Blue Ridge Calling

I came from the desert. Now, the desert in Arizona gets pretty dang hot in summer. Okay, it gets boiling – as in 115 degrees or more. As hot as it gets, that’s not why I left and moved to North Carolina. Honestly, for an outdoorsy type of guy who loves hiking, fishing, and hunting, Arizona is amazing. It is beautiful and almost shocking in its contrasts, showing off a diversity of scenery with a suddenness that sometimes startles the senses, from the flowering cacti after the desert storm to the giant ponderosa pine-covered mountains where mule deer, elk, and bear still roam without fences. It is a place of raw, elemental beauty, but outside of the cities, it can be wild, harsh, even unforgiving.

The Blue Ridge Mountains, on the other hand, inspire with their dripping, moss-covered walls, waterfalls that crash and swirl around almost every bend of boulder-strewn creeks and rivers, and with stunning, long-distance views that seem to defy one’s eye to catch a glimpse of the towns and cities that shelter under their misty, blue-tinted veil. These mountains were my mother’s place of birth, and were home to many friends and family in my youth. 

While in the southwest, I constantly compared what I saw to the lush forests and streams of the Blue Ridge, never quite getting them out of my mind’s eye. I was restless, always longing for what was beyond the next hill or bend in the road, always reminded of those years from my youth, memories of friends, relatives, and days gone by in the Carolinas and Tennessee, of summers spent hiking and climbing over boulder-strewn ridges, of walking down mud-bogged, red clay backroads, and of wading creeks searching for tadpoles and crawdads until the twilight called us home. 

Partly it was the memories of years and experiences gone by that called me back to the Blue Ridge. Partly, it was the hope of a better, quieter, simpler life for my children than the hustle and bustle of millions of city dwellers trying to stay cool and calm while they did their best to scratch out a living from the hot, harsh, overpopulated desert landscape. Mostly it was the Blue Ridge calling, calling me back. 

I think the Blue Ridge never really stopped calling me back to itself, all through my wandering years of desert wasteland and noisy, frantic city life, they called out to me with a whispered promise that only a few places left on this planet can still deliver, an untamed wildness that could quickly reclaim any of its territory left free from human intervention for any length of time. To me, the mountains seem to only tolerate human intrusion, never wholly giving themselves up. Through untold millennia, they have existed in their wildness; older and once taller than the Rockies, they continue today to hold at bay man’s repeated attempts to control and manage the region. 

Whether you spend a day, a week, or a year in the Blue Ridge, you’ll have the chance to form a connection to a people, heritage, and place that will develop your character like no city on earth can. Up in the Blue Ridge you can get outside, fish along silver-blue, cool mountain streams, take quiet strolls along pine-needle paths, or bike along rolling meadows and farms dotted with golden hay bales and white-faced cattle. 

The Blue Ridge is full of adventure, wilderness, charming small towns, growing cities, rolling farmland, mountain meadows, and roaring rivers. This spectacular place I now call home is offered up to visitors with a heartwarming recipe created and enhanced over time. It’s a place where life is seasoned by a dash of good old-fashioned southern hospitality, served up with an extra helping of deep-fried comfort food, held together with a long heritage of art, music, and generosity, and all washed down with a tall, ice-cold glass of the thirst-quenching Carolina sweet tea. I think you’ll find, like I did, that nothing could be finer than answering the call of the Blue Ridge.