Celebrating completing the Tar Heel State!
Above are the Blue Ridge Parkway (also in Virginia), Cape Hatteras NS, Cape Lookout NS, Carl Sandburg Home NHS, Fort Raleigh NHS, Guilford Courthouse NMP, Moores Creek NB, and Wright Brothers N Memorial. Appalachian NST, Great Smoky Mountains NP (also in Tennessee), Overmountain Victory NHT, Trail of Tears NHT, Blue Ridge NHA, Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, and the Southern Campaign of the Revolution NHC are here too.
Once I get to a park, I like to explore, preferably without burning carbon. I have a folding e-bike (Gocycle G4) and a folding kayak (Oru Bay) that fit in my car (Tesla 3LR). I also bring an old packraft (Kokopelli) for remote camping trips. [To be clear, I receive zero compensation related to any products or services, neither referral bonuses nor discounts.] Despite some wonderful experiences, I would not recommend anyone buy any of these products, which all have drawbacks. Instead, pick what works best for you.
In many parks—especially for normal folk who don’t visit a hundred a year—the smart paddling choice is to rent. Often the only way to get a pickup / drop off is free with a rental. If you don’t paddle frequently, this ends up being relatively cheap, with less hassle and without maintenance. Many places are very concerned about invasive species, so careful cleaning and drying of your own equipment is time consuming too, not to mention fees for licenses and mussel stickers.
My folding kayak works well for shallow, flat water. I have a spray skirt for whitewater, but it’s best in swamps like Congaree and Big Thicket or in long relatively flat rivers like the Delaware or Big South Fork. Because it tracks straighter than my packraft would go, I can cover a lot of ground, frequently passing younger, fitter raft paddlers. It’s a bit expensive, tippy, and it doesn’t carry a lot of gear, so I use it for day trips. But folks renting $90 a day gear often say ‘good idea’ when they see me pull my kayak out of my car trunk, not realizing this is possible. Their guides look much less pleased with the idea.
I wish I had a lighter packraft, as mine is almost as heavy as my 25 pound folding kayak. But it packs up small and carries much more gear, so that’s the only option when the campsites are far from the car. The Kokopelli is also more appropriate for whitewater than my Oru.
Which brings me to my new inflatable boat (Takacat 260) with electric outboard (E-propulsion Spirit Plus). Charging my new outboard battery with a solar panel (above) is easy, and the battery floats. While heavier than I would like, this is the lightest combo I could find. With a solar panel, I can run this at low speed all day, even charging underway. I find it works best when carrying gear across open bays or trying to cover longer distances when time is short. One surprising benefit is that I can approach birds very quietly and closely both in the water and on rocks or shore, with a more stable platform for photos. If everyone switched to electric, the shores would be much quieter and cleaner.
Some Cherokee still live in the Blue Ridge Mountains, although the western North Carolina heritage area is more focused on waterfalls, sights along the Blue Ridge Parkway, bluegrass music, the Great Smoky Mountains, and more. The Cherokee, angry about their stolen lands, sided with the British during the Revolutionary War, while their Piedmont—central NC—neighbors, the Catawba, sided with the Patriots.
A particularly beautiful area in the US, the Blue Ridge includes the headwaters of the New River and the eastern states highest mountain (Mitchell), gorge (Linville) and waterfall (Whitewater Falls), plus the homes of interesting people, including the poet Carl Sandburg. There’s also rich diversity of species and frequent wildlife sightings. I love driving through, and I have to admit to bending my itinerary a few times to see something new here.
The Gullah Geechee area is much larger, stretching from North Carolina to Florida, including some great national park units, like Reconstruction Era, Cumberland Island and Timucuan Preserve. I heard Gullah spoken several times in the Carolinas, and there are numerous spots along the coast in four states to stop and learn about quilts, baskets, and other crafts. I love the food, always wanting to stop for boiled peanuts, country captain, perloo or other dishes. Gullah Geechee is a living culture, a unique community, an integral part of our history, and this distinct heritage is woven deep into our collective roots.
