Cruising Across Carolina: Waterfalls, coasters and other high spots in Northern mountains

This is the fifth installment in Cruising Across Carolina, Martha Quillin’s summer road trip across the Tar Heel State’s backroads and byways.

A reviewer once wrote that if you saw the original “Star Wars” movie when it came out in 1977 and never rewatched it, you might only remember the sensation of flying low and really fast through a narrow canyon.

Thinking back on my summer travels so far is kind of like that.

Not that I’ve done space combat in the Death Star’s Meridian trench; so far the biggest fights I’ve had were putting sheets on the bed in my travel trailer (I won) and trying to get out of a parking ticket at Holden Beach (I lost).

But when I close my eyes, images flash by like a quick click through a watercolor slideshow of the North Carolina landscape.

The long stretch of beach on the Cape Hatteras National Seashore visible from a platform at a public access, with a dozen colorful kites overhead. The cluster of little red cabins at Dan Nicholas Park near Salisbury at dusk, surrounded by the smoke from family campfires. After weeks of drought, a welcome downpour watched through the door of an unrenovated room in a 90-year-old motor court by the Dan River.

During the most recent segment of the journey — to North Carolina’s Northern mountains — I etched new images into the photo album of my mind: the winding tunnel of green made by the trees overhanging two-lane N.C. 80 on its way to Celo in Yancey County; whitewater tumbling over rocks at Roaring Fork Falls; and the slice of night sky framed by my open tent window in a campsite near the New River.

Another couple of tanks of gas, another 600 miles on the odometer. Another stack of mental postcards that will help me get through the misery of February.

Let’s go make some memories.

This week’s itinerary

The main spots: Morganton, Celo/Toe River Valley, Mount Mitchell, Spruce Pine, Burnsville, Doughton Park on the Blue Ridge Parkway, West Jefferson, New River State Park

Length of trip: This week, for the first time since my travels began in May, some of my plans were thwarted by uncooperative weather and the spread of COVID-19. I squeezed in as much as I could in four days and came home to dry out my tent and my tennis shoes. With better weather, it’s easy to spend a week exploring this region.

In my arbitrary topographical sectioning of the state, I used Interstate 40 as the dividing line between the northern mountains, where I went on this leg, and the southern mountains, where I’ll finish up my tour. I spent two nights in the community of Celo, using it as a base for exploring the Toe River Valley and Mount Mitchell, before relocating to a campsite at New River State Park.

To get there, head west on I-40, timing it to pass through Winston-Salem during the hours Winkler Bakery in Old Salem is open. No ticket is needed to visit the bakery, which still cooks in the wood-fired ovens Brother Christian Winkler used when he bought the place in 1807. There is short-term parking on the street out front. Run in, get in line, ask the shopkeepers for a couple of Moravian sugar cakes, a tin of ginger cookies and some cheese stars, and get back on the road.

Alternatively, save this stop to break up the ride home and provide you with edible souvenirs.

From there, it’s an hour and a half to Morganton, which markets itself as a sort of gateway to some of the most popular attractions in the region: Table Rock and the spectacular Linville Gorge Wilderness Area, Lake James State Park, South Mountains State Park and Mount Mitchell State Park.

Get off 40 at N.C. 18 and follow that to downtown Morganton. Check the time on the clock tower on the 1835 Burke County Courthouse. Visit the 1916 Railroad Depot and Museum, which includes 100 pieces of dining car tableware; shop for a new or used tome at Adventure Bound Books and, if the box office for the municipal auditorium is open, ask to see the painting of Greek muses that muralist Ben Long and his students put on the ceiling in 2004.

If it’s Wednesday through Saturday, you can have a wood-fired pizza for supper at Root & Vine downtown, which has great fried oysters for a place 300 miles from the coast.

Celo and the Toe

It’s a little over an hour to Celo from here, much of it on winding roads you’ll want to travel in daylight the first time, both for the beautiful scenery and to get comfortable with extreme curves.

Celo (pronounced CEE-low) is an “intentional community” founded in 1937 by Arthur E. Morgan, a civil engineer who wanted to establish a small town where neighbors helped one another and respected the natural environment.

Morgan also was a white supremacist, but the summer camp that started in Celo in the 1950s and still draws youth today states as its mission to serve ethnically, economically and culturally diverse participants in a natural setting. Parents who bring their children to Camp Celo often spend a couple of days exploring the area themselves, tubing down the Toe River or hiking mountain trails.

