Meat, please: To make up for the nutrient-poor soils where it thrives, the Venus flytrap (top left) supplements its diet with tasty flies and spiders. Sticky nectar glistens on a sundew plant (top right), beckoning prey like ants and mosquitoes. Croatan’s coastal woodlands (bottom) are frequently burned to mimic the natural cycle of forest fires, a practice that pays off in biodiversity. photograph by Neil Jernigan
Water, water, everywhere — the sprawling Croatan National Forest is a coastal woodland whose feet are rarely dry. Drained by tidal rivers and bordered by Bogue Sound, Croatan is a mosaic of bogs and marsh, dewy pinewoods, and tangled pocosins — the nearly impenetrable “swamps on a hill” that hold deer and bear and canebrake rattlesnakes. Alligators cruise on sequestered creeks. Ospreys and bald eagles course along brackish waterways. Edged by the sun-drenched Crystal Coast region, Croatan’s secrets are — like all national forests — open for discovery by those with a taste for the wild.
More than a mile high in elevation, the three-story stone Wayah Bald lookout tower (top) was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1937. Visitors to Nantahala National Forest choose their preferred adrenaline level: Wide-eyed rafters drop through the rollicking Class III Nantahala Falls on the eponymous river (left). The Bartram Trail (right) follows the famed exploratory journey of William Bartram, who crossed this wilderness in the late 18th century. photograph by Ryan Karcher Photography, Derek Diluzio
A deep, shadowed, eight-mile-long cleft carved by an ancient river gives Nantahala National Forest its name. The Cherokee called the river Nun’daye’li, loosely translated as “land of the noonday sun,” for only when the sun is at its peak can daylight find its way into the gorge. Today, Nantahala National Forest is a half-million-acre rumpled quilt tossed across the southwestern corner of North Carolina. Managed for wood products, wildlife, and wild spaces, it’s a place that provides for the needs of both body and spirit.
Pisgah National Forest is a drama queen: Famed for windswept ridges, cathedral forests, thunderous waterfalls, and high-elevation creeks that hold ancient brook trout, Pisgah is a beloved forested commons that has served as a place of renewal for more than a century. In 1914, Edith Vanderbilt, the widow of George W. Vanderbilt, sold 86,700 acres of the Biltmore Estate to the U.S. government. With that, the seeds for the first national forest in the East were planted.
Catching a brook trout in Mills River is a prized find to crown a mountain fly-fishing adventure. photograph by Derek Diluzio
A brook trout looks as though all of North Carolina’s mountain lands were stirred into a giant cauldron, then poured and pooled onto an artist’s canvas: red spots from a sunrise over the Appalachians, blue halos from the smoky sky at sunset, dark green vermiculations mirroring rhododendron and laurel, white-edged fins like lightning from a summer storm. To catch one is to hook a piece of the primal past. To release it back into the stream is to give thanks that such wildness remains.
In the Uwharries, cyclists pedal across a low-water bridge over the Uwharrie River; anglers on Badin Lake cast for a shore lunch; off-roaders sling mud on the Wolf Den four-wheel-drive trail; and horseback riders head out from Canebrake Horse Camp. photograph by Tom Moors
Once upon a long-ago time, the Uwharrie Mountains drew a craggy, 20,000-foot-tall curtain across the midsection of North Carolina. Now, worn down to rounded, oak-clad nubs, the Uwharries rarely crest 1,000 feet in elevation. A few hundred million years will do that to you. But the passage of time has also created a landscape where the bones of the ancients — mountains, creeks, the haunts of moonshiners and gold miners — beckon hikers and hunters and get-away-from-it-all-ers from across the Piedmont.
The Pisgah Covered Bridge is one of two original covered bridges that remains in North Carolina. photograph by Tom Moors
Built in 1911 for $40, the Pisgah Covered Bridge over the West Fork Branch of the Little River was swept from its foundations and washed downstream in a disastrous 2003 flood. Volunteers from the local community and the nearby North Carolina Zoo scoured the creek banks to collect pieces of the historic bridge, then reassembled the structure with some 90 percent of its original materials. Now one of only two remaining turn-of-the-century covered bridges in North Carolina, the Pisgah Covered Bridge is a testament to the love that Uwharrie Mountain residents feel for their history and home.
This story was published on Aug 23, 2024
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