the original farmhouse and buildings, for a great view of the mountain, an enormous chunk of granite, streaked with water marks. Shortly afterwards the trail turned sharply uphill and we were soon walking up that chunk of granite, following paint marks on the rock. Luckily, the rock is rougher than it looks and we had very good traction, even where it was wet. It was still a struggle though as it was too steep for the ankles to make the angle. Definitely not a place to fall and roll! Stone Mountain is part of the Appalachian Mountain range and the view from the top was of mountains in all directions, and great slabs of streaky granite. Happily, the rain never arrived.
The locals around here used to be moonshiners, making their own corn whisky, mainly because the state of North Carolina imposed Prohibition against alcohol even before the federal government did. Today, the moonshiners have retired and now are mostly in the chicken farming business, but the state’s attitudes continue and the park is an alcohol-free zone. We had to drop the shades before bringing out the wine cask. The campers here, though, seem to be a normal bunch, unlike the strange 
people down in Georgia. Campers there carry their own plastic lampposts around and hang their name boards from the light. Then there were the trucks with “Jesus is Lord” bugscreens and the trailer with the “Calling America to Repentance” signs. The rest of the trailer was smothered with biblical texts.
The park seems to have lots of wildlife. As well as the vultures, we had a flock of turkeys going through the campground, and a good-sized herd of deer out in the meadows. Some of the deer were tame enough to let me get within touching distance. Others took off with a gasp as I came running around the corner.
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