This Land, Your Land

Bluffs Lodge and the coffee shop at the Blue Ridge Parkway's Doughton Park may not reopen after closing for the season, according to the Blue Ridge Parkway Journeys blog.

"Economic conditions and planned road closures due to guidewall restoration will likely keep the favorite-destination lodge and coffee shop closed for the foreseeable future," the blog says. "The operating concessioner (lessee), Forever Resorts (Scottsdale, Arizona) has indicated that they will not be renewing their lease arrangement with the park service next year."

The 24-room Bluffs Lodge closes for the season November 1, the blog says. Construction work on stone walls in the Doughton Park area is expected to be completed in the spring of 2012.

Blue Ridge Country magazine, in its December issue, explains how Parkway concessionaires find it hard to make money. The National Park Service's contract requirements make the concessions unattractive, so the NPS hasn't even sought new bidders in recent years.

Because of Forever Resorts' withdrawal, the NPS is in fact seeking "expressions of interest" through November 8 in operating Bluffs Lodge and the coffee shop, plus concessions at Julian Price Lake, the Crabtree Falls gift shop, the Mabry Mill restaurant and gift shop, Rocky Knob cabins, the Peaks of Otter lodge, restaurant and country store, and the Otter Creek restaurant and gift shop.

As Blue Ridge Parkway Journeys and Blue Ridge Country both say, the withdrawal of a concessionaire leaves the future of the affected Parkway facilities totally up in the air.

Chimney Rock State Park has been posting weekly slide shows of the fall colors. The photos below were posted last Tuesday, and the park says colors should peak this weekend and linger into November.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park will require campers to have advanced reservations for Cataloochee Campground beginning next spring, the National Park Service said this week.

The 2011 season begins March 11. Reservations will be available through recreation.gov or at 877-444-6777. The reservation system typically allows reservations to be made up to six months in advance, but the reservation database for Cataloochee is not expected to be active until February 1.

The 27-site campground is popular, but remote, and campers have had no way of knowing whether a site would be available before they got to the campground, a news release says.

"Cataloochee Campground offers one of the park’s most sought-after camping experiences, but getting there involves a 30 to 40 minute, 11-mile drive off I-40, with much of that along a very-narrow and circuitous gravel road,” park Supt. Dale A. Ditmanson said. “There is no cell or landline phone service and no regularly assigned staff assigned at the campground, so there is no way for anybody to check to see if sites are available. The reservation system will eliminate the frustration of finding no campsites left after having made the difficult drive to the campground.”

The fee will also go to $20 per night from $17.

Do you know the Blue Ridge Parkway? Do you know the Conservation Trust for North Carolina's contributions to the Parkway?

If so, you might try the CTNC's Blue Ridge Parkway trivia contest, which their running in part to mark the Parkway's 75th anniversary.

Answer all 10 questions correctly and you'll be entered in a drawing to win a weekend at a forest cabin in the mountains of Ashe County. Ten others will receive prizes from Great Outdoor Provision Co.

Here's a hint: you can look up the answers through our Carolina Outdoors Guide links above and by searching at the bottom of the home page.

Several trails in the Joyce Kilmer National Recreation Trail corridor will be closed for the first half of November as numerous dead and dying hemlock trees are removed from the area, the Forest Service said in a news release today.

All or a portion of the Joyce Kilmer National Recreation Trail, Stratton Bald Trail, Naked Ground Trail and Jenkins Meadow Trail will be closed November 1 to 14 for the work.

The Joyce Kilmer National Recreation Trail is a 2-mile figure-8 loop at the heart of the old-growth Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, which sees more than 35,000 visitors a year.

"Although located within the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness Area, the trail is managed as a highly developed trail," the release says. "The Nantahala Forest Plan directs managers to 'Fell all dead or dying trees within the trail corridor' on this type of trail to ensure visitor safety. The Forest Service explored the possibility of closing the area until the trees naturally fell, but has chosen to remove the hazardous trees in order to keep the area open to the public."

Because of a catastrophic infestation of the exotic insect pest, hemlock woolly adelgid, approximately 150 large hemlock trees are dead or dying in the Joyce Kilmer area, which is near Robbinsville.

Click on the photo or the link above to see additional photos from Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest.

Hikers and bikers in Brevard last weekend celebrated the opening of the Estatoe Trail, a 5.5 mile path linking the Transylvania County city to the Pisgah National Forest.

The path path begins at the intersection of U.S. Highway 64/U.S. Highway 276 in front of Lowe's, crosses Asheville Highway and winds into the forest along the Davidson River, passing the Sycamore Flats day use area and ending at the Davidson River Campground.

The city, the North Carolina Department of Transportation, U.S. Forest Service, state Department of Natural Resources, Davidson River Village, and the N.C. State Employees Credit Union, said the Times-News of Hendersonville.

The City of Brevard put $25,000 toward the project as part of a matching North Carolina Parks and Recreation Trust Fund grant, and the state paid a $75,000 match. The DOT paid for road improvements at the trail's entrance on U.S. 64/276 with $2 million in federal stimulus funding, the newspaper said.

