Danny Bernstein is a STARS Author and will be signing in the All-STAR Autograph Area on Sunday morning of the SIBA Trade Show.
Hiking North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Heritage
by Danny Bernstein www.hikertohiker.com
As I cross Basin Creek yet one more time on my way to Caudill Cabin, I carefully place my left foot and then my right between rocks and wonder where the drought is now that I could use it. It’s a warm mid-summer day and I’m in one of the most remote areas I’ve hiked for my second guidebook Hiking North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Heritage. Well, not that remote. The Blue Ridge Parkway is only a few miles above me, but here in the back of Doughton Park in North Carolina, there’s nobody. I pass the remains of a chimney, a grinding wheel, and rock foundations – this was a busy place before the flood of 1916 wiped out the community.
When I get to the cabin surrounded by pasture land, my first reaction is “These folks didn’t get out very much.” This dark one-room cabin without windows housed a family with fourteen children. Two books are nailed to the wall and I pull out a flashlight to read the Caudill family genealogy and sign my name. The person who signed in before me came three weeks ago.
Not all hikes are in such isolated places. North of Winston-Salem, I hiked at Pilot Mountain State Park with its wedding cake cone rising out of the Piedmont valley. While hiking Stone Mountain State Park, I met a local hiker who showed me the park’s moonshine past. He took me to a field of barrels, jerrycans, and rubber hoses a few feet from the trail. Outside of Highlands, I walked up Whiteside Mountain, a private mountain until 1975. The owners built a road up the mountain so that visitors could get tremendous views without hiking but their business venture failed; they sold the mountain to Nantahala National Forest.
The mountains are literally the foundation of our Blue Ridge Heritage. As historians say, “History is never just about the past. It’s about how history helps to shape today.” All the land we walk on was private at some point. I look at the history of the land from a hiker’s perspective. By walking, we can understand the need for protecting our public lands in perpetuity. My mission is to get people out of their cars, into the woods and hiking.
Like many inner city children growing up in New York City, I was sent away to a “Y” camp in the summer. I loved the outdoors and the vacation was always too short. As an inner city college student, (I did my undergraduate work at Brooklyn College), I became a counselor at this same camp. At least, then, I got to stay the whole summer and took girls hiking and canoeing.
When I started working in New Jersey, I saw an announcement for a hike led by a local hiking club. I was surprised to learn that adults went hiking without children. I went on the hike, brought all the wrong gear, and barely kept up with people older than my parents. But I loved it. I have been hiking and leading hikes for various hiking clubs since then. I “punched a clock” for 35 years, first as a software developer, then as a professor of Computer Science.
Now, I am a hiker, a hike leader for the Carolina Mountain Club in Asheville and an outdoor writer. Soon after completing the Appalachian Trail, I moved to the Carolina Mountains to hike. And that’s what I do, several times a week – and I write about it.
