Misty days are their own kind of beauty.
After over a month of complete closures in all of NC, a few sections of the Blue Ridge Parkway opened this week. Yesterday, I've heard, it was absolutely packed with folks turning out in force to see the colors. I hope everyone got what they were looking for. We all deserve it, after the month we've had.
I wasn't able to get up there till today, and it was quite an adventure getting there. It was rainy from the moment we set out, but I don't mind.
At 5500 feet of elevation on a day like this, you're not gonna see much beyond the edge of trees. It's not just foggy: You're literally in the clouds.
This kept most people away. We saw ONE other car during the hour or so we were on the parkway (it took 1.5 hours to get to the section we wanted to see, due to closures and detours, and 1.5 hours to get back... worth it).
What they missed, though!
It always feels to me like I'm in a 3D rendered environment where they haven't bothered to render beyond the forest I'm immediately occupying. It feels magical and otherworldly. Like everything has faded away, and it's just you, and these trees.
I especially love these mountains above about 5000 feet of elevation (Asheville, for comparison, is at 2100-ish; the highest point east of the Mississippi, which is Mt. Mitchell, is at 6400-ish), where the landscape turns to spruce forest, and you start to see species of plants and animals that are typically only found in Canada, or nowhere else at all, and you feel like you've entered a whole other country.
It's this way because the glaciers pushed Canadian species and ecosystems down this way in the last ice age, and then those at high enough elevations stayed behind, creating ecological islands that are unique in all the world. Some species have evolved in these "islands" into varieties that can be found nowhere else.
(All of this is at risk from climate change, btw, the sad counterpoint to all nature love stories these days, the grief weighed in the other hand.)
I'm so grateful to live in a time when these magical landscapes still live, still thrive. A place where I can drive an hour, or an hour and a half, and find myself in a place out of time and memory, a mystical, misty-cal world apart.
It is my fondest hope that we will find a way to reclaim our relationship with these special places through our care for all our relations. Maybe, if we love them hard enough, we can save them, and ourselves in the process.
~ Fen Druadìn
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