I understand that Gullah developed as a common dialect among slaves who had lived or passed through Angola, hence the name. A great public TV program on the English language taught me a bit about Gullah years ago. You already know some of the words that come from Gullah, like gumbo, jitters, and tote. The settlement on Cumberland and the plantation at Timucuan have clues about the Caribbean crops of indigo and sea cotton brought to grow in the barrier islands and about the enslaved people who worked the plantations. Not only did the communities survive, but they retained some of their African and Caribbean connections, linking us with living communities in other countries today.
10 trails cross the Midwest region, including 8 National Historic Trails linking multiple sites, plus the Ice Age and North Country National Scenic Trails which are individual park units. Only the Ice Age NST is unique to the Midwest, while the other trails continue on into other regions. Here’s a quick summary in case you are interested in exploring the trails in the region.
Decades later, I returned to see the southern live oaks that have haunted my dreams. Now I know the ferns that grow on the tops of their branches are called resurrection ferns, since they revive to a bright green after it rains. As a teen, I was told that humans could eat the Spanish Moss that hangs down from their branches, but returning as a tourist I was told that no humans ever did, only horses. I was too ashamed to admit I ate some long ago and thought it tasted OK.
Since I had been to the island before, I knew the only way to get to the north end on a day trip was to take a tour, so I joined the NPS recommended van tour and got to see everything from the settlements at the north to the Dungeness ruins in the south. The photo above is behind the Plum Orchard mansion, one of a few Carnegie family homes built on the island. The Carnegies were excluded by the other billionaires on neighboring Jekyll Island, so many of them settled here. Plum Orchard is beautiful and has interesting innovations, but plantation style troubles me. The center of the island is protected wilderness, and it feels like an ancient forest or overgrown jungle. Along the way we saw wild boar, wild horses, an alligator, several armadillos, and many beautiful birds.
I don’t always try to draw historic connections between parks, but bear with me this once. The natives here were related to the Timucuan. The Gullah Geechee (next week’s post) descendants of slaves are related to those all along the coast up to Reconstruction Era and down into Florida. The southern live oaks from this island were used to build the “iron sides” of the USS Constitution in Boston. Nathaniel Greene, commanding general of the Southern Campaign of the Revolutionary War, died shortly after retiring near Savannah Georgia, and his wife remarried and moved to Cumberland Island. There, Greene’s daughter Louisa cared for one of his cavalry officers, Henry Lee—veteran of Eutaw Springs—, before his death and burial at Dungeness mansion. Lee’s son was Robert E. Lee of Arlington House. And, if you want one more parks connection, the Carnegie’s innovative household DC power was likely overseen by Thomas Edison.
When I first arrived on the island several decades ago, I was invited as a guest of someone who knew the owners into a grand old home under the oaks for a meal, stories on the porch and an after dinner cognac, my first. As I recall, there was some discussion about whether the home would have to become an inn to survive, and we all agreed that it was important for beautiful old historic places to be preserved. (It later became the exclusive Greyfield Inn of Kennedy wedding fame). Folks need to come to places like Cumberland Island to try to imagine what it was like all those years ago, to walk along the barrier island beaches, to see the wild horses, to learn about dugout canoes, see photos of Primus and Amanda Mitchell who went from slaves to church and settlement founders, to learn about sea island cotton, and especially to feel the special old grandeur under those southern live oak trees.
Celebrating completing the Bluegrass State!
Abraham Lincoln Birthplace, Camp Nelson, Cumberland Gap, Mammoth Cave—a biosphere, national park & world heritage site—and Mill Springs are all above. Cumberland Gap is a multi-state park, but since I mostly hiked on the Kentucky side, I’m counting it here. Big South Fork and Fort Donelson parks are shared with Tennessee. Historic trails Lewis & Clark and Trail of Tears both travel in the state, and I recommend you do too.
Rational thinking, which has been engaged in debate about climate changing carbon pollution, imposes certain limitations that often hinder action. Scientists, who warned us of the climate crisis now upon us, rationally recommended reducing carbon emissions quickly to avoid irrevocably changing our climate from the one that sustained us since our ancestors were indistinguishable from chimpanzees. But the rational approach is also to conduct a risk assessment and cost benefit analysis of best options, despite the unprecedented threat to most living species.
