Hiking on the Blue Ridge Parkway

On Thursday afternoon, we hiked 5 miles

(2.5 out and back) on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. Started out at the Folk Art Center and hiked towards the Haw Creek Overlook. The destruction we saw in the forest was hard to comprehend.

This is one of hundreds of massive trees we saw that

had been flattened. It was the largest trees that were

hit the hardest. NPS has done a great job making the trail passable, but there were still many trees we had to climb over because they were too big to cut out.

This is an area that you had to pass under many fallen trees that were suspended by large tree that was holding them up. It will be decades before the forest recovers.

Here we are at the end of the hike, which was real workout. While it was good to be out in nature, it was really tragic to see so much carnage from Helene. We saw literally hundreds of trees that had been destroyed in the tiny part of the forest we explored. WNC needs our help, now and for a long time.

An accidental picture of the newly open forest canopy.