Snowbird Mountain and Joyce Kilmer

In past years, we have enjoyed canoeing on Lake Santeetlah while staying here, and we had planned to do that this year but the road to the lake had washed badly.  There was an alternate route, but it was a rough, one-lane road that our Mini would not have enjoyed.  So we decided to hike in Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, which is just down the road from Snowbird.

The old-growth forest, named after the author of the poem "Trees," is a favorite place that we have hiked often before.  Many of the trees here are 400 years old, some more than 20 feet in circumference and 100 feet fall. 

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

The loop trail passes between these huge giants that soar overhead, poplars mostly, all hardwoods since the hemlocks were destroyed several years ago by the hemlock woolly adelgid; their fallen trunks lie scattered all around us.

As the trail loops upward and around, we noticed that there is a shorter trail going directly up to each of the trees, as if made by reverent hikers who want to approach them and touch them in worship, lean up against them and feel the rough bark on your back.

After the hike, we took a long ramble in the Mini, around Cheoah Lake, the outflow from Fontana Dam, finally crossing over below the dam and stopping at Fontana Village to eat our picnic lunch (which, together with dinner and breakfast, Snowbird Lodge provides).  We know a little place there with a picnic table where we have eaten lunch many times in the past.

At last  we returned to the Lodge, and had some time to relax on the screened-in porch there, where we have lovely memories of being trapped in a summer rain shower.  But it did not rain on this perfect, cloudless day.