The risks are difficult to quantify. Supercomputers forecast weekend weather with varying accuracy, and now we are modeling global climate changes and their effects on equally complex systems over the next century, without any way to check our work. Economics dramatically discounts distant future damages, so we underestimate the costly burden we are leaving for future generations. The scale of the solution is also daunting. Global energy production and use needs to transition quickly away from fossil fuels that have dominated energy for over 100 years. How could legislation pass quickly, broadly, effectively and globally enough to fix the problem? How much would it all cost?
Smart rational thinkers quickly determine that the unknown risks themselves argue for immediate action, that the costs of accelerating our energy transition are logically less than adapting every system to an increasingly hostile climate, and that the long-term benefit of green energy is a cheaper, cleaner, healthier and more abundant future.
But the default position of many mediocre rational thinkers is analysis paralysis, to balk at the scale of both the problem and the solution. When the full extent of a problem’s risks are unknown and the solution is too large, expensive and difficult to execute, then the rational choice appears to be inertia. This suits instinctual thinking too, as we have a natural bias to conserve our limited energy and avoid problems. Do nothing, at least until the problem becomes unavoidable. Then rational thinking is sadly put to use in its most common application, rationalizing a decision already made. Oh, maybe it won’t be so bad. The climate has changed before, and scientists often turn out to get things wrong. We have air conditioning. The excuses are endless.
Moral thinking requires honesty, courage and a bias to act. While rational thinking is selfish, moral thinking is selfless. Moral thinking requires us to do what is right, even at great personal cost. Moral thinking does not discount the value of the lives of our children, grandchildren or future generations. Rationally, we seek ways to benefit financially. Morally, we seek ways to help others. Rationally, we obey the law to avoid punishment. Morally, we know that it is wrong to kill, and carbon pollution is killing the vast diversity of life on earth. Rationally, we weigh the cost of the solution to us. Morally, we weigh humanity’s responsibility for causing the problem. For rational thinkers, the scale of the problem causes hesitancy. For moral thinkers, the global extinction-level-event scale of the climate crisis demands a response great enough to fix the problem we caused. While rational thinkers will not have enough information to make a decision until it is too late to do anything, moral thinkers demand we solve the problem now, before it becomes even worse. We know the scientists are correct, we must take up the burden placed upon our generation, and we must act before it is too late.
Our instincts also hold us back. We distrust that foreigners will cooperate. We look for ways to shift the burden onto others. We are lazy and prone to procrastinate with wishful thinking. ‘Maybe someone somewhere will somehow solve it someday’. Moral thinking has a long history confronting such human weaknesses. An ancient Chinese proverb says that “you can’t put out a fire nearby with distant water”, meaning fix the problem now with what you have on hand, before it becomes worse.
The climate crisis can be depressing and demotivating. But moral thinking teaches us not to give up in adversity and to stand strong for a just cause, despite public apathy or disapproval. Courage is created by the moral certainty of righteousness.
”We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair;
— 2 Corinthians 4:8-9 KJV
Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed;”
Proverbs teaches us that the wicked stay down when they stumble in calamity, “though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again”. The climate crisis is real, our fault, here now, everywhere, worsening, and is catastrophically consequential, so we must act now.
For World Ocean Day this past June 8th, my sister and I watched the premiere of David Attenborough’s Ocean at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford. Although I learned even more about the scale of environmental devastation we are wreaking in our oceans, Attenborough persuasively argued that our positive conservation-oriented actions can still make a difference. He used examples of how marine sanctuaries like the Channel Islands can recover quickly, bringing broad, positive spillover effects far beyond their boundaries, as life finds a way to try to survive. The widespread bleaching of coral reefs can be slowed and mitigated when reefs are protected from overfishing, as healthier ecosystems are more resilient, buying precious time and hope for some species.
We are hardly aware of and barely comprehend all the diversity of life on Earth, yet our actions will either save them or extinguish them forever. What right do we have to end species we don’t even know? Why do we do so little, when we must do so much, to fix what we have already done? How can we justify our inaction to ourselves and to future generations? What comfort is there in a walk through a forest, when we know that it will soon burn, because of the carbon cars we continue to drive? If you claim to love nature, animals, flowers, food, beer, wine, coffee, outdoor sports, fishing, and all the seasons that we enjoy, then you should be taking carbon-reducing action now to protect what you love for the future, or you are a hypocrite.
