Grandfather Mountain and the Mile-High Footbridge, 28 Years Later
Blue Ridge Trip '24 #17
Grandfather Mountain State Park, NC - Wed, 4 Sep 2024. 5pm
Continuing in the vein of taking it easy today we decided to do an easy-hiking drive out along the Blue Ridge Parkway to Grandfather Mountain State Park.
Grandfather Mountain is a kind of touristy place. There's a big fee to get in, and once in there's a fancy visitors center with displays and a cafe selling overpriced bland food. There are a handful of drive-to spots to see some of the park's main features, including a tiny zoo that has a few black bears. It feels kind of like a place schoolkids might go on a field trip. But it's also a real hiker's park, with easy, moderate, and strenuous trails to really see the park's main outdoors features. Today we're kind of splitting the differences between "schoolkids on a field trip" and real hikers.
One of the big features I really wanted to see is the Mile-High Suspension Bridge.
It is literally what its name implies. It's a footbridge between the distinctive twin peaks of Grandfather Mountain. (You can see the twin-peaks shape in the first photo.)
Information signs in the second visitors center, the one at the start of the bridge, note that the bridge was modernized in 1999. Prior to that it was apparently a wooden plank bridge with chain-link sides. It probably swayed and bounced a heck of a lot more than this sturdier, all metal bridge deck does.
That's interesting to me because I tried to visit Grandfather Mountain in 1996... which would've been back during the time of the more primitive suspension bridge.
What was 1996? 1996 is when my partner and I made a cross-country drive from Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Cupertino, California. We'd finished with school, I had a great job offer from Apple, and we were moving out to California to start our new lives together. Most of our meager, student/grad student level possessions were sent ahead in a moving van while we drove my car, loaded with about 2 weeks of clothes and our hiking gear, 2800 miles across the country. We made a number of sightseeing and hiking stops along the way. Grandfather Mountain and its mile-high suspension bridge were meant to be the first sightseeing/hiking stop.
Alas, while the weather was beautiful in Chapel Hill the morning we left, the weather thousands of feet up in the mountains was completely fogged in. We drove past the entrance to Grandfather Mountain without bothering to stop. Instead, when we got to our hotel for the night near Knoxville, TN we spent time wandering around downtown Knoxville.
So, here I am, 28 years later. And today the weather's beautiful.
Across the bridge is the lower of Grandfather Mountain's two peaks. I'm standing on the lower one in this photo (above). You can see Grandfather Mountain itself in the distance back across the bridge.
There's not much out here on the lower peak. There's not even a trail, really. There's a sitting area for tourists at the end of the bridge, Past that it's a scramble across rough bare rock to the summit.
I wasn't the only one out here. In September and through much of October there are volunteers out here counting hawk migrations. This is apparently a huge fly-over spot for East Coast migratory birds. TIL the entire population of Broad-wing Hawks migrates every year. On a busy day thousands of them can pass this point. Alas there were no birds in the sky this afternoon. The volunteers out on the rock were packing up and calling it a day, having spotted pretty much nothing all day. Well, peak migration generally isn't for another two weeks, anyway, and there's apparently something about the weather conditions today- something we don't understand, because to us humans the weather looks freakin' perfect today- that's telling the birds not to fly today.
Grandfather Mountain State Park, NC - Wed, 4 Sep 2024. 5pm
Continuing in the vein of taking it easy today we decided to do an easy-hiking drive out along the Blue Ridge Parkway to Grandfather Mountain State Park.
Grandfather Mountain is a kind of touristy place. There's a big fee to get in, and once in there's a fancy visitors center with displays and a cafe selling overpriced bland food. There are a handful of drive-to spots to see some of the park's main features, including a tiny zoo that has a few black bears. It feels kind of like a place schoolkids might go on a field trip. But it's also a real hiker's park, with easy, moderate, and strenuous trails to really see the park's main outdoors features. Today we're kind of splitting the differences between "schoolkids on a field trip" and real hikers.
One of the big features I really wanted to see is the Mile-High Suspension Bridge.
It is literally what its name implies. It's a footbridge between the distinctive twin peaks of Grandfather Mountain. (You can see the twin-peaks shape in the first photo.)
Information signs in the second visitors center, the one at the start of the bridge, note that the bridge was modernized in 1999. Prior to that it was apparently a wooden plank bridge with chain-link sides. It probably swayed and bounced a heck of a lot more than this sturdier, all metal bridge deck does.
That's interesting to me because I tried to visit Grandfather Mountain in 1996... which would've been back during the time of the more primitive suspension bridge.
What was 1996? 1996 is when my partner and I made a cross-country drive from Chapel Hill, North Carolina to Cupertino, California. We'd finished with school, I had a great job offer from Apple, and we were moving out to California to start our new lives together. Most of our meager, student/grad student level possessions were sent ahead in a moving van while we drove my car, loaded with about 2 weeks of clothes and our hiking gear, 2800 miles across the country. We made a number of sightseeing and hiking stops along the way. Grandfather Mountain and its mile-high suspension bridge were meant to be the first sightseeing/hiking stop.
Alas, while the weather was beautiful in Chapel Hill the morning we left, the weather thousands of feet up in the mountains was completely fogged in. We drove past the entrance to Grandfather Mountain without bothering to stop. Instead, when we got to our hotel for the night near Knoxville, TN we spent time wandering around downtown Knoxville.
So, here I am, 28 years later. And today the weather's beautiful.
Across the bridge is the lower of Grandfather Mountain's two peaks. I'm standing on the lower one in this photo (above). You can see Grandfather Mountain itself in the distance back across the bridge.
There's not much out here on the lower peak. There's not even a trail, really. There's a sitting area for tourists at the end of the bridge, Past that it's a scramble across rough bare rock to the summit.
I wasn't the only one out here. In September and through much of October there are volunteers out here counting hawk migrations. This is apparently a huge fly-over spot for East Coast migratory birds. TIL the entire population of Broad-wing Hawks migrates every year. On a busy day thousands of them can pass this point. Alas there were no birds in the sky this afternoon. The volunteers out on the rock were packing up and calling it a day, having spotted pretty much nothing all day. Well, peak migration generally isn't for another two weeks, anyway, and there's apparently something about the weather conditions today- something we don't understand, because to us humans the weather looks freakin' perfect today- that's telling the birds not to fly today.