LuckyOtter – Blue Ridge Parkway
It was a gorgeous day so I took the car up the Blue Ridge Parkway again. I never get tired of its views. This activity is so relaxing to me.
The first picture (above) I took at Craggy Gardens, which has an elevation well over 5000 feet. The trees here are stunted, short, and knobby looking, due to both the cold and the wind. A little higher up, and deciduous trees disappear completely and are replaced by a spruce/fir forest, similar to what you might see in Canada. This is the home of the Frasier fir, similar to the kinds of trees you find in a northern boreal forest, but native to the southern Appalachians. The Frasiers were almost killed off some years ago by the wooly adelgid, a parasite that attacks balsams, hemlocks, and fir trees, but they have grown back. You can still see the white “skeletons” of…
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