Maybe we won’t solve the whole problem in time to prevent the worst damage, but we won’t solve anything with a bad attitude. We can improve the odds of survival for species even with small acts. Anyone reading these words is living in humanity’s most perilous time for life on earth. What you choose to do or not do may help determine which forms of life will be on earth ages from now. Act on your carbon choices with the care and consideration deserved, as you carry the future of life on earth in your hands. Morally, we have no choice.
These are two obscure heritage areas in the Carolinas, but none of the state or national park employees I spoke with had heard of either. While the South Carolina NHC has historic sites, plantations and gardens, the parks included—like Pinckney, Sumter, and Overmountain Victory—are unrelated. And while the Revolution NHC includes Moores Creek, it excludes many other important battles in the Carolinas and neighboring states. Don’t waste time following these confusing corridors, but instead start with an overview at historic Camden.
Here’s the story of the Revolutionary Campaign in the southeast, focusing on national sites and affiliates. Virginians Henry, Jefferson and Washington led their colony into rebellion, in concert with the north. Virginia colonial governor Lord Dunmore called in troops, organized loyalists and even formed a regiment of liberated slaves. Echoing Bunker Hill, Patriot militia fought well at Great Bridge in 1775, prompting Dunmore to order the shelling of Norfolk Virginia. Echoing Concord, the Patriots cut down a broadsword charge at Moores Creek North Carolina in 1776. And at the end of 1778, the Patriots took Savannah, followed up with a victory at Kettle Creek Georgia in early 1779.
But in May of 1779, the British sacked Portsmouth in Virginia, kicking off their southern campaign in earnest. In late 1779, the British returned to Savannah, capturing it after a siege. In early 1780, they took Charleston SC after another siege. Next, they turned their attention inland, hoping to sway more loyalists, keep their large southern colonies, and then take the fight back to the northeast. In 1780 the British fought over a dozen battles around Charleston and Camden (see Cornwallis’ HQ below) in South Carolina, consolidating their control over the colony.
But the British were ruthless in the south, revoking pardons, burning homes & farms, and imprisoning or hanging those who wouldn’t sign loyalty oaths. The most infamous example happened in May 1780 at Waxhaws—named after a local tribe—, when Banistre Tarleton massacred Patriots, inspiring further rebellion. Popular resentment against the tyrannical British grew, especially among the Scots-Irish settlers. After Gates lost his leadership position after failing at Camden, Nathaniel Greene began a much more effective guerrilla campaign in the back country.
The Patriots didn’t win all their battles, but many of the British victories were Pyrrhic, causing them to cede territory even after eking out technical victories. The back country belonged to the Patriots, especially when reinforcements crossed the Appalachian Mountains on the Overmountain Victory Trail. The Patriots won at Kings Mountain in late 1780, then again at Cowpens in January 1781.
Even though the British subsequently won at Petersburg VA, Ninety-Six in SC, and at Guilford Courthouse NC, clearly, they were not winning the broader campaign. Cornwallis brought his troops north to Virginia. After a close battle near Camden, the remainder of the British forces retreated for Charleston, with the last battle in the southeast fought at Eutaw Springs in September 1781. The denouement was set for Yorktown.
5 historic trails link multiple sites in the region, and 3 scenic trails are park units. Here’s a quick summary in case you are interested in exploring the trails in the region.
Historic trails
Scenic trails
This was one of the final battles for inland South Carolina, in September 1781. Nathaniel Greene’s Patriots were battle hardened and his forces included Francis Marion, Andrew Pickens, and William Washington. The British were equally disciplined veterans. What unfolded was a brutal battle between evenly matched sides that descended into hand-to-hand combat. Finally, the British line broke, and the Patriots entered their encampment.
While it seemed that the day was won, the British formed a defensible position between a stout brick house still marked by a garden gate and the Santee River, now Lake Marion behind the trees below. Stymied, Greene was forced to back off and wait. Both sides claimed victory—technically the British held the field at the end—, but clearly it was a strategic loss for the British, who lost more troops, were forced to withdraw to Charleston and never again advanced in the back country.
Zero Carbon Travel 