One of the most beautiful drives in America has to be the Blue Ridge Parkway stretching from the Shenandoah Valley 469 miles all the way to the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina. During the peak photography seasons of Spring and Autumn, it would take more than week to explore the entire parkway without exhausting the possibilities that lie before you. Making a blog post of the Appalachian Region or even the entire parkway is too arduous a task since there are too many opportunities to highlight. Therefore, this post will be the first of many on the parkway that I will narrow specifically to spring bloom in the Roan Mountain region, surprisingly not even attached to the Blue Ridge Parkway, but straddling the border between North Carolina and Tennessee south of Johnson City. Future blogposts may include the Mabry Mill in Virginia or other sections of the parkway in the south and in different seasons. Below are images taken in the summer more than a decade ago.
To begin, I must mention that one can take beautiful photographs of the overlapping distant ridges during any season and especially the warm months with leaves on the trees. Rocks, boulders, nearby foliage, and other subjects can make compelling foreground elements in the photographs you take. During sunrise and sunset, the light displays varying warm hues and shades of receding landforms that look spectacular when time is taken to compose the image. The shots above are some Blue Ridge Parkway shots in Virginia taken in late August. With any landscape image taken at sunrise or sunset, your photograph’s impact will surely depend on the fortune of chance cloud displays can turn a good picture into a prize winner.
Even though these photographs serve as windows into the rumbled topography of the Appalachian region, a region reminiscent of our country colonial outdoor heritage, I find that to complete these scenes there needs to be more. Enter the seasonal highlights. Peak color in autumn dazzles the eye with warm collages of bold color that elevate the composition to a new level. I will explore this in future posts. In spring, however, flowery accents and foregrounds are more subtle. Yet, these subtleties are what I look for to complete my scene when I plan an expedition. Catawba Rhododendrons are my favorites in this region, which bloom in these highlands sometime from mid to late June. There are many locations to find them in bloom along the parkway One sure bet, and maybe the most spectacular, are the balds at Roan Mountain; Grassy Ridge Bald, Jane Bald, and Round Top are some of the best spots on the planet to capture the pink blooms preceding green and blue distant mountainous terrain.
To get to the balds, start from Carver Gap and hike along a portion of the Appalachian trail, not a very difficult hike to make your way to Jane Bald. Jane is best at sunset but Grassy Ridge makes wonderful sunrise pictures. Look for the in-bloom Rhododendrons and the direction of the light to guide your selection.
Catawba Rhododendrons are my favorites but there are some nice looking Azalea (orange) bushes up at the first turn of Grassy Ridge that make interesting foreground details. Enjoy Roan Mountain and let me know what your find!
