Surprises

I love surprises.

You know the kind - the best ones are where you could never have planned things to be just the way they were, yet things work out wonderfully better than you ever thought they might.


Mt. Mitchell is the highest peak East of the Mississippi River.



This is what it looked like Saturday, September 15, 2007 around 11 o'clock in the morning.








We found these growing all over the place:



Now raspberries are a favorite fruit in our family but very rare down South, especially in September. So to find them growing all around the picnic area at the summit was a suitable replacement for the view we so hoped to find.




We hung around for a couple of hours and enjoyed the fog at the picnic shelters, picking raspberries, taking pictures of birds & berry bushes and kids frolicking around in the fog.

Then we headed down toward Craggy Gardens and on to other planned and unplanned parts of the day.

The surprises continued at Craggy when we discovered that there were still some late-season Huckleberries along the path to the trail shelter & lookout.

We saw a couple of butterflies - a Cloudless Sulphur and a Pintail Swallowtail, but alas no Monarchs. The rain from Tropical Storm Humberto as well as us being about 30 miles North of their migration route seemed to have derailed those efforts this trip.

But the fog was splendid.