Ann’s Falls in February

For those of you who have read Slow Road Home, this is Ann’s Falls spoken of in the book.

For those of you who haven’t read Slow Road Home, what are you waiting for!

SHE drug me up the hillside last week, insisting it would be worth my time. (But then, she’ll say anything to entice me out for a walk.) But she was right. I have some other pix of the ropes we’ve tied between trees on the way up that enable us to get to the falls–a handhold necessary even when there hasn’t been a winter storm and long, hard freeze.

It’s some rugged terrain, but once we get there, we’re always glad we made the effort.

Sadly, the falls are likely to become inaccessible one of these days. Several large (and of course, dead or dying) hemlocks at the rim of the falls will someday rot, and the tops, or the entire tree, will fall across the trail and the little trickle below. Then it will be decades before another photographer can get a clean view and appreciate the scene we were greeted with the other day.

Perhaps it’s worthy of note and relevant to this prediction that the sinuous tree trunk lying across the near foreground of this image is that of an American Chestnut, another species that belonged in the southern forest–once–but succumbed to a blight.