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September 1999

North Carolina - Blue Ridge Parkway and Asheville

David Aaronson
2005-09-23 23:13:06

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of the Mississippi (6684 ft). You can drive most of the way up and then hike the rest. There are actually quite a few trails in the area but we had more otters to go see that afternoon so we couldn't stay too long.

See, we told you there were more otters. Next stop was Grandfather Mountain which we recommend in place of Chimney Rock on anyone's itenary. On the lower slopes of the mountain are several wildlife habitats for animals native to this region of the world. Some of the areas feature timid animals like deer. These areas are actually overrun with groundhogs as they leave food out for the deer, but deer aren't really very threatening to the groundhogs so they come and eat it too. Most people ignore the deer and take pictures of the groundhogs. Funny thing that. The river otters, naturally, would not tolerate the intrusion of groundhogs and well, groundhogs probably wouldn't really want to catch and eat fish anyway.

There were four otters (at least) frolicking in the pools and streams here. One of them was attempting to be the sleeping otter while the other three were attempting to ensure that there was no sleeping otter.

These two resting otters stubbornly refused to rest in more appropriate light for photography. This is officially the last otter picture until at least the next trip.

Next we have black bears, and more interestingly, we have black bear cubs. There were two cubs when we visited one of which was a cinnamon color which is apparently a rare thing amongst black bears (hence the name). This one is managing to look surprisingly like Trout (see the Trout page for reference), which is also a rare thing amongst black bears.

Here the bear cub is not staring at his toes as it might appear, but actually at a small inoffensive stick on the ground. We know this because moments after this picture was taken he savagely attacked the stick for at least five or six seconds before his attention span waned and he wandered off in search of something else to do. The stick escaped with minor injuries.

Higher up on Grandfather Mountain there are other attractions, including a very nice hiking trail to the next summit over which actually requires as much scrambling and climbing as it does hiking. Unfortunately we didn't have enough time to follow the entire trail. There is also a shorter trail which crosses the mile-high swinging bridge. The bridge is not actually a mile above the gorge, it's only a mile above sea-level but it's still a long way down and the bridge does indeed swing.

After that we had to head back towards Raleigh. It was a fairly uneventful drive, and we did manage to have time for one more dose of barbeque in Greensboro (not to be confused with Greenville). We arrived at Raleigh airport a leisurely hour and ten minutes in advance of our flight, so naturally we were bumped up to the flight leaving in ten minutes so that we still had to rush. All this did for us was give us a longer layover in Charlotte. Two events of interest happened in Charlotte airport; the first is that our souvenir NC Zoo bag holding our souvenir NC Zoo stuff along with some souvenir Biltmore Estate wines exploded into a hundred little NC Zoo bag fragments. The second event of note is that a routine survey of Charlotte Airport employees revealed that only one out of five actually knows where the post office is, but the other four are willing to give you wrong answers.