SUNDAY: LAST DAY IN THE SMOKIES

This morning all three of us are reluctant to leave the beautiful Smokies but looking forward to seeing our pets and friends at home.  My knees and ankles remind me of yesterday’s eight mile walk but in short order I can actually move pretty well.  Packing my clothes is fairly easy once I find a trash bag for my damp and very dirty hiking clothes.  And, after breakfast, packing up the kitchen stuff is quick because we’ve eaten about 100 pounds of the food we brought. 

Then we check out.  Thanks to Kathy finding us such a good place and our sharing the cost, my part for a five night stay in the cabin is $160.  What a deal!

We park at the Sugarland Visitor Center which has a nice trail right off the parking lot.  Sue learned about the trail from one of her salamander workshop buddies.   The name of Sugarland, though, makes me think of Disney World.   

I want to go into the center later to pick up a little gift for Toni for once again feeding Feather, the birds, and the deer and watering new plants.  And I want to buy the Smokies Wildflower reference book and join Friends of the Smokies to help support this most marvelous national park.  There is NO ADMISSION FEE for this incredible place with its 800 miles of maintained trails. 

After we visit their modern, large, and clean rest rooms, we find the trailhead.   

We now can name the grass we see as seersucker grass.  And an old plant friend from our part of Georgia — may apple — which is in bloom.   Then yellow trillium, lots and lots of them.  And a favorite of mine, Canadian violet.  Or maybe it is a Northern white violet?   Does this pretty violet care what it is called?

 

 
  Right next to each other are Solomon Seal and what used to be called False Solomon Seal but is now called Solomon Plume.  I just hate it when a plant is called “False” anything.  I also detest anything called “Common” as in common blue violet.  Am I being anthropomorphic when I think about these plants feeling “less than” with a name like that?  

As we climb up a bit we see what I think is white baneberry.  Farther along we see long-spur violets on the right. 

  

Then we spot a couple who have climbed up high on the left side.  I am suspicious that they might be stealing rare plants, but they are photographers like me and point out the yellow lady slippers, our first and only sight of them the entire week.

As we resume our walk up the hill, a friendly woman coming down asks whether we saw the Vasey’s trillium.  Where?  Not far down where we just were.  Goodness, how did we miss that?  “You have to look underneath the leaves.  I’ll take you to it.”  It is the largest of the North American trilliums and found only in the southern Appalachians.

I have been enchanted by Jack-in-the-pulpit but did not know how to find them until Hugh Nourse pointed them out on Nature Rambles.  Now I find them easily in the mountains.  Some Jacks are all male, some all female, others are hermaphrodites.  The flowers are tiny and situated at the base of the “minister.”  I’ve never seen them, except in books, because I might hurt the plant trying to look down in there.

We cross a stream and see a large community of dwarf iris.  I take a photo of large umbrella-like plants and promptly forget why.  Good grief!  Do you know what they are?   If so, write it in “Comments” at the bottom of this blog.

 

Red paint indicates treatment for hemlock wooly adelgids.

Kathy has walked far ahead on the trail.  Sue and I are watching everything carefully.  She’s also listening, sometimes identifying birds by their calls. 

No surprise that we see mushrooms because the ground and logs are damp.  I just love walking in the woods!  I am getting better at naming plants from their leaves only.  I see sharp-lobed hepatica which has already bloomed out.   And then bloodroot, which bloomed much earlier.  Then something distinctive but what the heck is it?

 

The three of us join up, walk down the trail and enter the Sugarland Center.  When I sign up as a “Friend,” they give me the 2016 “Smokies Life” magazine.  I am excited to read that the 47-year-old Park Superintendent, Cassius Cash, is African-American.  He grew up in Memphis and had very little contact with the great outdoors until he became a Boy Scout.  As I read about his management style, philosophy and mission, I am grateful he is in charge.

Finally we’re on the road home.  I drive the tricky curvy mountain road bit this time.  Then Kathy takes over.  Sitting in the back seat, I can photograph a motorcyclist who must have just left the Smokies because she has a bear riding in the back seat of her motorcycle.  Speaking of bears, NPR has a short story on the 1600 black bears in the Smokies.  http://www.npr.org/2016/05/11/477693489/wildlife-biologists-manage-bear-interactions-in-americas-national-parks

Kathy’s sweet dog jumps up and down when we come back to her house to un-pack and re-pack our cars.  Feather turns her back on me when I return but eventually sits on my lap, forgiving my absence.