Beans, Trees, Rolling Pins

We needed to run out to the grocery store on Thursday so Andy suggested that we go to the Bush's bean factory to eat lunch.  We went to the museum a few years ago and the cafe was closed.  I am a huge bean fan and wanted to see how they serve them at the source. The General Store, museum, and cafe all sit right across the road from the factory.

I am enamored with the white frames surrounding the outdoor eating area.  We sat out there next to it and I inspected it right away.  I thought it was made of wood, but it turned out to be metal.

This is the farmhouse on the property.  I love it too except that is has a factory in the back yard.

Oh yeah, the food.  It was good, but I was disappointed that they did nothing creative with the beans. The waitress, Sharon, told us they just heat them from the can and don't do anything to dress them up.  They didn't have any bean entrees, only bean side dishes. It was good, but just typical cafe food.

I was wearing my park uniform shirt so Sharon also mentioned that she was a friend of the man who fell and died at Ramsy Cascades the other day.  She said he was 29 and from the Czech Republic and had been here many years. She had worked with him for ten years at another restaurant before he moved to the construction business.  He had no family here.

There is a great write-up on Wikipedia about Bush's, a fabulously successful family-owned business.

We don't usually leave the park on Thursdays or Fridays, Spence's day off. We also stay here on the weekends. Here are two of my regular photo subjects.  This branch is usually in the sunshine when we walk up to the campground in the mornings.

I also enjoy this scene when we are walking from our motorhome up to the parking lot area.

On the Radio:  An elderly man was sitting in the road behind his car over near Mingus Mill on the Cherokee side of the park. When a ranger went to investigate, he found the car but not the man. I didn't catch any more to that story.

Dispatch called for twelve volunteers to form a litter team to carry out a 79-year-old man with a knee problem on the Alum Cave Trail.

A ranger asked for some VPs for assistance, but there were none on duty.  All volunteers were coming in later to help with the firefly watching in the evening.

Spence and Linda stopped in this morning.  She brought me a present.  The last time she was here, Andy and I were disagreeing on something of major importance (we disagree on nearly everything) and were good-naturedly arguing.  Linda noted that she had something we could use.  Her husband Larry had made it.  So this morning, she delivered a set of His and Hers rolling pins.  For those too young to know.  The old comics and cartoons always had the wife threatening or bonking her husband with a rolling pin. One of them is slightly heavier than the other.  I told Andy that one was mine.

Boss Larry stopped in this afternoon while I was just finishing our dinner.  He told us that there had been another drowning. This time is was at Abrams Falls. I knew something was going on from the radio but missed the beginning and could not figure out what the emergency was. I kept dinner warm while Andy accompanied Boss Larry while he emptied the money envelops from the iron ranger.

While browsing for a photo online, I was shocked to see one with a line of young men jumping off the falls from the top. It was not free, so I chose this one from Pinterest instead.  There have been many drownings at Abrams Falls and the park has posted warning signs in the area.

We had hard rain today and that seemed to keep the number of day visitors down.  There were plenty of parking spaces in the picnic area parking lot.  The campground is nearly full despite the damp weather.

Get the Book on Amazon:

Circumnavigating The Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Boy, am I mad!!!!  Someone has carved initials in a tree in Campsite 9.  I don't know if it has been there for a while and I didn't notice it or it is new.  The letters are huge and deep.  It looks as though they burned them in. I'm going to look into the best way to obscure the letters without doing too much harm to the tree.

We needed to take a day off for exploration and adventure.  (Seniors adventures, of course)  When we stopped in for coffee after weed whacking, Spence suggested that it would be a perfect day to ride the Tail of the Dragon.  The weather was gorgeous, but the traffic would be less on a weekday.  I've been wanting to go there since our first year, but Andy has been reluctant.  We hear of too many motorcycle accidents on the park radio and the Tail of the Dragon is a famous ride for motorcycles.

Spence also suggested that we go into the park at Gatlinburg so I could take some pictures of the spot where thirty-to-forty trees fell over and blocked Little River Road for several days. Fortunately, there was a pull-over spot just past the tree incident site.

It has been all cleaned up now and was hard to capture on camera.  In real life, it was very impressive.  When we heard a park employee reporting it on the radio, he said it must have been a microburst. There were some trees and branches in Little River, across the road.

