“In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia on the trail of the Lonesome Pine . . .” June 28, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Air Tickets, Airlines, Beach Resorts, Cars, Europe, Georgia, Hotels, Motel, New York, Round The World, Turkey , trackbackThe Blue Ridge Mountains are the first ridge of the Appalachians as you cross the coastal plains from the Atlantic and step up off the Piedmont plateau. Famed in the Laurel and Hardy theme song, they rise fold on rounded fold of thick hardwood forest, to some 6,000 feet.
Three hours’ drive from the steaming sauna which is Washington in the summer, and 3,800feet up in the clear air of the Blue Ridge Mountains, lies the Wintergreen Mountain Resort. Perched a few miles west of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and the University of Virginia which he founded, the resort is stamped by a distinctive feature. The facilities are owned and controlled by the property owners, who have bought sites and built second homes within the Wintergreen area. The owners underwrite a management company for the resort, securing it against insensitive over-development and downmarket pressures with a degree of success which has made them keenly studied and imitated by leisure resorts elsewhere.
Wintergreen covers 11,000 acres of mountain forest, with recreation facilities of general range and quality. A par-70 golf course has been cut out of the forest and winds for 6,500 yards across blue grass fairways and watered greens, with sudden mountain vistas fifty miles across the Great Valley to the Alleghenies. There are sixteen tennis courts, outdoor and indoor swimming, pony trails and lakes for swimming and canoeing in the valley below. There are twenty miles of marked tracks through the forests, and guided nature trails to study plants, trees, fungi, wildlife, geology. Ten ski slopes, including 1,000- foot vertical falls and snow-making equipment, provide for a three- month ski season, with lifts and floodlit skiing.
And yet, all this is lost within the vastness of the mountains and the forests. Nature overwhelms man. Rocks formed 1,100 million years ago fold into mountain ridge lines, valleys and rock faces, where plant and animal life have found their niches. Variations in slope direction, altitude and moisture give shelter to different forms of wildlife. Natural gardens have established themselves, in different microsites, with different plants. Springs rise, streams are fed, waters tumble down mountainsides, over rock slides, through trout pools. Deep gorges are cut. Shamokin gorge (a Monocan Indian word meaning “land were the antlers are plenty”) at Wintergreen drops almost 3,000 feet from the top of the rocky slide down into the creek bed.
The main trees I see are shagbark hickory, red oak, white ash, yellow birch. Also chestnut oak, with their gnarled twisted trunks, table mountain pine and huge Canadian hemlock up to six feet in diameter. These form the leaf canopy overhead, and insulate the forest floor from the hot sun. By late September the hickory leaves have turned bright yellow, and Virginia creepers add blazes of vivid red. Very soon now the forest will turn, and the trees take on their autumn colours. At head height, rhododendron, azalea and mountain laurel abound, promising brilliant colour in early summer. American chestnut, reduced by a disastrous blight at the beginning of the century, struggles cyclically back to shrub height before disease cuts it down to the roots again. Underfoot meanwhile, my scant botany cannot keep pace with the profusion of wild flowers and fungi. On one short trail I count twenty-one different plants in bloom. Yellow lady slipper is in flower. So too is ginseng, with its red berry fruit, a protected plant whose dried root fetches $300 a pound for export to the Far East. There are oxeye daisies, yarrow and crown vetch; numerous varieties of fern; wood nettle and its antidote, jewel weed; wild vine, wild orchids and lilies.
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