Pity the poor dad who has to endure the obligatory pinstripe tie and dubious collection of golf-themed humor every time June rolls around. This father’s day, why not give your pater familias the gift of a great weekend. Call for details on our Father’s Day Weekend package at 888-828-3978 or see https://www.bluewatersmtnl.com/rates/special-packages/
Everyone knows “A River Runs Through It” was set in Montana, celebrities jostle for stream side property around Jackson Hole in Wyoming; and John Gierach’s “Trout Bum” regarded by many as a modern fly fisherman’s manifesto, is set in Colorado. But the creek laced mountains of western North Carolina, with several thousand miles of public and private trout water packed into a million acres, there is another version of the sport.
Along the area’s narrow river reaches, casts are typically shorter, the fish are less particular about their diet and anglers can get by with fewer fly patterns. It is entirely feasible to hit one trout stream in the morning, one after lunch and still another before dark.
As trout fishing destinations go, western North Carolina has long remained a relatively unknown on a national level and some contend this has been by design. The locals used to be pretty tightlipped about how good the fishing is in the area.
Annual rainfall averages 90 inches in much of the region, offering up a steady supply of water, while elevations greater than 1,400 feet ensure a cold water environment essential for trout survival. As a result, rainbow, brown and brook trout lurk in abundance at the base of numerous waterfalls and in the deep pools of countless creeks.
The area has recently received more exposure, through books like “Western North Carolina Fly Guide” by J.E. B. Hall (Brushy Mountain Publishing 2007) and in television shows that romanticize the thrills of trout fishing in the southern Appalachians.
Please see our website, www.BlueWatersMtnL.com for more details.
It is obvious that all mountains have crazy roads. Engineers can’t build them straight up and over, after all; they must find reasonable grades and accommodate geological asymmetries. But there are crazy roads and there are crazy roads.
Consider the section of United States Route 129 that winds through the Appalachians of western North Carolina. It is called the Tail of the Dragon because it bends 318 times in just 11 miles, some of the turns seemingly tight enough to snap a motor home in half. Motorcycles and sports car drivers flock from all over North America to ride it.
Despite its running along the southern edge of Great Smoky Mountains National Park – by far the busiest national park, with more than nine million visitors a year – the lakes country, which lies west of Asheville, North Carolina and south of Knoxville, Tennessee, is free of Appalachia’s standard roadside attractions: No Dollywood, no Cracker Barrel, no ticky tacky souvenir clutter.
About two thirds of Graham County in North Carolina is national forest and the elevation ranges from 1,170 feet to almost 5,600, so visitors go the lakes and the mountains. The fishing is epic; the hiking on the Appalachian Trail and in the Joyce Kilmer Slickrock Creek Wilderness Area is spectacular. If the Nantahala Gorge’s whitewater doesn’t rev your engine, you can pedal through the Tsali trail system, a celebrated mountain biking destination.
The sense of escape is palpable, occasionally even literal: The Cheoah Dam at the south end of the dragon’s tail, was the site of Harrison Ford’s plunge off the spillway scene in “The Fugitive”
We urge you find all the charms of the Carolina Lake Country….
Please see our website, www.BlueWatersMtnL.com for more details.
As the South has never lacked story materials, so it has never lacked storytellers, audiences and occasions for storytelling. On farmhouse and country
store porches, in the parlor and the nursery, at religious and political gathers, on courthouse steps and benches, at picnics and barbecues, around the campfire, on the job – wherever people came together for sociability and entertaining or persuasive talk, there have been tongues to tell and ears to hear the inherited repertoire.
In addition to the universal themes and motifs of yarns and tall tales and historical and local traditions, the South has a rich source of anecdote and story in the characters and doings of kinfolk, friends and neighbors, who are all the more readily assimilated to folk tradition by reason of the Southern code of personal ethics, which regards them first of all as human beings and individuals.
Besides the inherited themes there are the inherited techniques; and the art of casual narrative flourishes where life is causal, leisurely, and informal, paced to the relaxed tempo of Southern living. In an environment where people “do not like books so well, but…like to remember and memorize many things that [they] do love,” according to Bascom Lamar Lunsford, book-say is close to folk-say; and literate and non-literate reconteurs alike are caught up in the same stream of oral memory and “torrential re-collectiveness”.
In the mid 1800’s, some of the best and tallest tale-tellers who ever got into print were recruited from the rank of Southern lawyers, judges, ministers, editors and sportsmen. The newspaper became an important link in the story-telling chain, folklore and local color were the soil from which sprang the broad humor, the racy idiom, the anecdotal verve and the gorgeous yarn spinning of later humorists.
Have you memories of a shimmering lake, crisp earth, twinkling stars, and sweet smells of a campfire? They will be revitalized with a visit to Lake Santeetlah. Nestled in the Smokey Mountains of Western North Carolina and surrounded by the Nantahala National Forest, Lake Santeetlah is an unspoiled treasure. With over seventy miles of protected shoreline, Lake Santeetlah’s 3,000 acres are a serene reminder of the beauty nature has to offer. For more information on activities planned for Memorial Day Weekend, please call 888-828-3978.
Please see our website, www.BlueWatersMtnL.com for more details.