2005/04 Deep South trip - Blue Ridge Parkway |
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The morning started sunny, but soon got cloudy. Sandie tried looking for gems in the creek, but decided the water was 
just too cold. We were planning to drive down the Blue Ridge Parkway to a mine at Canton, but first we had to get out of the Pisgah forest. We took what North Carolina calls a “mountain road”, a narrow gravel track through some tiny mountain communities. These Bible Belt communities may only be a cluster of shacks and trailers but they always have at least one neat little Baptist church on the corner. We’re more used to the Wisconsin landscape, where each community has a bar on the corner, sometimes on every corner.
The snow started as soon as we climbed up onto the parkway, heavy wet stuff coming at us horizontally. The parkway runs for hundreds of miles along the southern Appalachian Mountains. It is a narrow winding road, with access points where it crosses other major roads, usually on a bridge. There are no towns, traffic lights, businesses, or trucks on the road, so it makes for pleasant driving provided you’ve planned your access to food and gasoline. In the summer and fall though it has a lot of holiday traffic, sometimes bumper to bumper. We saw little traffic; actually we saw little of anything but snowflakes. It was just warm enough for them melt on the road, but I was wondering about the last section of the parkway, the piece we drove and camped on last year, as that has the highest mountains in the range. The police must have been concerned too as when we got there they had closed the road!
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