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Here are some pictures Rick and I took while we were on a trip to South Carolina to work in the plant my company has there. Since it was a weekend trip, we went up into the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina on Sunday. We started by driving up from Anderson, SC and picking up the Blue Ridge Parkway and ended up at Chimney Rock, near Asheville, NC. On the way to the parkway, we stopped at Chatooga River, which forms part of the South Carolina and Georgia border. This is a beautiful river with whitewater rafting and plenty to keep a person busy for an entire vacation. These pictures were taken mid-November, 2001. On the Chatooga and the Chimney Rock pictures, I'm trying something called a Slideshow. Click on the small picture and the larger image will appear below. Use the arrows on the left and right to scroll to more images to click on. On the Blue Ridge pictures, click on any of them and the larger on will appear. Then hit 'Back' on your browser to get back here. On the slideshow, on large picture will appear for each group of pictures. This will slow loading the page, but make viewing more convenient. Then other way is faster, but less convenient for you. Let me know which you prefer. Chatooga River The Chatooga River forms part of the border between South Carolina and Georgia. As Rick and I were driving up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, we saw all kinds of signs for camping and rafting and such. Then we hit the Chatooga River. As you can see, this is a beautiful river. I'm not sure of the exact course, but I think it runs generally north to south along the border and then heads in on the South Carolina side. It looks like this would be a great spot to camp and do some rafting of the whitewater kind.
Chatooga River Looking upstream from the bridge. When there is no traffic, it is absolutely quiet. I imagine if you paddled up aways, there would be nothing to disturb you.
Blue Ridge Parkway Much of the haze you see is from forest fires burning in the adjacent Great Smoky Mountains. The smoke drifted from there, giving some of these images an almost surreal feel to them.
Chimney Rock Chimney Rock is a park about 20-30 miles east of Asheville, NC, It's so popular, a whole town grew up outside its gates just to cater to the tourists. Just past it is the town of Lake Lure, which is where parts of Dirty Dancing was filmed. There is a quaint old hotel there that looks like a very romantic place to take your spouses of significant others for a romantic getaway. For Hugh, there is a championship golf course not too far away. The park is interesting. You have to drive up for about 1-1/2 miles or more into the park to get to the ticket booth. Then you have to drive the same to get to the parking lot. Once there, you have a choice to take the elevator the remaining 26 floors to the gift shop, or climb the steps. I recommend the steps, but you might want to try them on the way down if you have difficulty. It's easier that way. You really should try them because there is much to see along the way. The views are incredible from those heights. I thought that the height would bother me more, but it really wasn't that bad for the most part.
On Chimney Rock Here is Rick standing beneath the flag on Chimney Rock. I was right on the edge by the rail to take this photo.
Climbing the steps was hard mostly on the knees. At first the heights bothered me tremendously, but you get so OD'd of being up that high, after a while you begin to think less of the heights and more of the scenery and how you're going to navigate yet another flight of steps. That's actually when it gets to be fun.
I don't remember what they call this, but you can see how large the natural stone is from this. Impressive. We got to the park late and we didn't think we had time to take one trail that led to some falls. That was too bad, because in retrospect, we might have had time after all. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