An article in the December issue of Blue Ridge Country magazine looks at the outdated campgrounds and lodges on the Blue Ridge Parkway and explores the prospects for updating them. (The magazine is online, but not this article.)

National Park Service campgrounds along the scenic road were state-of-the art when they were built in the 1940s and ‘50s, which did not include showers or electricity hookups. Large RVs didn’t exist then either. The question of whether to upgrade involves not only money, but whether it is in the National Park Service mission.

Parkway campgrounds are less crowded than commercial campgrounds, and probably shouldn’t try to compete with the many commercial campgrounds just off the Parkway, Mike Molling, director of maintenance for the Parkway says in the article. Some campers come to the Parkway for the rustic atmosphere, Gary Johnson, the Parkway’s chief planner and landscape architect, added.

“We’ve been talking about adding showers for 30 years, but as soon as we get into that conversation, then we have to talk about whether we have enough water, drainage fields and so on. Adding electrical hookups would require installation of a network of service lines in the campgrounds,” Johnson said.

“We have to decide what the break-even point is. Do we have to completely redo our campground roads to accommodate large RVS, make the tent pads larger for the larger tents people now have, add showers to all campground comfort stations [showers were retrofitted at the Mount Pisgah campground]? What about handicap accessibility? What is the minimum investment we can make for maximum return?”

The Parkway has applied for $9.5 million to rehabilitate the campground at Peaks of Otter in Virginia (work that the article does not detail), but will compete with other Park Service facilities in the region and then across the nation for the money, the article says. The decision will be made next year, but work would not begin until 2015.

Meanwhile, the Park Service’s concession planning staff is working with the Parkway to determine how lodges and restaurants on the Parkway can be expanded to make them profitable. As it is, they are too old and too small to make money.

Another problem is that concessionaires, who run the facilities, are required to make specific building improvements as part of their contracts, but the 10-year contracts are too short for them to recoup their investment. So, no one wants the contract and, instead of letting new agreements, the Park Service extends old ones year by year. If and when someone opts out, who knows?

Blue Ridge Country is a monthly covering the outdoors, travel, arts, culture and the people of the mountains of the South, including Kentucky, Maryland, the Virginias, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama. It’s sold on most newsstands.

We had a chance to visit South Mountains State Park south of Morganton a few weeks ago, by chance showing up on Nature Day, and have added a page with photos and information to the Carolina Outdoors Guide section about State Parks.

Besides the back country, South Mountains' main attraction is the 80-foot High Shoals Falls. Take a look here.

The National Forest Service has found "no significant impact" in the development of a shooting range proposed for Nantahala National Forest land near the Fires Creek backcountry area in Clay County.

The decision permits construction of the range on three to five acres approximately 9 miles east of Hayesville near Perry Creek, an area with several miles of popular hiking and bridle trails.

Blue Ridge Outdoors magazine said in February that the site is within a half-mile of the Chunky Gal Trail, a 21-mile-long footpath that connects to the nearby Bartram Trail from the Fires Creek Rim Trail, "which would make the sound of gunfire a constant companion on the trail."

Building a road to the range would mar an unspoiled area, which the Wilderness Society and Southern Appalachian Forest Coalition have named it a Mountain Treasure area, the magazine said, adding that the two groups had publicly opposed the project.

The Forest Service decision says the Perry Creek site has less of a noise impact on the Chunky Gal Trail than the alternative proposal to build the range at a site on Barnett Creek Road (Forest Service Road 6236).

Because Clay County is developing rapidly, "national forest lands represent one of the few options in the county to provide a safe, secure facility for marksmanship and training in firearms safety," the 40-page decision says.

The plan, Alternative B among proposals studied, calls for the creation of five to eight shooting lanes and clean-soil earthen backstops, approximately 1,300 feet of single lane, gravel road, and a parking lot for about 10 vehicles.

"The shooting facility, designed to the safety standards set by the National Rifle Association, will include covered shooting stations, sign boards, and a portable restroom facility," it says.

The proposal for a public shooting range in Clay County debuted in November 2002 with a proposed site on Birch Cove off Nelson Ridge Road, which was deemed too close to homes whose residents would be bothered by the noise.

You can now walk right in and speak your mind at any of the nation's 392 national parks (nine of which are in North Carolina).

The National Park Service announced Thursday that, effective immediately, it had eliminated a long-standing requirement for individuals and small groups to obtain permits to demonstrate and distribute literature in national parks.

The Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said on August 6 in Boardley v. Department of the Interior that the policy was too broad, and the Park Service says it will not appeal the decision.

The court upheld the Park Service's practice of setting aside designated areas in parks, and requiring a permit for larger demonstrations and the sale of printed material.

The Park Service says in its news release that in the case of larger groups, "the permit process allows NPS to protect park resources and guarantees groups a priority for a space when multiple groups or individual demonstrators want to use a designated area in a park."

The release does not say what size group or demonstration would require a permit.