It was in the waning days of the winter of 2000 that I first discovered the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Driving a rental car from Charlotte to Blowing Rock, I discovered for the first time what Fog on the Blue Ridge Parkway could be like. The next day I tried again. This time I climbed the Blue Ridge at Little Switzerland. Once on the Parkway, I stopped at every pull off… I still remember looking towards Cold Mountain and feeling ice crystals stinging my face on the blowing wind.
For the next three years I explored these mountains via the World Wide Web. It was the Internet that led me to discover Watauga County and Valle Crucis.
In 2004 I introduced my family to my discovery. We returned the next year… And again in 2006. We planned a return in the summer of 2007, but, life intruded and a health issue forced a delay. By November my wife and I were back in my beloved mountains. Each trip has led to new discoveries.
By 2006 I started writing about my love of the mountains in a blog called North Carolina Mountain Dreams. Eventually, over the course of three years, I grew my web presence into a set of sites running from Maine in the north to Alabama in the south. I used this website, AppalachianMountainDreams.com, to pull together links to all of the posts from each of the sites.
At the start of 2016 I decided it was time to reboot the effort. I began to pull all of the databases together into one, redesign the site into something more like an online magazine. What you are viewing today is the initial result of that effort… It is still a work in progress,