We continued on and took the Townsend exit from the park and then got on the Foothills Parkway.  We hear of it on the park radio so I wanted to see it.  There was very little traffic.  I stopped a few times for pictures.  This one is looking north/west.

This overlook is looking south/east

The spot and the view were lovely, but there was a lot of graffiti on the steps and viewing platform. I reported it to dispatch.

The Tail of the Dragon is an eleven-mile stretch of curvy mountain road on US29.  It is very popular with motorcyclists and sports cars as there are 318 curves.  Andy was very relieved that there was not much traffic.  Only two vehicles came up behind me and I pulled over to let them pass.  All the motorcycles were traveling in the opposite direction. I believe we were at the Tail of the Dragon Overlook when I took this picture. If so, that is Calderwood Dam and Lake. 

I also wanted to see Fontana Dam and Lake on the Little Tennessee River.  I was not prepared for it. Holy Moly!!  That thing is huge!  At 480 feet, it is the biggest dam in the Tennessee Valley power system and the highest dam east of the Rockies. Built to produce power for the WWII effort, it was started in 1942 and completed 36 months later. 

Our next stop was at the top. This is a view of Fontana Lake from an overlook.

The roadway on top of the dam is the Appalachian Trail.

We turned into the visitor center and looked into this giant hole.  It is a spillway to dump water from the lake and there are two of them.  They are so large and deep that I thought they might be the gates of hell.  I didn't get a picture looking down.

The visitor center has some exhibits and an observation deck on the roof.

From there, I took this shot of the spillway with the bridge.

We walked onto the bridge and I took this picture of Fontana Lake.

I had planned to stop in the Deep Creek campground near Bryson City to say hello to fellow campground hosts, Henry and Bonnie, but we realized it was getting late.  We opted to pass it by and that was a good decision.  It was after ten o'clock when we got back to Big Creek.

Here is our trip today. Counterclockwise from the red "X", Big Creek.  I circled the main points of interest in red too.

We picked up this brochure at the dam visitor center.  We did not stop at the Tail of the Dragon store for stickers or t-shirts. I'm not sporty enough.

String Trimming and Mowing

I don't know what they are, but the rules for using power tools in the park are limiting.  Definitely not on weekends when there are more visitors.  Of course, he can't mow the grass when it is raining.  He needs to weed-whack when there are not too many cars in the parking lot.  Many cars are parked there for days while their owners are hiking in the back country. Slinging gravel on them is a no no.

Often, the stars do not align properly for days on end. Weekday, few cars, no rain.  It doesn't happen very often in Big Creek. We've had two days with no rain.  Spence was week whacking (actually, the park calls it string trimming) around the parking lot in the mornings and mowing in the afternoons.

The men in Site 6 had some very attractive firewood.  It was scraps from his wood-working shop.

The folks in Site 12 had collected some wet wood from the forest and it was just about smoking them out.  

Big Creek - It's a Book!!!!!

I checked Amazon late last night and found Big Creek!.  It's a book!!!!

Even if you are not remotely interested in buying a copy, check it out.  Somehow, the more people that look it up, the higher it gets in the algorithm and will show up higher in the list of searches. Or, so I've read.  I probably don't know enough people to make a difference, but it's worth a try.

I don't have my paper copies yet.

Now you won't have to read my whining about the book not getting done any longer!

The Recovery

The tent campground was cleared out when we made our morning walkabout.  Only the parties in Sites 2 and 3.  We saw Spence a bit later and he reported that only Site 3 was occupied.  There were plenty of day visitors though, even with imminent rain.

The section of Little River Road, where all the trees blew down yesterday, was still closed.

On the radio:

A fisheman (angler, if politically correct) fell and fractured his leg in the Little River. He must have used his cell phone to call 911 and they forwarded it to the park dispatch office.

It was noon before the litter team reached the Ramsey Cascade.  Ranger Jeff was ahead of them. At 1:35 the team announced that the they were heading back down the trail. We did not hear them talking to much about the recovery, except for people checking in to help or verifying that people were carrying the necessary "technical recovery" equipment up the trail. It is a big job, requiring a lot of people to carry equipment in and more to carry the patient out. It saddented me each time I heard them on the radio.  The crew got rained on as they were carrying the patient back down the trail. I think is was about 7:30 in the evening when we heard Ranger Jeff report that all participants were "clear" of Greenbrier.  It must have been a long, hard day for them all.

