“The Youngs Mountain Trail is Conserving Carolina’s most spectacular trail project yet, and it will serve as a crown jewel segment of the budding Hickory Nut Gorge State Trail network, Trails Specialist Peter Barr said. Its overhanging rocks and dramatic cliff ledges offer stunning vistas of the surrounding mountains, including Buffalo Creek Park and Chimney Rock State Park. With the opening of the Youngs Mountain Trail, this breathtaking landscape is one step closer to being linked together by the Hickory Nut Gorge State Trail.”
The trail passes through 437 acres of forever-protected land that provides a haven for biodiversity, including numerous rare or endangered plants and animals. The mountain is home to bear, deer, bobcats, turkeys, and many other kinds of wildlife. The lower part of the trail crosses several beautiful brooks while the top of the trail passes over sheer rock with a lush community of mosses and lichens.
Cold Calling: 21 refreshing retreats in the South that offer a dose of natureâs air-conditioning
A subterranean cave, a chilly river, the highest summit east of the Mississippiâthese destinations are all shivery oases on dog-day afternoons
Photo by John Starrett
Can you even call yourself a Southerner if you donât spend at least a quarter of the year griping about the heat (and donât forget the humidity)? But during a season when the forecast seems permanently set to âscorching,â you can still find pockets of delicious coolnessâand we donât mean the blast radius around your air-conditioning vent.
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NOAA
Back in 2006, when Scott Shuford was Asheville’s planning director, he reluctantly accepted a friend’s invitation to attend a meeting about the impact of climate change on local governments.
“I didn’t see how a two-degree temperature change could affect the community,” he recalled, referring to the predicted rise in earth temperatures in years to come. “But I agreed to attend, thinking it would only be about 15 minutes.
“After about an hour-and-a-half I came out of the meeting drenched in sweat.”
All the plans he had drafted up to that day suddenly seemed to have overlooked an unsettled future fraught with unanticipated challenges. Those two degrees of temperature change meant greater threats of weather extremes of torrential rains, devastating floods, and landslides, and of their opposites, extended drought and wildfire.