We spent yesterday
(my birthday, I promise not to mention my birthday in any more posts...at least until next year) at the
Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, an untouched wilderness old growth forest that was dedicated to Kilmer, a poet and a soldier. Kilmer was killed during WWI while searching for enemy machine guns in a forest of France; it was the Veterans of the Foreign Wars who requested an appropriate stand of trees be set aside as a living memorial to him. His poetry captured the essence of the common yet magnificent things found in nature and is best known for his poem Trees.
Being that this particular birthday was momentous for me, it seemed fitting that this is where we would spend the day...the poem was read at my brother Marc's memorial service as we planted a living oak in his memory, and it happens to be my dad's favorite poem...while the decision to visit the forest was made without these things in mind, it seems serendipitous that's how things unfolded.
The forest is incredible, with a two mile trail with two loops meandering through the trees. The following pictures are presented in the same sequence that I snapped them along our hike. I hope you enjoy your visual virtual hike...
This is the beginning of the first loop...
...some pretty poke berries
(you can eat cooked poke when it's young but once the berries appear beware...it's poisonous)...
...a dead tree trunk with an interesting large cavity...
...intermingled trunks...I found the rock wedged inside to be particularly fascinating...
...the forest has very few flowers because the tall canopy doesn't allow much light to reach the ground...but I did come across some very large Jewelweed blooms...they were almost twice the size of the ones around our cabin and interestingly they were all yellow
(there were no orange/red blooms, the color predominating our woods).
The two trail loops meet in the middle
(making a figure 8), where this memorial plaque is embedded into a huge rock...
...as we ascended up the second trail loop, the trees became huge and their canopy really obscured the suns rays...as a result moss and ferns dominate the landscape...many trees have fallen and created beautiful wooden sculptures...
...this is an up close photo of the moss from the same spot as above...I love how delicate it looks...
...trees are down everywhere, this one crossing the trail...I told Johny we had to limbo under it!...
...the first really big poplar we came to...that would be Johny standing next to it...
it's really hard to grasp the enormity of these trees through photographs, I couldn't even capture a tree in its entirety in one picture frame...
...its hard to see this clearly, but there were 4 giant trees growing in a row...
...most of the trees were almost perfectly vertical, but every now and again there were some that created interesting bends as they grew, there are two n this photo, one in the center and one on the far left...
...the forest floor was covered with intricate roots these huge trees used to keep themselves standing...
...the tree top canopy was high that you had to tip your head all the way back to see up...the other interesting thing is you don't hear many birds, also because they are so high above in the tree tops...
...some trunks had fascinating webs for bases...
...these two trees were enormous, and stunning right next to each other...
...a natural watering hole in a rock...
...years of water rushing over this rock made an intricate design on this rock...
...many trees had interesting holes that I can imagine must be home to something...
...there wasn't much wildlife to be seen, but this fuzzy caterpillar was among the few we did encounter...
...as was this Pipevine Swallowtail...
...another massive root structure...
...the moist, dark and decaying wood is perfect growth medium for lots of fungi...
...we thoroughly enjoyed the trail, and just as we were coming to the end, the skies opened up and the rain came down...
...we stayed under a shelter for a while, then Johny ran for the car. The rain put a bit of a damper on our picnic plans, so we decided to drive up to the observation deck about five miles from the trail, and though much of the view was obscured by the clouds, it was still spectacular...
We decided to head back east toward home
(the forest is almost as far west in NC as you can get, a couple hours from the cabin) looking to see if we could find a dry place to picnic. On the way, we stopped at the beginning of the
Cherohala Skyway, a trail similar to the
Blue Ridge Parkway...we'll be coming back for that drive some day!
We ended up visiting 3 wineries on our way back to the cabin, which made for a lovely winding trip back home. I'll tell you more about those stops tomorrow. It was the perfect way to spend the day!
Thanks for reading my blog, you are the best f/f/r/s/f's, see you tomorrow,
Lise
