Linville Falls

[thesummerqueen]

The next paths I traced back up to the falls were much easier.

This next overlook, much higher than the first (or second, obviously), had hewn stone steps that led to this weathered outcropping over the river.



The falls start simply, in low cuts.


Then the river begins to funnel…


And the river wound around the bend...


Until you couldn't see it anymore...


...till it hit a corner and spiraled with a roar...


And down it swept to a sudden and ugly drop off.




The fourth overlook was much higher, and one could barely make out the vicious path the river cut through the mountain.


While below the falls the river began a placid if rocky path, winding ever downward.

---

"I thought how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes, barrens, wilds. It still dwarfs, terrifies, crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens, orchards and fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.
- Wallace Stevens, Letters, p. 73


Back I turned, along a path barely marked out.


At the final, highest overlook
"It was not that the jagged precipices were lofty, that the encircling woods were the dimmest shade, or that the waters were profoundly deep; but that over all, rocks, wood, and water, brooded the spirit of repose, and the silent energy of nature stirred the soul to its inmost depths."
- Thomas Cole


They were ancient, these trees, and there is no sense of scale except to say that the leaves on the rhododendrons to the left were twice as long as my hand. And these were the smaller trees, the narrower younger ones that stood guard around the behemoths no usual tourist would see. Older than our grandparents, unconcerned with our ephemeral human trifles. We will age and scrape out short mediocre lives, then return to the soil. They will age, and quietly sunder mountains, feeding on our sinews and weaving roots amongst our bones.




Again, there is no real sense of scale in my photos - I am 5'3" and weigh about 140. I could have slid into that log and spent the night as if in a roomy sleeping bag.