I decided to make the short jaunt up the Blue Ridge Parkway from Ashville to see Mount Mitchell while I was in the area. After all the Parkway itself was splendid and worth the trip even if the mountain was fogged in. The Parkway runs for about 470miles connecting the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina to the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. I guess I've seen roughly half and intend to do the whole thing one day. One of those things laying around on the list in the bucket. (every time I read about one of those lottery winners who say "oh I'll just keep working" I have to choke back the urge to find them and punch them.) It was in the upper forties in Ashville and I had a heavy winter coat for the mountain so I figured I'd be fine. Halfway there and the views were stunning and the temps had dropped into the low thirties. Just like on the Foothills Parkway, grouse were everywhere. They are the ubiquitous as well as iconic animal of these high mountain roads and I think I saw at least a half dozen that morning.
By the time I'd made Mount Mitchell State Park the temperature readings on the car's dash had dropped into the upper teens when I pointedly decided not to look at it anymore. A thin coat of snow covered the ground or at least I thought it was snow but when I parked the car and got out I found it was a thin white ice like the kind that used to build up in old refrigerators forcing you to defrost them. I jumped back in the car pulling on the jacket and rummaging around for the toboggan under the seats. For the wind was blowing. I don't know a better way to put that, tempest?, gusting?, tumult?. Hmm I need a colder word there... All I know is that the wind was a steady twenty or thirty and gusting to somewhere over forty. Which I understand is just par for the course on Mount Mitchell in winter for it a place of extremes. There is a little weather station here close to the summit that from what I gather holds the records for everything nasty weather wise in the state. The coldest temperature ever recorded in the state occurred there on January 21, 1985 when it fell to −34 °F. It is also the coldest average reporting station in the state at 43.8 °F which is way below any other station. Heavy snows can fall anytime from December to March, with 50 inches accumulating in the Great Blizzard of 1993 with an average annual snowfall of 178 inches. The highest straightline wind speed in the state was recorded here at 178 miles per hour! Well you get the picture. I bundled up and headed up the short pathway to the summit. Even with the heavy jacket and hat I was freezing. Not just cold but bone jarring frost bite inducing, hypothermic kind of cold. A few photos and I was running back downhill towards the car.
I ended up taking a bit longer to hit I-40 as the Parkway was now closed back the way I had come. You could see snow pouring over low spots on the ridgeline as I now turned north to take 80 back southward.
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