On the western edge of the D.C. metro, elusive bobcats roam the darkness in the hills of West Virginia. Just how many, state biologists would like to know.
They’re enlisting the help of trappers in the state’s eastern panhandle and its Allegheny Mountains region, asking trappers to release the cats back into the wild with tracking collars, according to Gary Foster, assistant chief of the wildlife-management section for the W.Va. Division of Natural Resources.
Mostly active during twilight, the cats are rarely seen and more often heard and may inhabit most every county in the Mountain State, the most forested state per square mile in the contiguous U.S.
Deep in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, about 50 miles south of Knoxville, sits an American wonder 140 feet below ground.
Inside, a narrow tunnel leads to an intricate cave system drenched in history. Cherokee Indians used it as a shelter in the 1820s. And during the Civil War, Confederate soldiers used the cave's minerals to make gunpowder.
Tour guide Savannah Dalton is part of that rich history. Her grandmother and great aunt played down here as children.
"I was actually six years old the first time I came down here with my grandmother and older brother," Dalton said.
Few places encapsulate Appalachia like The Great Smoky Mountains. From the stunning views at Cades Cove to the rich history found in Cherokee, this unique range also represents the nation’s most visited national park.Here’s your chance to tour the Smokies on your own terms. The folks at RVshare have this terrific contest—The Smokies Summer Giveaway.
The grand prize winner receives a free RV rental for four-days, a free three-night campground stay in the Smokies, and $1,000 in cash for spending money. The prize package would give you the flexibility to go where you want and see what you want, all while bringing your lodging with you!
But be sure to enter soon. The contest ends July 1, 2019.
And once you enter, don’t forget to increase your chance of winning by taking some of these social media actions:
Finally, we want to hear about your Smoky Mountain experiences and aspirations. Be sure to leave a comment below and tell us—what’s your favorite spot in the Smokies or what spot do you most want to visit?
We all lie a little.
Maybe your boss asks what you think of her new top, and though it looks like it's made from fishing nets, you say, "It's really fun!"
Or the tub is clogged, and there's no way the plunger will fix it. You tell your significant other, "Yeah, I already tried that."
White lies sometimes get us by, and that apparently holds true on the Appalachian Trail. Greg and Jen Seymour started their thru hike on Springer Mountain in Georgia on March 22, 2017 and finished on Mount Katahdin, Maine on September 16, 2017. Along the way, they heard enough fibs to make this handy list, which originally appeared on their blog Appalachian Trail Tales.
Maybe some are familiar. Maybe you even have your own to add. What's the best lie you ever heard in the great outdoors? And what's the best you ever told?
Most Appalachian Trail thru-hikers start the trail as a neophyte and end it as an expert. Along the way they learn that some of the things they had been told about the trail just aren’t true. These are five of those things for us.
1. Virginia is easy/flat
Before we left on our thru-hike, we heard several times in several ways that the miles in Virginia were easy or at least flatter than those experienced in the preceding states of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
If you compare the elevations in the guidebook of Virginia against any one of the first three states, it does appear flatter. Don’t be fooled. Virginia has plenty of challenges for the thru-hiker and it is neither flat nor easy.
I believe one of the contributing factors to this fallacy is that in Virginia many hikers begin busting out serious daily mileage. That means it’s easy right? Uh, no. It means by Virginia, a NOBO hiker has earned their trail legs. They have also dialed in their gear and their packs are at an optimal weight. In this way daily mileage increases in Virginia, certainly not because it’s flat!
2. You should cut your toothbrush handle off to save weight
There is a trend in long-distance backpacking to be as light as possible. New backpackers are admonished to cut off tags from clothing, remove extra length from straps, and yes, cut the handle off a toothbrush. However, focusing solely on weight causes problems. Have you ever tried brushing your teeth with a toothbrush with a short shaft? I’ll carry an extra half ounce to have a product that is more comfortable. Another example is frameless or ultra light backpacks. They may be a pound or two lighter than their counterparts with support, but if they cause shoulder pain because they can’t support the weight you are carrying, it’s not worth it. So, when considering gear choices you have to weigh not only weight, but comfort, utility, durability, and cost.
3. Anything they say going down a mountain when you are going up
This is actually true of ANY hiker you meet descending a mountain you are climbing up. They will want to help … to be positive, but whatever they say, it’s a lie!
“You’re almost to the top, maybe a tenth of a mile.” Thirty minutes and half a mile later you reach the summit.
“It’s just a gradual climb up.” Translation? Rock scramble most of the way up.
The truth is everything is experienced differently by those coming down the mountain, plus they were just up at the summit hanging for an hour, they are refreshed. You, on the other hand, have been climbing all morning and are fatigued.
