Western Counties fall like Dominoes Part 3 (12-15Jul2023)

After 4 days in Cullowhee, the family unit packed up and we headed further north to reposition to the Boone area where my older son Luke was going to stay with some friends.  I selected Fleetwood randomly  based on the availability of a nice VRBO cabin, but I quickly learned it was somewhat isolated and required a 30 minute drive to get anywhere.  This isolation was also partly why I liked it.  

On the way north, I convinced the family to take a short break near Camp Creek on the parkway so we could stretch our legs and let Paco go pee.  I was hoping for an Alder Flycatcher as I have had them here in years past, but no dice.  Probably it was too hot and the birds were resting.

Great Spangled Fritillary

This Black-throated Blue was way up in the canopy and it tripped up the rare flag in eBird.  Not sure why as they are fairly common all over the parkway.

This Red-breasted Nuthatch also flagged as rare.

Camp Creek is in Burke County which also counted as a new one for my year effort although I suspect I will be back later this year to explore the county more thoroughly.

Burke is a middle sized county with 512 square miles but it does have a decent population at 90k people owing to some larger towns like Morganton within its borders.

I was searching famous people from Morganton and I landed on a gold mine.  The following is the Wiki entry for Robert Harrill aka the Fort Fisher Hermit.

Robert E. Harrill, or Harrell, (February 2, 1893 – June 4, 1972) was an American man also known as the Fort Fisher Hermit. He became a hermit in 1955, at the age of 62, having hitchhiked to Fort Fisher on the North Carolina coast from Morganton, North Carolina. He had previously been committed to a mental hospital in Morganton, after his marriage failed. Harrill settled in an abandoned World War II bunker set in a salt marsh beside the Cape Fear River in the Fort Fisher State Recreation Area. 

Harrill fed himself by fishing and scavenging. He and his bunker became a tourist attraction and visitors would listen to him talk about his "School of Common Sense", leaving donations in a frying pan. After living as a hermit for 17 years, he died under mysterious circumstances in 1972, with the official cause of death given as a heart attack. His life has been commemorated with books, films and a theatre production.

Legendary!

After another hour or so we found our VRBO and settled in for the evening.  Paco was glad to finally get out of the car.

Thursday was mostly a work day so I only briefly got out to visit Brookshire Park in Boone which is a nice park adjacent to part of the Appalachian State campus.  This is Watauga County which I had already visited earlier in the year.

This park is always good for Willow Flycatchers.

And Red-winged Blackbirds.

After about 20 minutes into our walk, the skies opened up and it poured all over us as we ran back to the car.  It took a day to dry out my camera bag but at least the camera stayed dry.

In the evening we headed over to EB Jeffress Park up on the Blue Ridge Parkway to take a really short hike on the Cascades Trail. 

A trip to the Parkway is always worth it but unfortunately the trail was under maintenance and all we could see was the top of the falls.

The bird life was pretty much non-existent and we didn't see any other cars either.  It was eerily silent other than the sound of the falls.

Technically this was a new county for me.  In fact, this small section of the parkway only dips into Wilkes County for less than a mile or so as far as I could tell.

Wilkes County is definitely a county I would like to explore more of.  It seems like it has some hidden gems to be uncovered.  Doughton Park is in it as well as Stone Mountain State Park which I did visit many years ago.  The population is middling with 65k people mostly due to Wilkesboro.  It is one of the biggest counties in NC with 750 square miles.  It was named for John Wilkes, an English political radical who lost  his position as the Lord Mayor of the city of London because of his support for the colonists during the American Revolution.  During times of prohibition, Wilkes County was known as the "Moonshine capital of the world".  I couldn't find any recognizable names for famous people from Wilkes County but I am sure some of them are interesting none the less.

On Friday both Melissa and I took the day off for the first full day of the trip where we didn't have to log on and work.  It also happened to be our 21st wedding anniversary!  After taking Paco for a walk to tire him out, we headed out with George and did the Elk Knob Mountain hike. Its about 2 miles straight up but it didn't take long to get to the top.  This is one of the few over 5000 footers in the area.  The other is Snake Mountain which hosts some Golden-winged Warblers.

