Morning broke clear and crisp. There was no shelter from the light on top of the bald, so as soon as the sun crested the eastern ridge and blazed full and harsh on our campsite I was awake. Despite the brightness, there was a bitter chill and I wrestled with my sleeping bag before finally unzipping myself from its warm cocoon and stumbling out of the tent.
As a little girl I used to run out to the old horse pasture in front of my parents’ house and gaze up at the stars. Johnston County wasn’t quite so built up back then: there wasn’t a mega Walmart with its theme park-sized parking lot a couple miles away, or a Game Stop wedged between chain restaurants, and there wasn’t a long row of gas stations at an unremarkable truck stop with some fast food annexes haphazardly built on. When I was little there was an abyssal night sky visible, and I could count meteors and satellites and name planets and stars, and feel humbled beneath the enormity of it all.
Sometimes a wild ache falls upon me and I find myself compelled to go, just go. Such was the case in late September when McCrae and I packed up our gear and our dog into the little Mazda hatchback and headed west to the Balsam Mountains near Asheville. One weekend after another had become booked up so that we were afraid our October schedules would be impossibly full and we would miss the fall foliage entirely unless we went immediately. We didn’t hesitate, and it was suddenly that easy to leave for a few days.
Traffic was awful. I had no idea that Labor Day weekend sees some of the busiest traffic of the year, but I had already committed to driving to Atlanta on Friday evening, so I gritted my teeth and pushed through the frustratingly slow drive. First there were delays leaving Chapel Hill, and then there were slowdowns along I-85 south in Greensboro and Charlotte, and inexplicable stop-and-go traffic along random stretches through South Carolina.
After the Blue Ridge Parkway, Durham seemed...flat. Geographically flat, emotionally flat: just flat. It was an opened can of sweet Dr. Pepper left out while I was away. The nectar was the same, but the appeal had waned.
or our big backpacking weekend we actually ended up extremely lucky. We were about a mile or two away from Mount Pisgah when the “check oil” light started flashing on the dash of my PT Cruiser. Since we didn’t have reliable GPS in the mountains and were relying on directions that pretty much said “get on the Blue Ridge Parkway and drive until you find the campground,” we had no idea if we would end up stranded in the middle of nowhere with no cell reception and no way to get help. It seemed just a matter of minutes before the mountain men emerged and we would find ourselves in the middle of a B-list horror film, so it was a great relief when we made it to Mt. Pisgah campground, and there, sitting obligingly on a shelf in the country store were a few quarts of motor oil. Heaven help us, we were in luck!
For the past few weeks I’ve made it a habit to take a “Sunday stroll,” though as my mother was quick to point out, “You call that a STROLL?!” Apparently several miles up a rocky path around places that are optimistically named "something-something bluff," "blah-blah ridge" and "so-and-so mountain" is not considered by the majority of the population to be a “stroll.” But while I’ve been consistently getting out and exploring I’ve been abjectly derelict in documenting it, so let me catch up.
Perhaps the most difficult part of New Hope Overlook is getting there. The Jordan Lake state park doesn't give very specific instructions on how to find the place: "From US 64, turn south on Beaver Creek Road/SR1008. After passing Ebenezer Recreation Area, turn right onto Pea Ridge Road and follow the signs to the park entrance, which is on the right."