4. You can’t smell the stink on your self
Wrong. Lie. You can!
5. It’s only about the journey not the destination
It sounds good and it makes a great poster, but is it true? For the prospective thru-hiker, I think not. The two words, journey and destination, are a team and while you can have a journey without a destination, it is unlikely you would complete the entire Appalachian Trail if you didn’t have the destination in sight.
My assumption is that your goal is to do just that, to be a thru-hiker. If that’s the case, you must have a destination. Something to work towards. To walk to. A culmination of your hard work and aching bones. An end.
And that destination is your purpose.
Yes, over the course of five or six months you will meet incredible people, see unbelievable sights, commune with nature. And yes, the journey can change you and feed your soul for years to come. But, if the objective is to be a thru-hiker, focusing only on the journey will set you adrift.
Instead, focus on the destination and enjoy the journey.
Weekend getaways keep me sane. There's something liberating about throwing clothes in a bag and skipping town, saying goodbye to the office, to bushes that need trimming, to the mail pile I've ignored for weeks and, within a few hours, finding myself in a totally different space.
Often that space is west of my Alexandria townhouse. I drive past the D.C. metro's long arm, out where roads get curvy and the land rises up. Brave hills defy Virginia's Piedmont and make way for true mountains, which is where I'm usually going.
I'm no fan of motels. Those land gobbling, cookie-cutter eyesores just rile me, so before heading out, I usually find a good vacation rental. Over the years, I've stayed in cabins, bungalows, converted barns, and farm houses. Some are people's residences, vacated in a rush with little hints about them left behind like family photos, a stray hair bow, clothes, and toiletries. In other houses, every last drawer is empty.
Personal belongings or not, I feel the same—transported, immersed in an actual home where I can make a pot of coffee and pour whiskey into a real glass, where I can admire the landscape from a porch or patio or second story window. At dawn or dusk, I'll stare across rolling blue silhouettes and pretend that I again live among the mountains.
You could add a pleasing look to your house windows for which you have to Buy Blinds Online roller blinds.
Long story short. Everyone knows about windsor westside, but here is the list of some unit places. Enjoy.
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This rustic charmer is both affordable and secluded. Owned by the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, it's a third of a mile from the nearest road. Reaching it requires a hike past barns and stone fences through what was once a mountainside farm. By the time you see the cabin itself, you feel decades away from the modern world. Inside, the newest amenities are electricity and hot water. No telephone. No internet. No mobile service. At Vining, you're left to enjoy unspoiled views and imagine the people who plateaued its steep hillside, old timers who downed chestnut trees by hand to construct their home more than a hundred years ago, carving a farm from this wilderness, one you can still enjoy today.
Not all mountain retreats are rural. This charming little bungalow rests on a quiet West Asheville street where cars are infrequent and big porches are the norm. Since North Carolina is a longer haul, I stayed for a week, cooking old family recipes like wild rabbit hash and lounging in the hammock out back. Arts and craft touches like wide posts and vertical-paned windows reflect a period when working class Americans could still buy a quality, thoughtfully designed home, knowing it would bring pleasure for generations.
I wrote this post here, alternating between the house's sunny front porch and a tufted leather sofa. This remodeled farmhouse, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, serves as a beautiful example of Appalachia's sophisticated side. With double parlors decorated in lush patterns, shining floral wallpaper in one and fake fur throws in the other, it reminds visitors that mountain folk can clean up real good. Though it has shimmering touches, including one magnificent gold ceiling, the house remains country at its core. Bailed hay is within sight of every window and wood is still hauled from the paint-chipped shed in a rusty wheelbarrow. High quality painting for home interiors in Central PA assists with getting such houses ready for sale or rental.
Most people like to visit Appalachia in spring, summer, or fall, but I'm also a fan of wintertime mountains. Harpers Ferry is uniquely pretty with a dusting of snow, and you can't get a better view than from the charming Bed n Biskit. This hillside house overlooks tin rooftops and brick storefronts, which stretch to the trestle-crossed Potomac. I suspect its stone patio would be a lovely place to sit on warmer days, but snow kept me inside, sipping whiskey and catching up with friends by the fire.
Some years ago, I spent Thanksgiving at this 1920s cabin. Nestled in one of Virginia's most charming counties, it fronts a wide creek and is surrounded by pastureland. With a stone fireplace large enough to stand inside, it was warm and inviting, the perfect spot for a celebration. In addition to a generous patio and shelves filled with books, it sports an unusual feature. The ceiling fans atop its soaring main room are mounted through long, rustic tree limbs, a design quirk that makes it feel like you've rented not just a cabin but an entire lodge.
