Black Balsam Knob

I mean, some of these places are, are some of the most well-known and beloved places on our whole landscape.

You mentioned like Sam Knob, Black Balsam, uh, Graveyard Fields.

These are all, uh, roadless areas.

I'm not worried about those being developed for, uh, for timber development necessarily, but I would hate to see more development happen in those areas, uh, I think they're really valuable as, you know, essentially backcountry recreation areas.

And I think we're at a point now where, gosh, if we don't prioritize health and cooperation and the long-term over short-term profits, we're in deep trouble.

Yeah.

I mean, I know I feel my best around here when I'm up on Black Balsam Knob or hiking over to Mount Tennant there or Sam Knob or Craggy.

Like when I'm in these places and it's a recurring thing with my family, with my wife telling us all that we're so lucky to live here.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the other part of that trip was we went through Shining Rock Wilderness and that gets to Tenet Mountain and then over to Black Balsam Knob.

And Black Blossom Knob was, we camped out on top of that.

And probably what makes it easy to get guided groups up there is the road, you can get pretty close to driving up.

We got done the next day, driving back to Raleigh afterwards.

And that was, you probably remember this, that there was a small earthquake in Western North Carolina.

And we were on top of Black Balsam Knob when that

happened.

And that stuff exists, sure.

But if you drive up the Blue Ridge Parkway south of Asheville and then turn off onto a gravel road near a place called Black Balsam, you end up somewhere that doesn't match the postcard at all.

You come out of the trees at around six thousand feet, and the whole world just opens up into these huge, rolling, grassy mountaintops with no forest on them.

They call them balds.

On the way up the mountain, we dropped the Ford at the Big East Fork parking area on Highway two seventy-six, where the Shining Creek Trail comes down off the mountain.

That's the kind of logistical detail that means nothing to a fourteen-year-old until two days later, when you're limping toward that van like it's the gates of heaven.

The plan was to start high, up at the end of the Black Balsam Road, walk the old railroad grade in to Shining Rock Gap and camp, spend the second day moving across the balds to a second camp, and then come down the creek trail to the lower lot on Sunday and drive home smelling like camp stove fuel and feet.

A lazy loop, honestly.