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Introduction |
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are pictures of fertile fields and fruitful orchards. The peaks stand out here in the blue haze most sharply. I recall vividly a hike of one summer's vacation from Highlands, North Carolina, through Rabun Gap. There through a week-end we were the well-cared-for guests of the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School. Now we had the joy of the fifty-mile hike from Rabun Gap to Neel Gap. Here the Blue Ridge appears in somewhat broken ranges as if a backbone was dislocated and the joints of the skeleton had become somewhat disarranged. The high altitude is maintained (nearly 5,000 feet in some instances) but the ever thrilling sights of the journey are the loftier ranges of the Nantahala Mountains to the northward in North Carolina. Sharply outlined and striking is the changing view of these peaks. They appear all the more majestic in the distance because ten miles of the journey over the Blue Ridge are made without a sight of human habitation. First is the gradual rise to Burton Lake, passing Glassy Mountain and Charlie Mountain on the south. Then there is a steep ascent until one thinks he has surmounted the Blue Ridge, but the hiker is sure to be thus deceived many times before he emerges on the final ridge with a clear view of the Nantahalas on the north and the sea of mountains southward towards Cornelia. Back eastward lie Rabun Bald, Flat Top, and Double Knobs. But again the eye wanders to the distant Nantahala range to the northward with its strikingly outlined peaks till at last the decent is begun at Dick's Creek Gap and the hiker passess from Rabun County into Towns County. Thence one crosses the Hiawassee River below Hightower. It is said that the Chattahoochee River near its source flows at one point within one hundred yards of the Hiawassee, but the latter goes northward, breaks its way through the mountains and flows into the Tennessee, while the Chattahoochee wends its way quietly southward to the Gulf of Mexico
Lunch was enjoyed by a stream pouring down the side of the mountain. But the greatest thrill was the violent but short-lived mountain storm. These storms are quite terrifying to the stranger, though in summer they are almost of daily occurrence in this region. A most vivid account of the danger of these storms is related by Miss Margaret Morley in her "Carolina Mountains" (See p. 254). She relates the manner in which she was overtaken by one of these mountain storms on Whiteside Mountain near Highlands, North Carolina. Here it is said more rain falls than anywhere in America outside of Puget Sound. The sight that greets one on the downward western slope towards Hiawassee is enchanting. Here lie prosperous farms. The way then |
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