On the shuttle ride from Biltmore’s parking lot, I knew I should have been paying more attention. The estate’s legendary grounds, designed by the father of landscape architecture Frederick Law Olmsted, lay on either side of me, native plants looking as if they’d sprung from the earth perfectly spaced. I glanced out the window but mostly studied our driver, a retirement age woman who transfixed me the minute she said, “We’re fixin’ to drive up to the house.”
Her mountain drawl was telltale. I knew she was a North Carolina native and couldn’t help but wonder what this home meant to her. The largest in the United States, it was built by an outsider more than a hundred years ago, when George Vanderbilt II swept into the Blue Ridge, purchasing 125,000 acres and transforming it into his great estate. In doing so, he redefined this part of Appalachia, carving an economic path for the area around Asheville, one that leads directly to this shuttle bus driver’s paychecks, which she receives from George’s great grandson, the current president of The Biltmore Company.
“What’s that like?” would have been a strange question, so I simply told the driver to have a real good afternoon as I stepped from the shuttle and faced Biltmore. Some 250 rooms encased in tooled limestone, the house was too large to take in without scanning left and right. This close, it was disorienting, so I let my eyes settle on the darkened interior and inched past massive lion statues, arriving in an entry hall built to impress.
To the left, stone stairs wound around a four-story chandelier. To the right, a solarium overflowed with leaves, and beyond it, I could see a wood-paneled room with hulking pool tables.
I was traveling with my friend Neil, a North Carolinian who’d visited Biltmore before. He nudged me toward the billiard room, and I walked in silence, awe struck by marble and silk; by soaring 16th-century, Flemish tapestries; by three side by side fireplaces, each so large I could have easily stood inside.
Stopping next to a dining table designed to seat thirty-eight, I found myself wondering Who lives like this?
I’d been in mansions before, places like Marble House and Monticello, and while these estates were large and elegant too, I could picture people residing in them, working in them. It wasn’t difficult to imagine them full of life, but barely any homes exist on Biltmore’s scale. Fewer boast its grandeur. The house is at once impressive and somehow inhuman. Even when we reached its most personal quarters—his and her bedrooms on the second floor, which were once occupied by George Vanderbilt and his wife Edith—I struggled to connect the home to living, breathing people, other than us tourists who craned our necks and shuffled along the carpeted path laid to protect the floors.
And those floors do need protecting. About one million people visit Biltmore every year, spending more than $140 million locally, according to a 2012 report on the estate’s economic impact. In addition, the house employees about 2,000 people, ranging from our twangy shuttle bus driver to a rosarian—yes, that would be a rose expert—who cares for the house’s historic rose garden.
Any Appalachian area would be lucky for this infusion of capital, but I wonder if it came at a cost. Did Vanderbilt’s landgrab displace many families, and were they well compensated? How did his mansion sit with other mountaineers? We are a notably down to earth people, and this was wealth at its most flaunted. Were locals bitter about the Vanderbilt’s or just happy to see cash flowing into the region?
With docents stationed in most rooms, I had ample opportunity to ask, but, again, my questions seemed uncouth, especially in the face of such opulence. Walking through a Louis XV inspired bedroom, complete with silk velvet wallcoverings imported from France, I imagined myself alive when the house was built. The person I am today would have enjoyed knowing Biltmore was my neighbor even if I was never invited to visit, but how would I have felt as a 19th-century mountaineer, the kind who fell trees himself to build a one or two room home?
Indoor plumbing and electricity would have been exotic to me, so this house, with 43 bathrooms and electric buttons to summons help, would have seemed like a fairy tale, as mythical as Camelot, simply unbelievable.
Were it not for Neil, I would have missed the house’s best part. As we returned to the lobby, he said, “This way,” pointing to a discreet doorway, and within inches, everything took a turn. Downward stairs were lit with simple sconces, a kind I’d seen in many older homes. The walls were unadorned, and where the stairway ended, a brick-lined tunnel began. It led to an unassuming cellar, a large room with bare concrete floors that would have been unremarkable were it not for an amateur mural, painted in grotesque yellows and greens, that encompassed all four walls.
Neil pointed to our brochure: “In April 1924, Cornelia Vanderbilt [George and Edith’s sole child] married the Honorable John Francis Amherst Cecil, a British diplomat. In 1925, the young couple, joined by family and friends, spent several weeks painting these unusual wall scenes for a New Year’s Eve party.”
