mountain water

While the seasons are gradually shifting in the mountains, there is one element that is in constant motion despite what the leaves look like around it. Water. It is constantly flowing through mountain country; waterfalls appear wherever mountains can be found.

The Smokies' rushing waters fuels the greenery, fuels the wildlife, and fuels the communities all the way to the Atlantic. The changing elevations allow the liquid life to trickle and tumble down, always going, never staying. Like the seasons here, the elements, too, are never stationary for long.

Water spends much of its time on its journey down a mountainside in creeks, or "cricks." Pull off any winding road and take a step into the forested hills beside you. Open your ears, open your eyes. Listen for the rush, look for the moss. Within minutes, you will find a crick. It may be just a trickle inching its way between green stones, or you may find a huge stream pushing through massive boulders and rushing over cliffs in miniature falls. Dip your fingers into the liquid and feel the definition of crisp. The higher you go on the mountain, the fresher the water. This is the stuff that companies try to sell you in plastic bottles, but nothing compares to the real thing.

the mountains

Autumn is coming. 

The season is in the air. The formidable heat of summer is closing in for one last strike at our skin and lungs. Autumn is on its way, traveling on winds from the frozen north down through America, arriving on Floridian soil a bit too late for my taste. But it's coming, eventually. But Florida is not where this season shines. You have to go farther north to truly appreciate all that the fall provides. You have to go where the land begins to swell and rise, buckled from massive plates beneath the earth's surface, where the land is crumpled like a sheet of notebook paper after a frustrated scribbler has given up on their prose. 

You have to go the mountains.

In these hills and valleys the weather is real and alive; there are actual seasons that come around like clockwork, predictable and variable. The spring is warm, the summer is hot, the fall is chilly, the winter is cold. Degrees matter. It shows on the flora, most vividly in the fall. The leaves give up on life for the year and decay on their stem, scenting the air with that unmistakable smell of autumn. Orange, yellow, brown, red, and every other shade of dying in between gets sprawled across the mountainsides, drenching the land with more than just green. The mountains are where you can breath in the scent of death and still be completely and totally at peace with the world.

"...a walk among the mountains [is] the equivalent of churchgoing." - Aldous Huxley