21 years of marriage and we are still going strong.  I didn't bring my camera this time and it was really much easier to hike and I kept up no problem despite Melissa and George's fast pace.

Back down in the parking lot I noticed a Turkey trying to hide in the grass.

Field Sparrows breed up here.

Dark-eyed Juncos too.

We went back to let Paco out and then headed to the South Fork New River for a Innertubing adventure.  The weather was a little iffy with possible thunderstorms and I had no idea if we would be jumping into the water so I didn't bring my phone and thus have no pics.  It was a blast!  We put in at the High Mountain Expeditions headquarters and floated for a couple hours on the New River.  Perhaps because of the questionable weather, there were hardly any other people on the river and we had sections where we floated in complete silence.

Not my photo but you get the idea.  They pick you up two miles downstream and bring you back to your car.

For dinner we went to an awesome restaurant called Craft Bistro in West Jefferson.

Saturday morning we set off home early but I walked Paco one more time and saw some of the locals - Hooded Warbler Male.

Female

Northern Parula

Indigo Bunting.

Our final stop on the way home was to Yadkin Memorial Park in you guessed it, Yadkin County!

Halloween Pennant

Red-winged Blackbird

Great Egret 

It was blazing hot and despite trying, I didn't get too many bird pics.  However, it was a really nice park with tons of different habitats and I will be back.

So where do I stand with my county effort?  54 down and 46 to go!  I don't think I am going to make it but who knows, maybe I will step up my game later in the fall.  I love going to the mountains in the fall and the migration might light a fire under me.

As a review, this latest trip bagged me Mecklenburg, Gaston, Jackson, Macon, Clay, Cherokee, Graham, Burke and Wilkes Counties.  So if I can do a couple more trips like that, I could make it happen.

Larry Birds, just not too hard. He just doesn't have the same drive that Jamie has.

Western Counties fall like Dominoes Part 2 (10-11Jul2023)

Although I was working most of the time for our stay in Cullowhee, we did get out for half a day in which I planned an ambitious romp through 4 counties.  It was a bit frenetic and and I certainly did not spend enough time and the bird lists were small, but I had a good time and felt as though I got a decent feel for the towns I visited.

We arrived at our first stop in Macon county right around lunch time and it was hot!  Macon County borders Georgia to the south and is mostly taken up by the vast Nantahala National Forest. The two major towns are Franklin and Highlands, both small towns that are really interesting and what my wife would classify as cute.  We focused this visit on Franklin but we did visit Highlands later in the trip.  I dropped George and Melissa in downtown Franklin so they could get an ice cream and check out the shops, and I headed down to the Little Tennessee River Greenway which is in walking distance from downtown.

It was hot as hell and I didn't get very far but it was a really nice spot and I vow to go back some day.  However, I did find a new bird for my year list that I didn't expect although it was good habitat.

Warbling Vireo!  It was silent so I feel lucky that I saw it fly into this tree.  Warbling Vireos love mountain towns with large trees bordering rivers or lakes.  It looks like per the below map that Franklin may be on the very edge of its breeding range.

Maybe they need to push that map down a tad based on my sighting, and others who I see now have had Warbling Vireo at the same spot.

Macon County is 39th on the list of NC counties by size with 515 square miles.  There are only 37k people and I think most of them are in Franklin and Highlands. Most of the rest of the county is rural mountainous with twisty roads.

The only name of famous people from Macon County I recognized was Eric Rudolph, the Olympic Park Bomber!   Apparently he was not born there but was raised in Nantahala, NC.  But anyway, it does say something about the somewhat lawless wild west feel some of these western NC counties has.  It breeds people who are anti government and a bit radicalized, but also some really nice folks that know how to live the good life.

