Carvins Cove: Up the HiDeeHo Trail and along Brushy Mountain Trail and back. 6 miles.
A rainy day and a spur-of-the-moment turn led us to the nearly empty Carvins Cove parking lot at the base of Brushy Mountain.
A few drizzles as we got out of the car led me to reassure The Day Hiker and move on along under the trees where you couldn’t feel it. (And sure enough we felt not another drop the rest of the afternoon.)
The HiDeeHo Trail makes its way pretty directly up the mountainside in a little less than two miles, by our reckoning, past the strange phone up in a tree and onto the ridge line of Brushy Mountain and its forest-road trail. We walked a distance along it, saw a faint, phantom trail that looked like it took you up to a precipice, which turned out to be a nice high-point lunch spot, but with the trees in full leaf, the views over to McAfee and Catawba Mountain were limited. Its high-knob status was verified by the presence of an old light standard, wire and glass, as if at some point there had been some kind of warning light.
Back down, the walk was easy and warm, completing a gentle, short hike with nothing particularly of note save the completing of a sad circle: The Day Hiker had previously, in every month except August, experienced the strange, white-fingered symptoms of Reynaud’s Syndrome. On this cool, cloudy day with a good climb to warm the body and a shady spot at lunch for it to chill, the fingers went yellowish toward white, but at least only mildly so.
August 22, 2009