I met some of them at the Celo Inn, a five-room bed-and-breakfast built in the 1970s to look like an old European inn. Some rooms share a bath and there’s no air conditioning, but current innkeepers Nick and Kavita make sure guests are comfortable and start with the day well fed.

More difficult than the choice of breakfast protein is how to ration daylight hours given the range of things to do.

The Toe River is a big draw, and river runners have established a 37-mile canoe trail with a detailed description of the whole route plus breakdowns of smaller sections. The river includes rapids not recommended for inexperienced boaters.

The North Carolina mountains are full of waterfalls, many of them on federal or state land and several within a reasonable drive of Celo. Roaring Fork Falls, within the Pisgah National Forest, can be reached by an easy three-quarter-mile hike from a small parking area off N.C. 80 just 10 minutes from Celo.

Beautiful falls, cold water, intimidating bridge

The falls, 50 feet high, land in a clear pool where children and dogs are safe to play. The falls draw enough people to make the hike feel safe even for a person traveling alone, but not so many that you can’t get your feet in that cold water.

The day I went, a local artist had set up his easel and brushes just off the trail and was painting a landscape of the trees and wildflowers.

About halfway to the falls, there’s an old-fashioned suspension foot bridge (Coordinates: N 35.78000 W 82.20553) across the South Toe River, and just past it is a small pull-off on the right side of N.C. 80. Park there, walk back to the bridge and see if you have the nerve to cross it.

After visiting the falls, you can drive the 2.5 miles back to the Blue Ridge Parkway and follow the state’s most beautiful byway south to the entrance of Mount Mitchell State Park. Remember it’s a scenic road, the speed limit is 45 mph, and you’re here to relax and enjoy the views. If you get behind a Winnebago with Florida plates doing 37, pull off at an overlook, look out at the scenery and let him get out ahead.

Except for sitting by the ocean, there is nothing like looking out from the ridgeline of ancient mountain ranges to remind us that the world is big and our troubles are small.

A sign on the side of the road as you enter Mount Mitchell State Park tells you to tune your radio to 1630 AM for a continuous loop of park information, punctuated by bird noises and other fun sounds. It’s a charming, old-school way to get a ranger’s insights without having to clear out a seat for him in the car.

The restaurant in the park was supposed to reopen this year after renovations, but the work isn’t finished yet. Follow the park road to the parking lot at the top where, if you need it, there’s a snack bar, and a gift shop with a fun collection of ball caps and little bottles of essential oil that will make your house smell like the spruce-fir forest.

The regular bathrooms are out of service but there’s a bank of porta potties on the edge of the parking lot.

Highest point east of the Mississippi

A paved walking trail will take you to the summit, the highest point east of the Mississippi at 6,684 feet, from which you will either see dozens of distant mountain peaks or a wall of white fog. Either way, you’re breathing air that’s 10 or 20 degrees cooler than your friends at lower altitudes.

If the education building along the trail is open when you walk past, step inside and see if the ranger is putting on a program.

Leaving Mount Mitchell and heading north on the Blue Ridge Parkway, it’s about 40 minutes to the Museum of North Carolina Minerals, inside an unassuming National Park Service building that also sits on the site where a large part of the American Army marched past on the way to the pivotal Battle of Kings Mountain in South Carolina. A weathered monument tells the story.

Inside, the museum will give you an idea of what lies beneath the surface across North Carolina, and why so many people have risked so much trying to extract it. The coolest exhibit in there is an interactive state map with dozens of minerals listed. When you mash the buttons, the map lights up with all the places where each mineral has been found. There’s also an oral history interview with a miner that plays on a loop. His story and voice are so clear and authentic, people keep looking around corners expecting to see him sitting there.

This is a good place to get off the parkway and explore nearby towns.

I had hoped to take a nighttime black-light tour of the fluorescent green Hyalite opal mine at Emerald Village Mines in Spruce Pine, but they’re booked through the end of the season. Something to consider next year.

Spruce Pine has some other fun features: the Old Pine Walking Bridge across the North Toe River, connecting a riverside park with downtown. Built in 1940, it’s 403 feet long and features a “bowstring deck truss” in the section over the water that makes it historically and architecturally unusual and significant.

Downtown, which has one street that runs along the river and a second that runs parallel but a level higher, has a brewery, an interesting-looking junk shop and some intriguing derelict industrial buildings. Look, photograph, but don’t trespass.

