N 35°51’25.89″ W 82° 8’14.55″ Google Earth location
This week we have raindrops, or perhaps leftover dew, though it looks more like raindrops – I just wasn’t there when it was falling. Big deal, right? You can get rain anywhere, often at a decent price too. But the background is Crabtree Falls off of the Blue Ridge Parkway in western North Carolina, not really close to any particular town. It was one of the places The Girlfriend and I visited while doing a tour of the Blue Ridge many years back.
Or at least, I think this is the location. Here’s the issue:
I was clearly remembering Crabtree Falls, and in fact the images in my stock folders were labeled as such. I knew, from the nature of the terrain, that I’d never be able to find them for this post just by looking at aerial views, so I searched on the falls themselves, which are as I’ve plotted. But this is well off of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I can find no evidence of the parking area where we left the car and started the hike, definitely over a kilometer, down the steep trails to the base of the falls. I don’t recall a long drive off of the Parkway either, but at that point we were following signs, having come across the turnoff for the falls, so perhaps I’m not remembering that it was a few kilometers to the trailhead. The trail, however, I remember distinctly: The Girlfriend is not sure-footed on downslopes and wasn’t happy about that part of it, which is what I consider easy, while I was unhappy about the return trip upwards, carrying the stuffed camera bags and the tripod on a hot day over what was only a little less than a flight of stairs up many stories. Should I return, I’ll do more plotting with the GPS functions on the smutphone, but both of these were unavailable in, hmmmm, 2009 I think?
So if you’re using my info here to get to the same shooting locale, well, you might not – you’ll be near the base of some falls anyway, because you can see them to the right in the mapping plots, but I can’t vouch that they’ll look the same as the photo here.
On the other hand, I think I might have found two other former shooting locations on the Parkway while doing all this, which you may see later on…