Spence at Work in Big Creek

Spence has been working hard this week.  We passed his Gator parked near the picnic area toilet building.  I got a kick of how his brush from knocking down cobwebs is strapped to the Gator.  It is even funnier to see him carrying a ladder.

We were heading back down the campground road from our morning walkaround when Spence came driving up to clean the tent campground toilet building.  Andy pointed out that his Gator only has one headlight.  Spence doesn't know when he'll get a new bulb.

This cluster of leaves along the campground road stood out against the green forest behind it.

Leaf Burst

Ramsey Cascades Tragedy

We had one clap of thunder and then some rain last night about eleven.  I didn't notice any wind. Apparently, they got a much bigger storm on the Tennessee side of the park.  The radio was abuzz this morning about trees fallen across the roads.  It seemed that most of the park roads were closed. We heard several people discussing downed trees on Little River Road. At one point, a park worker said there must have been a micro-burst as there were thirty to forty trees down in one area.  They had the road blocked.  There were discussing through the day on what to do about it and they eventually decided that it would be too dangerous for men to cut them up with chainsaws.  They decided to close the road and wait for heavy equipment to come in some time this week.

There is a gate at the entrance to the group and host campsites.  We try to keep it closed on weekends and, especially, holiday weekends.  Otherwise, as soon as the small parking lot is filled, people will be parking in the group site. I'm sure the folks who paid for that site would not be too happy about it. The parking lot was already full when we walked around the campground in the morning.  Andy closed the gate on our way up there.

Since we were already up to the road, we continued on it rather than our normal route through the parking lot.  I love the little (short) split-rail fence along this section of road.  Most of the rails are covered with moss.  I think the moss poachers Spence told us about got a lot of their moss from this fence.  Many of the rails are missing their mossy blanket.

At this point, the road loops around into the parking lot.  The campground road is just around the bend.

I noticed this tiny forest of slender plants.  I thought they might be ferns, but they have not opened enough for me to be sure.

Boss Larry, fresh from his vacation, arrived while we were eating. Ranger Jeff arrived shortly thereafter and they went to the campground to empty the iron ranger. They brought all the payment envelopes back and counted them on our picnic table.  We chatted for a bit and then, they were on their way.

Here is another first.  These mushrooms are growing in the gravel walkway in the campground.

I post photos of these boulders in the woods next to the campground road every year.  They are brilliant when the sun hits them just right.

We stood on the bridge and watched these two children in the creek.  They did not get in that frigid water any more than necessary to get from rock to rock.

Another crop of mushrooms has popped up in the moss near the toilet building. They are about as big as a pencil eraser.

I don't remember the time, early to mid-afternoon most likely, when we heard a report of a man who fell forty feet onto rocks at the Ramsey Cascades and they could not see him. Rangers were immediately chiming in.  Ranger Jeff was apparently the first one to the Greenbrier area.  Ranger Heath was not far behind him. It is a long way to get to the waterfall with a five-mile dirt-and-gravel drive into the Greenbrier area from the entrance.  Then it is a four-mile strenuous hike to the falls.

Someone reported a tree down across the road in the park.  I think Ranger Jeff reported it and went on.  Ranger Heath was going to clear the tree from the road so the rescue vehicle could get through. More park personnel were joinging the rescue.  About eighteen were on the way to carry the patient out, clear other park visitors out of the way, interview hikers coming down the trail, etc.  They were having radio trouble and kept having to repeat for dispatch or each other.  Sometimes we could only hear half of a converstation.

It was about seven to seven-thirty when we began to hear them discussing continuing in the morning. The In-Charge ranger said he wanted a report first-hand before making a decision.  Later, he announced that Ranger Jeff had reached the patient.  They would make a recovery in the morning.  All the rescue team on the trail was to drop all their rescue gear where they were.  The trail will be closed until they complete the recovery tomorrow.

It is always distressing when we hear of a death in the park.  It happens way too often for various reasons. I am sure it is hard on the rangers and other park personnel who attempt to rescue park visitors.