Burnsville — a mountain gem

Fifteen miles away, about a 20-minute drive from Spruce Pine, is the Yancey County seat of Burnsville, an underrated mountain town on the northern edge of Pisgah National Forest. Now bypassed by U.S. 19, downtown Burnsville sits just a couple of blocks off the four-lane highway and only an hour from Asheville even when the traffic is bad. But except for an annual August craft fair, it’s largely missed by tourists.

A local fellow named John Silver who had been brewing beer in Asheville returned to Burnsville in 2017 and opened Homeplace Beer Co. on Main Street, which operates in conjunction with Hog Hollow Wood-Fired Pizza. During the pandemic, Silver expanded outdoor seating into an adjacent lot and added a stage for live music performances, creating a new gathering space in his town.

On Friday night of my travels, I had planned to attend an event at the Bare Dark Sky Observatory on a Burnsville hilltop, the site of a former mica mine-turned landfill that was later used by artists who mined the methane from the decomposing waste. When the Mayland Community College acquired the land, some of its amateur astronomers began using it as a place to watch the night sky. Eventually the site was certified as one of just 180 Dark Sky Parks around the world, for its absence of light pollution.

The observatory regularly hosts “community nights” where guests can spend up to two hours gazing through two fancy telescopes, with guidance from staff on what they’re seeing.

The events are listed on Eventbrite, where you can make reservations and pay the nominal fee.

The ones set for the nights I was in the area were all canceled for rain or heavy cloud cover. When I tried to substitute an event at the Glenn & Carol Arthur Planetarium, which had just opened in June, that got canceled because a staff member tested positve for COVID-19.

So I landed at a picnic table at Homeplace Beer with a crazy-good pizza and salad, listening to a fun band called Fancy & The Gentlemen cover Patsy Cline and Emmylou Harris songs while kids played cornhole in the dirt and the sun set over the old brick buildings downtown.

It was an easy drive back to the Celo Inn for my second and last night in what looks like a treehouse that grew out of the forest. The next morning, a Saturday, I was back in Burnsville — named for Otway Burns, whose grave in the Old Burying Ground in Beaufort, at the other end of the state — for the farmers market.

While I was there, I peeked into the windows of the old Nu-Wray Inn, a hotel that opened in 1833, a year before Burnsville was chartered. The Inn, one of the oldest in Western North Carolina, was recently closed for a complete renovation, which you can follow online.

Several vendors at the market had fresh flowers, gorgeous but not well suited for long-distance car travel. A fresh apple a farmer gave me didn’t make it very far either, but only because it was my first apple from the 2022 harvest and I ate it as soon as I got to the car.

A wilderness coaster and braking lessons

Good thing, because my next stop, not quite an hour away, was the Wilderness Run Alpine Coaster on a mountainside in Banner Elk. I rolled up into the parking lot having no idea that you should “check in” first on the website, then arrive a half-hour ahead of your appointment time to pay for a ticket and take a place in the line.

The parking attendant told me it was my lucky day: I was able to go online and get an appointment for an hour later. Most people who arrive with no appointment have to come back another day, she said.

I opted for the single-ride ticket (as opposed to three rides), and after an hour and 15 minutes in that line I began to regret even that. But finally, after pretty much everyone in front of me had been hauled up the mountain and zoomed down it three times, I finally climbed into a car, got my instruction on how to work the brake — do NOT stop on the tracks — and was whisked away by a steel cable that looked about the size of a stem on one of the sunflowers I had seen for sale in Burnsville.

Turned out I didn’t need instructions on how to work the brake; my reflexes kicked in on the first spin and I pulled back on the handles like Casey Jones coming into the station on his fatal final run. I eased up for the last couple of turns and then — it was over. My stomach and I lurched back to the car and headed north for a reserved campsite at the New River State Park on U.S. 221 outside of Jefferson.

I planned to tent camp. Only I didn’t plan very well, because I left my trusty Walmart tent at home, and had to stop on the way to the mountains to get another one. Unfortunately, the tent selection in late July after two years of “supply chain” problems is limited to a six-man tent that takes at least two people and three college degrees to erect, and a seafoam-colored “youth tent.”

Adventure camping in a teal turtle

Landing at the campground at dusk left me just enough time to set up the tent, bobby-pin it to the ground with the tiny stakes provided, and do a little math. The tent floor: 6’ by 6’. My air mattress: 3’ by 7’. My tolerance for sleeping on the cold hard ground: 0.

After I stuffed the mattress in, the tent looked like a teal turtle with digestive troubles. But by then it was dark and I figured the people around me sleeping in their Airstreams had pulled their shades and couldn’t see it anyway. I did worry that where the mattress was poofing out the tent on two sides, it might cause it to leak when the storms on the radar showed up. I also wondered if it might make me look like a tender morsel to a passing bear.

