A Walk in the Woods

Well, folks, time for another re-wind!  Back in April, as part of our Nashville, Asheville, Charlotte, Virginia road trip, we visited a nephew in Lynchburg.  A fellow hiking enthusiast, he served up one for the memory banks – McAfee Knob.

The Knob, which falls along the Appalachian Trail (A.T.), is a quartzite and sandstone formation jutting horizontally from the ridge.  It has an almost 270-degree panorama of the Catawba Valley and North Mountain to the West, Tinker Cliffs to the North and the Roanoke Valley to the East.  Red-roofed farmhouses, dilapidated barns and winding country lanes are visible from the elevation of 3,197 feet atop Catawba Mountain.  The Knob is named after James McAfee, a Scotch-Irish immigrant who settled in the Catawba Valley in the late 1730s.
 
Spring flowers were out in abundance on the trail, and I was fairly trigger happy, as you can see in the collages below.  A shout out to fellow blogger Beth from Garden Grumbles  – she gave me a link to the US wildflowers site, which has been immensely helpful in identifying these beauties.   

I have a new appreciation for violets – who knew there were so many, with widely varying petal shapes and colors, and leaf formations.  I have definitely learned that I need to get a good shot of LEAVES – it is critical to the process of elimination when considering flowers that may look similar.

In preparing this post, I learned that McAfee Knob is one of the most photographed spots along the A.T.   I don’t think there is a correlation, but the Knob was featured in the 2015 major motion picture A Walk in the Woods, starring Robert Redford and Nick Nolte.  In fact, the movie poster shows Redford and Nolte standing on the Knob.  The movie is based on travel writer Bill Bryson’s 1998 autobiographical book, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.  Our family are big fans of Bryson – if you have never read one of his books, I highly recommend them.  They are funny, insightful about different cultures, thought-provoking and feature quirky trivia.  So, I love the serendipity of hiking somewhere that has also been trod by Bryson!

Linking to Mosaic Monday

Mosaic Monday