Unusual was an understatement, more like menacing. A creepy village filled with cats climbing on rooftops and bizarre flowers towering over the houses—this was the kind of graffiti I’d expect from teenage stoners but not American royalty. It was so unlike any of the art upstairs—John Singer Sargent’s formal portraits and Anders Zoran’s depiction of a Victorian ball—beautiful but staid paintings, art built to impress. This messy mural was something else. It showed whimsy and a dark humor. Instead of obfuscating personality, it revealed it, leaving me gawking, entranced. For the first time I could picture people living in Biltmore.
I saw the young couple dabbing at the walls with friends, all in paint splotched clothes. I imagined cooks and laundry boys cutting through the room, laughing at this messy scene. Even their long ago New Year’s party seemed possible. It was surely an elegant affair. These were Vanderbilts after all. It must have extended beyond this humble room to the entire mansion with guests dressed to the nines, yet I could envision their hugs and toasts and kisses, their flirtations and loud children. I could see an older couple retiring early and a sullen loner studying his champagne in the corner. This silly mural transported me to the jazz age, a time of frivolity, of great change, when Victorian pretense began to give way to modern pragmatism, a time when even the extremely rich began to act more human.
The end of November is a great time to go to Europe. Flights are cheap. Tourists are scant. And one of the continent's best traditions—Christmas markets—are in full swing. From Hamburg to Zürich, town squares are transformed into winter wonderlands with every imaginable ball and bauble on display in greenery draped stalls and the Euro-version of state fair food making everything smell truly scrumptious.
Sidenote: At a Christmas festival in southern Germany, I once ate some kind of sausage patty on a bun that still infiltrates my dreams. If you can find one for me, I'll declare you my new best friend.
With Germanic origins, you'd think these kriskindlmarkts, as they're called in their motherland, might have made their way to Appalachia. Germans poured into the region throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, settling in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and further south in North Carolina. In fact, the first European known to have seen Virginia's longest valley was John Lederer, a German who, at the behest of the colony's governor, crested the Blue Ridge Mountains in March of 1669.
While German immigrants aren't as well-remembered as their Scots-Irish neighbors, they did leave their mark on local culture. Anyone who has seen a v-notch in an Appalachian cabin or listened to a dulcimer can attest to their influence, and now German-Appalachians can add their beloved kriskindlmarkts to the list.
In November of each year, a lumber mill in Clifton Forge, Virginia is transformed into a traditional kriskindlmarkt, complete with Christmas wares — everything from handmade gifts to holiday decor — and German food.
If you're in the area, swing by. While browsing the stalls you can swig a little gluhwein, a traditional mix of red wine and cider with spices, and get some quality time with Father Christmas, who will be decked out in old world garb to entertain the kiddies.
Like dragons in miniature, hellbenders crawl across the craggy floors of Appalachian creek beds. They feed and rest. They fight for mates. The ones that remain, some fraction of their once booming population, enchant the humans who are lucky enough to spot them.
"When you see one underwater you're just blown away," says Jeff Humphries of North Carolina Wildlife Resources. "You'll see a hole. You'll see a hellbender head sticking out, and that's that guy's home. He might have that rock as his little home for years and years."
Among the largest species of salamanders, these remarkable creatures grow up to two feet long, and they have lived in Appalachian streams, serving as an important predator and pray, for some 65 million years.
Today, Jeff explains, hellbender populations are seeing a steep decline. "I think it's safe to say that we've probably lost 80-90 percent."
Two problems endanger these animals, and both are man made. First, run-off has filled the precious cracks and crevices they call home. As Jeff explains in the below video, "All that mud and silt just builds up in these rivers over time, and it fills in all these little spaces."
Just walk along your favorite creek or river and look closely. If you see a lot of dirt, sand, or silt, there's a good chance you're viewing a run-off problem. It probably also means that hellbenders are long gone, and as Jeff points out, "Once they're gone they're gone."
While improving land use and urban planning is essential, it's also daunting. Regular folk aren't typically involved in those decisions. We are, however, in a great position to help tackle the other challenge hellbenders face. All we need to do is leave river rocks where they lie.
You see, moving rocks around puts these animals at risk. While it's fine to skip rocks with your child, says Lori Stroup of the U.S. Forest Service, "it's another thing when you're starting to move hundreds of rocks to build a damn or build some kind of shoot to get a tube down."
By disturbing bigger rocks, we can take away this animal's shelter and feeding ground, and once we do that, they're as good as done. Jeff says he sees the sad results of river bed disruption all the time. "We find hellbenders quite a bit that are dead because of people lifting rocks."
I, for one, had no idea I'd been endangering giant salamanders, and I'm a changed man. From today forward, I'm leaving river rocks alone. How about you? Do you have this unique species in your neck of the woods, and will you do your part to help them?
The Last Dragons - Protecting Appalachia's Hellbenders from Freshwaters Illustrated on Vimeo.
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