I cleaned out the passenger side front seat in case I needed to bolt for the car in the middle of the night.

The rain did come, and the tent leaked like a sieve — but not on the sides. The water poured in through the untreated seams on the front and back, puddling in the floor until my sheets and blanket wicked it up. All night, whenever I got too hot, I just extended my feet to the end of the bed where the covers were wet and cold. It was like a natural ice pack.

I had a reservation for a second night. But in the morning, the weather was even worse, was forecast to stay that way and I was running out of towels.

In better weather, one of the most fun things to do in the area is paddle or float down the New River, a designated scenic waterway, meaning that development visible from the center of the river (like that visible from the pavement on the Blue Ridge Parkway) is supposed to remain unchanged. There have been some exceptions, but much of the “viewshed” still does look like the bucolic landscape that environmentalists fought so hard to protect when a Virginia electric company wanted to build a dam and flood much of the New River Valley in North Carolina for a hydroelectric generating plant.

Zaloo’s Canoes, New River Outfitters and others will send you down the river, an easy paddle under normal conditions.

Instead, I packed my soaked gear and headed for The Bluffs restaurant in Doughton Park on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

In 1949, the restaurant was the first to open directly on the new scenic byway, and it sold its famous fried chicken for 61 years, closing down in 2010 when the operator didn’t renew the lease. I went there to write a news story about the closure of the restaurant — and the inn — and of the worries over whether either facility could ever reopen because of mold and other problems. The parkway had to defer maintenance on everything for decades because of a lack of funding from Congress.

When I saw and smelled those buildings, I didn’t think they would ever reopen.

And while the inn is still closed, the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation raised about $1 million to rehab the diner, found a new vendor and it reopened in spring 2021. It looks almost identical to the way it did in 1949. When I had breakfast there on a Sunday, a vintage car pulled in off the parkway, adding to the ambiance.

One significant difference: it now offers alcohol.

Records and much, much more

After breakfast, I drove across the road to check out the old inn, and could smell the mold from the parking lot. Several hiking trails can be reached from the section of the park past the inn, but none of them beckon in a pouring rain.

A road closure for a bridge repair forces you to exit the parkway southbound at N.C. 18 near Laurel Springs, and if you turn right, toward West Jefferson, you immediately come up on Wild Woody’s Records and More.

It is so much more.

What first caught my eye was an assemblage of travel trailers on bottomland behind the store, of similar vintage to my own Mermaid Mobile. It was like I had stumbled into a family reunion of little tin canned kindred spirits. I whipped the car around to find out what was going on back there.

I had to wander through a warren of overpacked rooms in the shop to track down the proprietor, Blondie, who has had the business for more than half a century.

It was like a Roger Miller song: the trailers were for sale or rent, whichever would be the most profitable. They date from the early 1950s to the 1980s, and each is decorated in a different theme. None are connected to electricity or running water, and they all rent for the same price, $45 a night. Some nights, a band plays at an outdoor bar that occupies one corner of the parking lot. I might still be wandering around in there if I had not needed to get to my last stop.

That was West Jefferson, one of my adopted hometowns, which has spent the past 20 years or so cultivating an arts community whose wares and studios draw reliable crowds of tourists through much of the year. Restaurants and other shops also came, and it all makes West Jefferson an easy place to spend a day. There are several hotels in the area and lots of vacation homes for rent, and a historic downtown hotel is under renovation.

Ashe County Cheese, which I have long wished to tour, is closed on Sundays, so I still haven’t been there. But Boondocks Brewing and restaurant was open and had a musician playing at its outdoor dining room, and I had a fresh salad with delicious homemade ranch dressing. Black Jack’s Pub & Grill down the street makes good burgers and they recently brought back their stuffed potato skins.

McB’s Mercantile, also on South Jefferson Avenue, has terrific ice cream.

I left town licking a cone of coffee ice cream with chocolate chunks that was so good, I didn’t even care about the rain.

Coming up: Our summer road trip’s final stop is North Carolina’s Southern mountains. Look for that Cruising Across Carolina installment on Sept. 7.

This story was originally published August 17, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Cruising Across Carolina: Waterfalls, coasters and other high spots in Northern mountains."

Martha Quillin

The News & Observer

919-829-8989

Martha Quillin writes about climate change and the environment. She has covered North Carolina news, culture, religion and the military since joining The News & Observer in 1987.