Blue Ridge Parkway
Virginia
June 2015
What is that, right of center in the top quarter of the photo, sticking up above the trees? That small, silvery hut. It looks little.
Wait, I know the answer. It’s the Green Knob Lookout Tower. Let’s set that as our goal for today’s hike.
We turn off the Blue Ridge Parkway into the parking lot at Milepost 350.4, the Green Knob Mountain Trailhead parking lot.
As we lace up our boots for the hike, a blue Subaru pulls into the lot with authority. The driver stops in the middle of the pavement and asks us where the trailhead is. She is a trim, middle-age woman with an athletic haircut. “I’m just scouting. I’m taking a break while I’m waiting for my knee to heal. They repaired a ligament. I blew it out on Blood Mountain [in Georgia] but it was worth it.”
Really? It was worth it? That must have been some hell of a hike!
(Lisa and I don’t know this at the time, but a month later, we would be on that very same Blood Mountain trail. We would blow out no ligaments. And in fact, it was a hell of a good hike!)
We remove our hiking poles from our vehicle. I now use two of them. I miss the days of carrying a charming wooden stick, but lately my knees are thankful every time I take a walking-stick-supported step, especially downhill. No torn knee ligaments for me.
Anyway, our recovering hiker says, “You carry a shillelagh. That’s a great idea.”
Shillelagh. It could be a stick designed to be used as a weapon. It isn’t. In this case, a shillelagh is a walking stick.
We turn her in a direction and point out trailhead. I point it out with my shillelagh. Before she leaves the parking lot, I ask her what her license plate means…
MYTARDIS
TARDIS, I am told, is a term from Doctor Who. It means “Time And Relative Dimensions In Space,” whatever that means. Doctor Who is a British television show featuring the adventures of an alien Time Lord, the Doctor. His vehicle is the TARDIS which on the outside looks like a blue police public call box. When the Doctor first touched the TARDIS console he said the ship was the most beautiful thing he’d ever known.
Open the door to the TARDIS and you find that the inside is far larger than the outside could possibly contain. This is because of its trans-dimensional engineering, which should be obvious to anyone who would just look.
I idly wonder if Lisa and I have already climbed Blood Mountain but, because of this encounter with a fan of the Time Lord, time has shifted and we just don’t know it yet.
Today’s hike is a short, fun hike. The Green Knob Trail is nothing but switchbacks. Switchbacks and spider webs. It’s a race to the top. Will we make it before the webs completely wrap us up? I imagine Lisa dragging a large cocoon off the trail, me swaddled inside.
The length of this switchback hike is just a hair over half a mile, which possibly relates to the Time And Relative Dimensions In Space phenomenon; When we reach the end of the trail at the observation tower, we are only 500 feet from the car. But in that 500 horizontal feet, we’ve gained more than 350 vertical feet. Could explain all the switchbacks. Or the other way around. SIDRAT.
I’ve lost track of what I was talking about.
No reason to wonder why lookout towers are placed where they are. They are built at the top, y’know, where there are the best views, the best places from which to look out. Eh? This one is on the summit of the 5080-foot tall Green Knob Mountain. The views are impressive, the best panorama of the Black Mountain range.
Built in 1931, the lookout was staffed through the 1970s. Someone actually lived in the cab, only slightly larger on the outside than Doctor Who’s vehicle, the call box. It was abandoned for years but was repaired in 1996. Access to the top deck though is blocked. We sit on the steps just below the cab wondering what it’s like to live in a large closet 40 feet above ground, for weeks at a time.
Maybe the lookout ranger is still living up there, on the other side of the closed and locked door. We can’t get in, he can’t get out.
On our hike down we encounter swarming bees. Not too many, but enough. I mean, how many do you need?
Maybe instead of a ranger, the bees live in the lookout now. They wouldn’t be hampered by a locked door.