April 16, 2009
Coming into Hot Springs I was able to do a great bike-hike. Here's an overlook along NC Route 209 looking back south toward the Max Patch area. The road hugs the cliff top, then plunges down to the French Broad River.
Here's the hike back up to where I started - there's one of the many hikers I met along the way.
In Hot Springs, I'm camping where a CCC camp was located, and here's part of the treadway that they built in the 1930s.
Approaching Hot Springs
Dicentra canadensis
April 13, 2009
While strolling along on Sunday, I spotted a patch of spring flowers, and snapped a photo.
On close examination, it's squirrel corn, a relative of dutchman's breeches and bleeding heart - so nice!
Sun and Rain
April 13, 2009
Sunday (Easter for some) was a perfect sunny day, so I "skipped ahead" a few miles to famous Max Patch, one of the classic Appalachian balds. A snow drift still clung just below the crest where the wind must have compacted it all winter. Two days later I went by the trail head and the snow was gone. Quite a few picnickers were up there with dogs and frisbies although it's quite a remote place, about a 10 mile drive up a dirt forest road.
Most days have been cloudy or foggy - today I hiked Walnut Mountain and Bluff Mountain. Here's Walnut Mountain Shelter, built in 1938, I'm guessing out of chestnut logs.
Here's the top of Bluff Mountain, at 4600 feet, in the clouds. I was glad to be on a day hike, returning to the lowlands for the night - I met numerous hardy through-hikers who were camping in the fog and drizzle.
Smoky Mountain Springtime
April 11, 2009
I'm at it again. After a drive from New England on which I encountered snow flurries on the Hudson and daffodils through Virginia, I'm headquartered in Newport, TN.
I'll be hiking the Tennessee-North Carolina state line northward.
On my first day, I finished the last stretch of the Smokies and crossed the Pigeon River. Here's the Trail along State Line Branch, plunging down to the Pigeon River (and I-40).
Now I'm starting up the Bald Mountains - the first hike to the top of Snowbird Mountain was socked in with low-hanging cloud cover.
These funky trilliums (if I remember right, they're called "toad shade") are blooming in damp places.
You can see how foggy it is here.
Architectural Fantasyland
April 4, 2009
I've been meditating on nature and artifice. I went on another art experience ... a tour of Philip Johnson's landscape in New Canaan.
A forest was turned to farmland for a century or two, then overgrown. Then for 60 years after 1945, PJ re-cleared fields, restored and enhanced stone walls, built a pond in the valley, and constructed a series of pavilions. Each one is sculpture in the landscape but simultaneously a building that can be experienced from within, and also a container for art.
Like an Olmsted park, there is an illusion of nature, but it's carefully manipulated. PJ's humor is everywhere, from the Poussin painting in the Glass House hinting at nature as artist's canvas, to the cast-in-bronze driftwood sculpture, the mini-pavilion in the pond, and the sampling of all the design fashions of the 20th century. And yet ... what a skillful abstract composition of line, cube, cone, positive and negative, transparent and opaque.
Art from a Book
April 1, 2009
Julie Cockburn's "The Beetle Book" on display at the Yale British Art Center to celebrate the Sustainability Summit (that's what they SAY, but it could be an April Fool joke). The beetles are illustrations which she cut out of the book and turned into 3-D paper art - I love it!
I'm getting psyched for my own performance piece - I'll be off soon to Tennessee for another outing on the Trail - I'll be filling in the last gap to complete my walk. Stay tuned ...
West Coast Week
March 4, 2009
Bob & I took a low-key vacation to California where it was already spring (!) at the "Hotel Bressack."
Our splurge was a weekend with Abby & Dennis to Pacific Grove and Monterey - the jellyfish are only one of many marvels at the aquarium.
Phoebe and I indulged in local tourism with a visit to some art on the Stanford campus,
and I enjoyed the Los Altos redwood grove in high water, a first for me.
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