After bagging my Warbling Vireo, I picked up Melissa and George and we headed to our next stop, Chatuge Dam in Clay County NC!  The Chatuge Dam is one of the many dams built during or immediately after Roosevelt's New Deal was implemented in 1933.  The county was in the Great Depression and Roosevelt dreamed up the New Deal as a way to stimulate the economy by putting people to work on infrastructure projects.  The Tennessee Valley Authority was one of those programs and involved the building of hydroelectric plants and dams across much of the south including some in NC.

The dam itself was an earthen one that you can walk across and we did just that.

The scenery in the lake created by the dam was really beautiful, and we resolved to rent a house on the shores of this lake in the future.  The islands in the center look uninhabited and the water was a really clear blue.

The lake was different than other lakes in NC that I am familiar with in that it is surrounded by forested mountains. 

The birding was slow but I did manage some decent shots of the many Eastern Kingbirds that were fly catching from the many perches that the dam had.

Kingbird after a nice bath in the lake.

We were buzzed by some fighter jets which was a bit of a surprise, not sure what base is nearby.

Clay County is one of the smallest counties in NC at only 214 square miles.  Forget famous people from here, there are only about 10k people in this sparsely populated county.  I like it!  However, we had more to see so we moved on to the next destination, Murphy.  Murphy is the county seat for Cherokee County.  

Cherokee County was named for the Cherokee, the indigenous tribe of this area of what we call the United States.  Let us never forget who was here first and what happened with the Trail of Tears. I hope this important history is not white-washed for our youth in the future. This county is the farthest western county in NC, bordered by Tennessee to the west and Georgia to the south.  I have romped around through this county extensively and in fact hiked a section of the Appalachian Trail through it.  The county is about middle sized as NC counties go, with 455 square miles.  The population is 28k and oddly enough only 2% of them identify as Native American.

The Murphy River walk is a nice trail that runs along the Valley River in downtown Murphy.  It continued to be hot as hell so the birds were again not so cooperative.  In fact, I didn't take any pics at all.  We only had a short walk and then we had to skedaddle again as we had a dinner reservation at Snowbird Mountain Lodge in Graham County.  

Ruby-throated Hummingbird.  

American Goldfinch

Snowbird Lodge is known birding hotspot due to their feeder setup.  It was already late in the evening and we had dinner reservations so I was only able to bird a bit, but it was a nice setup indeed.  

When I made the dinner reservations, I neglected to look at the prices. The prix fixe 3 course meal was $75 a head.  That's pretty much more than I usually would pay for a meal unless its guaranteed to be orgasmic.  In fact, I have never paid that much for a meal.  However, we committed and gave it a try.  The food was actually not very good so it was a huge bummer and I definitely regretted making the reservation, but now I know.  I suppose if you are staying up there, the food is included and maybe worth the cost.

The view from the porch is definitely nice but they didn't position the restaurant to take advantage of it.

Graham County is a relatively small county with only 222 square miles and only around 9k people.  To get to Snowbird you probably will drive through Robbinsville.  There is a huge mural in Robbinsville that celebrates their most famous son, Ronnie Milsap.  

If you don't know this country musician, check out this YouTube of Smoky Mountain Rain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC6bo3XJnVQ.

After dinner we drove back to our place in Cullowhee.  It was a whirlwind tour of 4 counties that day but we had fun despite being robbed by the dinner.

The next day I only got away long enough for a short visit to the river walk between Cullowhee and Sylva, which was nice but again hot and not birdy.

I neglected to mention that my parents had joined us in our VRBO and one evening we all made the trip to  Highlands NC.  On the way we stopped at Dry Falls which is so named because you can walk behind them and still stay dry.

They were absolutely stunning and almost as impressive as some of the falls we saw in Iceland.

For perspective, that is Melissa behind the curtain.

A side view with my pops heading behind the falls.

2 generations of Adams.

For the next installment, my smaller family unit moved to Fleetwood, NC which is just Northeast of Boone and about 3 hours north of Cullowhee.