#spruce mountain

[stephenjams]

Spruce Mountain Fire Tower Prescott

[pelicantowne-blog]

a wild lessbien appeared

[vandaliatraveler]

Nothing but birdsong and wind wafting through the red spruce canopy. Absolute serenity on the Huckleberry Trail at Spruce Knob.

[vandaliatraveler]

Blake and I headed up into the mountains yesterday to make the most of a glorious spring day, which was cool and illuminated by a beautful, flooding sunlight. At this time of year, there is still significant variation in the progression of the spring forests from the valleys to the summits, often with a temperature differential of from 5 to 10 degrees. Down on Gandy Creek, the fly fisherman were out in force after a trout stocking, but Blake's fly-fishing gear is out of commission right now, so he could only watch in envy. He's a great salamander hunter, however, and he did catch a gorgeous northern two-lined salamader (Eurycea bislineata), which reaches its southern-most range around these parts.

[vandaliatraveler]

Day Date at Spruce Knob-Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area, Part 1. Most couples would probably equate a "date" to a nice dinner out and a Marvel adventure movie, but Blake and I, being hopeless nature fanatics and aspiring satyrs without hooves, equate it to mean "putzing around in the mountains". The timing was perfect: the haze from the Canadian wildfires, which has been choking most the US Mid-Atlantic and Northeast for the past week, had mostly moved on, replaced by a crisp blue sky with a light breeze.

From top: the view from the Rich Mountain Overlook on Old Route 33, heading toward Harman; Blake communing with the mystic creek chubs in Gandy Creek, one of the best brook trout streams in the Mid-Atlantic region; cow parsnip (Heracleum maximum), a mildly phototoxic beauty that Native Americans relied on for food and medicine; a forest composition of false green hellebore (Veratrum viride), ferns, wild geranium (Geranium maculatum), and golden Alexander (Zizia aurea); a close-up of golden Alexander, a lovely, spring-blooming member of the carrot family; the wetlands complex at Spruce Knob Lake; shining ladies' tresses (Spiranthes lucida), a spring to early summer-blooming bog orchid recognizable from its bright yellow labellum; bunchberry (Cornus canadensis), which can be easily mistaken for a spring-blooming forb but is actually a dwarf dogwood; and a feisty eastern garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis sirtalis), whose saliva contains a mild neurotoxin that is deadly to its prey but harmless to humans.

[vandaliatraveler]

Trailing white monkshood (Aconitum reclinatum) is a critically imperiled, globally-rare member of the buttercup family, known only from a few scattered locations along the Appalachian Mountain chain from Southwestern Pennsylvania to North Carolina and Tennessee. A lover of moist seeps and streambanks on shady mountain slopes, this unusual perennial is readily identified by its lush, deeply-divided and roughly-toothed foliage and tall racemes of cream-colored, hooded flowers, which open downward. The monkshood patch above is located along a seep on a west-facing slope of Spruce Mountain in West Virginia.

[vandaliatraveler]

A bench with a view. Blake gets a bird's-eye view of Central Appalachia's ridge and valley country from the highest peak in West Virginia, Spruce Knob. The valley below is part of the Potomac River drainage.

[vandaliatraveler]

Late afternoon light on Spruce Knob, looking east to North Fork Mountain, from many years ago.