This Land, Your Land

The U.S. Forest Service has banned alcohol at 11 Nantahala National Forest day use areas in the Tusquitee, Cheoah and Nantahala ranger districts. The Forest Service said the decision was in response to recent vandalism rangers think was perpetrated by intoxicated forest visitors, the Asheville Citizen Times reported this week.

The prohibition includes Cheoah Point, the only free public swimming area on Lake Santeetlah, which attracts large numbers of summer visitors.

Other sites are: Balsam Lake Recreation Area, Big Choga Dispersed Camping Sites, Bristol Fields Campground, Dry Falls Recreational Area, Fire's Creek Hunter's Camp, Fire's Creek Picnic Area, Jackrabbit Recreation Area, Pine Ridge Dispersed Camping Sites, Wayah Bald Tower and Picnic Area and Whiteside Mountain Recreation Area.

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park has received $12.2 million in additional stimulus fund money to improve hiker parking areas and resurface two roads, the Knoxville News Sentinel reported last week.

The extra money will be used to pave the Foothills Parkway-East, the Smokemont Campground and the Heintooga Ridge Road, and to create new hiker parking lots and repave the roads leading to the popular Little River and Jakes Creek Trails in the Elkmont area.

The park has received a total of $77.5 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds, the newspaper said.

The Blue Ridge Parkway has initiated a Twitter account and is tweeting since earlier this month.

The Asheville Citizen-Times' Girls Gone Outdoors blog quotes the parkway's chief of maintenance and engineering, Mike Molling, who says the Parkway will send out updates on the status of openings and closures along the 469-mile scenic roadway.

It's also sending notice of public programs along the Parkway and, in an April 23 message, mentioned a couple of special visitors.

Catch the BRP's tweets at @BLUE_RDGE_PKWY.

Ongoing renovations at Carolina Beach State Park are expected to keep the marina and all boating access closed through the summer, the Division of Parks and Recreation said in a news release.

The project, which began December 1, 2008, is projected to be completed in September.

The final phase will interrupt all access to the marina area, including parking lots, trail access points and the park’s fishing pier.

The $2.5 million project includes construction of new floating docks, additional boat slips, boat ramp improvements, walkways, above-ground fuel tanks and a redesigned parking area with additional single-vehicle spaces.

The access channel to the marina was dredged earlier.

The park’s Sugarloaf Trail and Swamp Trail will remain open with access from the visitor center via the Campground Trail or from a parking area at the end of Nature Trail Lane, the news release says.

Campers will continue to register for campsites at the visitor center office instead of at the marina, as they have since it has been closed.

Trails at Dupont State Forest re-opened earlier this week upon completion of work to clear them of debris from winter storms, Forest Supervisor David R. Brown says on the Friends of Dupont Forest Web site.

"This does not mean that trails will be completely free of hazards," he adds. "Visitors to the forest must always be aware of their surroundings, and watch for hazards."

The winter of 2009-'10 was wetter and colder than any winter in recent years, and ice storm debris created hazards on many trails.

The Vista Trail will not be cleared or reopened, the message says.

Dupont State Forest encompasses 10,300 acres on the Transylvania/Henderson county border between Hendersonville and Brevard. The forest has four major waterfalls on Little River, including Triple Falls (below), and several more on Grassy Creek.

In another note on the site, the Friends group has announced that it will not hold the Mother's Day Tour de Falls this year. It cites "a lack of affordable buses."

America's 392 national parks are offering free admission as part of National Park Week, April 17 to 25.

In North Carolina, this means savings at Wright Brothers National Memorial at Manteo, which normally charges $4 for ages 16 and older. It's the only one of nine national parks in the state that charges admission.

Recreation "user fees" such as permit fees, camping fees and tour fees are not waived during the National Park Week promotion.

The Blue Ridge Parkway grew by nearly 50 acres this week when the National Park Service accepted a gift of land from the Conservation Trust for North Carolina, the Ashevile Citizen-Times reports.

The 48.7-acre Roaring Fork Headwaters tract is on the border of Alleghany and Surry counties near Milepost 220.5. It is adjacent to 201 acres conveyed by the conservation trust to the park service in 2007.

The two properties are near the 3,400-acre Saddle Mountain Wilderness Area and 1,000-acre Cumberland Knob National Recreation Area, which are both in Virginia.

The U.S. Forest Service routinely positions video cameras in National Forests to monitor "illicit activities," according to a report last month by the Island Packet of Hilton Head, South Carolina.

The Island Packet got the story after a man camping with his daughter and a friend in Francis Marion National Forest stumbled over a wire that led to a video camera and antenna.

Heather Frebe, public affairs officer with the Forest Service in Atlanta, told the newspaper that the camera was part of a law enforcement investigation. "She said that surveillance cameras have been used for 'numerous years' to provide for public safety and to protect the natural resources of the forest. Without elaborating, she said images of people who are not targets of an investigation are 'not kept.'"

Marijuana cartels use remote land in national forests as well as in national parks for large growing operations, according to published reports.

"The enforcement of federal drug laws on the national forests is fundamentally related to visitor safety, employee safety and natural resource protection," the Forest Service says on its Web site. "Currently, most marijuana illicitly grown on federal public lands in the West and Southwest is tied directly to Mexican drug cartels and criminal gangs. These criminal gangs are armed and dangerous and have confronted and intimidated hikers and hunters at gunpoint. The Forest Service works aggressively with state, county and other federal agencies to eliminate this criminal activity from national forests."

As for the legality of cameras, the Island Packet says, "In general, the courts have held that people typically have no reasonable level of privacy in public places, such as banks, streets, open fields in plain view and on public lands, such as national parks and national forests. In various cases, judges ruled that a video camera is effectively an extension of a law enforcement officer's eyes and ears. In other words, if an officer can eyeball a campground in person, it's OK to station a video camera in his or her place."

There are more than 1.2 million acres of land in national forests in North Carolina.

Correction: We've re-set the first link to go to the news release and corrected the date of Columbus Day.

The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse opens to climbers for the season next Friday, April 16, the National Park Service announced this week. The season runs through Columbus Day, October 11.

It will cost $7 - or $3.50 if you're younger than 12 or older than 65 - to climb the 248-step iron spiral stairway (below) to the top of the tallest brick lighthouse in North America at Cape Hatteras National Seashore.

Tickets will go on sale daily at 8:15 a.m. and climbing tours will begin at 9 a.m., allowing up to 30 people in every 10 minutes. Ticket sales close at 4:30 p.m. in the spring and fall, and at 5:30 p.m. from the Friday of Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day.

"The opening day of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse will continue to be a 'fee-free' day, as it has in the past, for local community members to climb the Lighthouse," the NPS news release says.

Firefighters this week battled and contained a brush fire that scorched up to 100 acres at Morrow Mountain State Park in Stanly County.

The blaze broke out about 12:30 p.m. Sunday but by Tuesday afternoon firefighters were monitoring hot spots, according to WBTV in Charlotte.

The N.C. Division of Forest Resources had dozens of workers at the state park on Monday including forest rangers and burn crews.

The summit of Morrow Moutain, bridle trails and the Morrow Mountain and Mountain Loop trails remained closed as of early Wednesday.