Kara has been working in outdoor education with kids at risk for the past three years. The kids are taken into the mountains and dropped off blindfolded with a compass, an iPod, a bag of crisps, a rubber band and a paper clip. They then need to make their way to a base camp 20 miles due south. Their success rate is 98.7% and they have only lost three kids. Okay, this is only what I think that they should do. Read here about the incredible work that Kara really does.
We arrived on Halloween evening. For those of you who don’t know, Halloween is a BIG deal in the US. People get their houses decked out a month in advance and by decked out, I mean full sized activity scenes of 20 plus ghouls, vampires, ghosts etc in their front gardens / yards. I dressed up as a “Happy halloweiner” flasher, Hannah was a (star) trekkie and Kara was a ‘waist’ of time.
Kara took us to her friend, Dave’s (Marty McFly) halloween party. It was a great halloween party and people really dress up with imagination. There was the man with the little chicks all over his jacket – the chick magnet! There was the woman in the bridal dress with Russian stamps all over her dress – the mail order bride. As I mentioned, Asheville is blue grass country. It seems that all musicians bring their instruments to parties and at some stage of the evening, a jam session develops. But these aren’t just any instruments, these are banjos, guiters, double basses, fiddles, violins!! Hannah and I sat enthralled for large parts of the evening listening to such incredible music!! Country music and by association, blue grass music has got a bad reputation through movies like Deliverance, but I’ve found it to be such good fun.
The second reason we went to Asheville was that Cory (Hannah’s brother) is studying at Warren Wilson college just outside Asheville . So we spent time with him, Christina and their daughter Willow. Willow was in a fine mood and really enjoying baby handling the crunchy autumn leaves.
The third good reason for visiting Asheville is that our trip was carefully crafted to coincide with Kara’s birthday. Asheville and a fair amount of North Carolina is mountainous and forested and both of these have a habit of making a landscape aesthetic beautiful. Asheville is no exception. Kara had a birthday gathering at a friend’s cabin in the mountains surrounding Asheville. The mountain is covered by a poplar forest which was in full autumn colo(u)rs. There was also a little stream that ran by complete with small trout. It was great to meet some of Kara’s friends and to hang out in such a beautiful place. That night we went to the ‘Brew ‘n View’ which is a cinema with a difference. Instead of chairs arranged in theatre style, the cinema had couches and tables, a bar stocked with a local brew and a pizza oven. It was quite an experience watching ‘Tropic Thunder’ eating pizza and drinking a draught. There is a gap in the SA market!
The next day Hannah, Kara, and Kara's friend Mike went for a hike for Kara's 25th birthday while I went fishing (fishing report below). Hannah, Kara, and Mike hiked at Max Patch, a bald mountain on a section of the Appalachian Trail that borders North Carolina and Tennessee. Mike left "trail magic" at one of the huts for other through and long distance hikers. The next day we left to go back to Greenbelt.
Fishing report
North Carolina has some fantastic salt water fishing, but Asheville is about 5 hours drive from the sea. There is also some incredible trout rivers around Asheville in particular the Davidson. It is a pity that there is a spelling mistake, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that it is rated one of top 100 streams in the US. There are extremely large brown trout that are notoriously difficult to catch. This is probably because these large browns have figured out that the discharge from a hatchery upstream includes pellets used to feed growing hatchery trout is much better than the tiny nymphs / terrestrials normally on offer. So these browns get big and frustrate most fly fishermen’s efforts to catch them.
This reminds me of a story told to me by Harry, a great fly fisherman who I’ve befriended in Greenbelt. He was fishing on the lower Gunpowder river and reached a pool that had a few magnificent trout holding in the middle. Harry spent the next hour presenting the contents of his entire fly box to these decidedly uninterested trout.
I went to another river close to the Davidson where I fished for the morning. The water is these NC rivers runs extremely clear and cold. The river level was low as the winter rains had not arrived yet. I experienced with trying a team of two nymphs. I finally decoded my first brook trout on a #18 black midge papae. I had two more takes but didn’t hook up.
One of the Davidson river brown's that I didn't catch!
A typical looking NC river!
