Some hikes in North Carolina can provide a memorable and wonderful experience when the time is right. Roan Mountain is best in the middle of June when the rhododendrons and flame azaleas are blooming, Graveyard Fields is best at the beginning of October when the trees have turned yellow, red and gold. For Cold Mountain, the best time is probably the second half of July. It’s only five miles to the top but it took us three hours to hike them, enjoying the show all along the trail.
Cold Mountain is found along the Art Loeb trail, starting at the Daniel Boone scout campground and going all the way to Brevard, forty miles farther, passing Shining Rock. Cold Mountain is at the beginning, five miles from the campground. The trailhead is at elevation 3230 feet, the summit at elevation 6030 feet. The trail is steep in some places, and quite technical, slippery, with lots of tree roots and some rocky passages. The trail is divided into two portions. From the trailhead to Deep Gap, after 3.5 miles, the trail follows the side of the mountain in the forest. After Deep Gap, the trail climbs to the top of Cold Mountain, a dead-end, following the ridge of that peak, going through luxurious vegetation with lots of grass, weeds and bushes under a less dense forest.
There are some wildflowers on the first part of the climb, but there’s nothing really extraordinary. The hiker can find a lot of Squawroots (although dead in July), some dead Wake Robins. There are some Fire Pinks and some Bee Balms near little creeks. White Rhododendrons are blooming all the way from the bottom to the top.
Deep Gap is a sea of flowering Sunflowers, as high as three feet tall. Some smaller blue flowers are hiding below the Sunflowers, Spiderworts and Self Heals. From there to the top, the number of wildflowers is simply impressive. The best part to me awaits the hiker only 15 minutes from the gap. On the right side of the trail, three Turk’s Cap Lilies are standing quietly for a preview of what is coming. That area is like a garden of lilies, as fifty feet further up the trail, a group of around 50 Turk’s Cap Lilies provide the most breathtaking view of the whole hike. Those flowers are tall, around 6 to 7 feet high above the ground. They look like small parachutes, glowing with a bright color going from yellow to orange with dark red spots. A Pipevine Swallowtail was sitting on a lily to get all the pollen it could take. It didn’t move for more than 20 minutes, not caring about hikers passing by, allowing us to take as many pictures as we wanted.
More wildflowers were blooming along the way, Fire Pinks, Carolina Phlox, white and yellow Azaleas, Black-eyed Susans, False Dragonheads, a couple of Common Evening Primrose and peculiar Wild Columbines. The view from the top was fine, the sky was mostly cloudy and white, Shining Rock was visible but a picture would not have been very good. There are a lot of blueberry bushes at the top, but it was too soon to pick them up.
I didn't take one picture of the trail or of the view because it was not eye-catching. However, small and bigger wildflowers were everywhere, sometimes hidden, always just by the side of the trail. With a macro lens, the background is blurred to the extreme, giving some nearly unrealistic portraits of flowers where only one piece is in focus and gets all the attention. By including macro photography into hiking, I am discovering a whole new world.
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