Reilly and I are finally going to Craggy Gardens today! Working together on the project proposal yesterday was incredibly exciting in light of our trip. It has felt like spring for the past few days and I am so looking forward to visiting Craggy to explore and enjoy the sunshine.

In creating our project site, we hope to focus most of our work into sharing a narrative of Craggy Garden that weaves human stories about Craggy into the story of Craggy’s landscape. By sharing this narrative of Craggy Gardens, I hope that we will explore much of what we have discussed in class about re-envisioning the stories we tell about landscapes and people’s sense of place within those stories. I am looking forward to approaching this through the perspective of change, both from urban areas to Craggy Gardens (via the Parkway) and in time through seasonal change and from the 20th to the 21st century.

Reilly and I plan to share most of the responsibility of the project, including collecting archival documents, building our website and using digital tools. We both hope to research the ecosystem around Craggy together, with Reilly researching hemlock tree restoration while I focus on American chestnuts. We have already found information about hemlock trees in the UNCA archives, but will do more digging to see if there is archival information about chestnuts. Additionally, Reilly will focus on documenting the transition from Asheville to Craggy while I document the transition from winter to spring through wildflower blooms. I am so excited that will we be traveling to Craggy Gardens with enough regularity that we will be able to document that change.

Here is the timeline of our project:

March 1 － Contracts due

March 2 － Collect archival documents, meet with the Jackie Holt, Pack Memorial Library, BRP Forest Service, UNCA archives and UNCA Media Design Lab

March 8 － Assignment 5 (integrate writing with a digital tool to convey an aspect of Craggy Gardens)

March 9 － Digital tools (build on Assignment 5 by using other digital tools to begin to build the project website)

March 18 － Visiting Craggy Gardens (have visited Craggy Gardens during the day and night to complete nature writing)

March 27 － Rough draft (complete rough draft of project website)

March 28 – April 16 － Visit Craggy Gardens (visit Craggy Gardens to continue to document the site through writing and multimedia tools)

April 17 － Final version (complete final version of project website)

The mountains here are ancient. Once, millions of years ago, they stretched snow capped peaks as high as the Rockies. Time, and the water and wind that it carried, has dulled their sharp peaks into gentle, rolling earth. Now, well-worn and wrinkled, they descend back into the folds of the earth.

These mountains are the deepest blue, a color of shadows, and bear the name of their color. As they undulate towards the horizon, their deep blue fades so the furthest mountains are almost the same shade as the overcast sky. Like an unmade bed, their wrinkles and folds are soft, cradling one of the most biodiverse regions in the temperate world. When glaciers retreated at the end of the Pleistocene epoch, they left the vestiges of a much colder climate in the spruce-fir forests that now blanket only the mountaintops. The widely variable elevation of these mountains supports the growth of forests that are usually restricted to northern climates as well as one of the richest concentrations of salamander biodiversity on Earth.

Along the Blue Ridge Parkway, I feel the magnitude of the mountains as the road traces their contours. I am on a large scale now, observing passing mountains and counting time by the wooden signs that mark each passing mile. Ahead, the road is blocked because of snow and I continue on foot.  

There is the chatter of a stream alongside the road, swollen from winter melt. If you were to sit along its banks, you would be hidden from the road, sheltered within the arms of drooping rhododendron and the trunks of young trees. I descend towards it and sit in a hollow within the roots of an oak, the pull of the water an inch from my feet.

From a car traversing the Parkway, you see only bare trees and thin, spreading grass that clings tightly to the earth, ducked beneath oncoming wind. But there is so much more to see. It is winter, and most living things have retreated from the cold; it is still apart from the water, the rush of life slowed, its colors muted. There is a skeleton of Queen Anne’s Lace here, a cluster of stonecrop cascading towards the stream bank, sumac holding only a bundle of drupes and, beneath it all, a blanket of last fall’s leaves. Most of the green is from ferns that line the water and rhododendrons crowded above them.

But the plants whisper of spring. I can smell their murmurs as the soil thaws, a yawn of life stretching from slumber. Just beneath the leaves is the growth of new ferns. They are curled into themselves, yearning and impatient as if within a moment, their coils could spring open to unravel skyward. But for now, they wait until spring brings warmer days.

Back along the road, there is more water, locked into crystalline ice as it cascaded down a rock face. Even this ice speaks of spring; as I walk closer I can hear the rapid drip of water released from its tips. Beneath the ice, melting water mimics the flow tadpoles, rushing across the rocks and into the soil below. Clouds are gathering overhead and across the mountains; they will release more water tomorrow. I feel the mountains opening in anticipation of rain, readying themselves for water that will flow through their veins to feed the growth of spring.

The Blue Ridge Parkway grew from the need to employ workers during the Depression mixed with rising rates of automobile ownership among American families. Stories like Kerouac’s On the Road and Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance speak to the way that road travel is embedded in the American imagination; in a road trip, the road is as much a destination as the journey itself.

The roadway of the Blue Ridge Parkway, situated within a narrow corridor of National Park land, offers travelers a scripted view of the ancient Blue Ridge Mountains within a frame of a car window. There is inherent duality in that interaction, where the “nature” exists on the other side of the glass. To leave your car is to become part of the narrative of a changing landscape where time is measured by seasons, the thawing of ice, the ebb and flow of mountains.

Researching Bent Creek Experimental Forest from the perspective of archival documents help me develop a sense of history for area where the Experimental Forest is located. The oral histories included in this timeline describe the work of two young men who were employed in the Experimental Forest within ten years of one another, before and during the Great Depression. Both touch upon the actual labor involved in their job positions and, in addition, describe the culture of “mountain people”. Reading these perspectives from workers at Bent Creek changed my perspective of the location by describing how the Experimental Forest exists in relation to the communities that surrounded it. Since the Experimental Forest is a research station, I expected it to be more isolated from the people who live near it.

I also found that looking through pictures of the Experimental Forest helped to me to construct a mental landscape of the area where research was being conducted. Several pictures within the archives illustrate ways in which the landscape was disturbed by human activity, which began to build more layers into a “deep map” of the Experimental Forest that depicted the landscape as well as changes to it. I also enjoyed looking through pictures that depicted smaller pieces of the Experimental Forest, such as the picture of the trunk of a sycamore tree.

If Reilly and I choose to continue to research Bent Creek Experimental Forest, I could foresee us exploring the StoryMap platform to assemble archival documents about Bent Creek. I attempted to create a presentation with StoryMap for these documents, but had difficulty doing so. If we created a StoryMap, we could visually explore some of the environmental changes that have been and are currently being researched at Bent Creek Experimental Forest and place these changes within a larger map that illustrates Bent Creek’s landscape. Within this map, we could layer in the voices from the interviews along with pictures of how the forest would have looked during the time when William Nothstein and Hugh Creasman were working there.