- Title
- Our State
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-
- Date
- March 2009
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-
- Place
- ["North Carolina, United States"]
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Our State
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Blue Ridge
Parkway
Stop-and-start traffic makes for a perfect weekend
when you’re cruising a scenic highway and pausing to
relish seemingly endless vistas.
hirty miles west of Asheville, it comes into view: a lone peak,
sided with roughly 500 feet of sheer granite and fringed with
l' a mantle of oak and pine, so big, so formidable, that it would
look more at home in California’s Yosemite Valley.
The mountain is Looking Glass Rock, and, dramatic as it is,
W it’s just one of scores of notable sights along the North Carolina
portion of the Blue Ridge Parkway. From Cumberland Knob, near
the Virginia border, to its terminus at the gates of the Great Smoky
Mountains National Park, more than half of the scenic road’s 469
miles pass through our state, offering a visual feast of wild (lowers,
foliage, Canadian forests, circling hawks, and vistas that seem endless.
The good news is that you can traverse this black ribbon in the span
of a weekend, even with stops to soak up the view’s and to take in
some sidetrip pleasures — shopping at the factory outlets in Blowing
Rock or enjoying a Cuban sandwich at a downtown Asheville cafe.
Next year, the Blue Ridge Parkway celebrates its 75th anniversary.
Envisioned as a link between Shenandoah National Park to the north
and the newly created Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the
south, it was authorized through the National Industrial Recovery Act
of 1933, with much of the brute effort needed to create it coming from
the n»en of the Civilian Conservation Corps
(С
XX').
The Art Loeb Trail (opposite
page), which crests Black Balsam
Knob in Pisgah National Forest,
is one of hundreds of treks that
draw hikers of all skill levels to
the Blue Ridge Parkway (above).
march loot Our State 69
By Kent
Рпх&лИгу
\ Photography by Stzvtn Mcfriide
