by Marcus Wohlsen

Blue Ridge Backcountry Groves

The thermometer read 50 degrees that February morning, but the wan sun broke through the clouds only sometimes. Snow still lay on the north side of the hill. In the half-light, you could sense winter creeping in, ready to go another round.

Larry wanted to show Kim and me a grove. He’d been reading a book on Albemarle County, Virginia, home to Charlottesville and a part of the Blue Ridge steeped in the mythology of Jefferson and the birth of America. The author, Avery Chenoweth, describes groves as a defining feature of the Albemarle landscape, a place where field and forest meet, the English settlers’ homage to their homeland, where the ancient Celts revered certain groves as sacred.

Though he hikes almost every day, Larry doesn’t go in much for that woo-woo nature worship vibe that sometimes finds its way into the Asheville water supply. He’s a landscape painter with a rigorous eye for the interplay of light and natural forms and finds the Blue Ridge rarely fails to inspire. But when he read about groves, Larry had a vision: a new way of seeing the forests he loves.

Ever mindful of the landscape, it didn’t take him long to rattle off more than a dozen groves he’s discovered in western North Carolina over the past few years. Like the one near the fire tower on Frying Pan Mountain.

“If you go up the back way, at the very top of that little node, there’s a small grove of red spruce that’s like a hut,” he says. “It’s so wonderful to go in when it’s all covered with rime ice-a dark world with blue and white coming through.”

Then there’s the grove of virgin rhododendron near Whitewater Falls (“as big as apple trees”). Or the ancient oaks on Yellow Mountain just off the AT. On High Top in Shining Rock, Larry takes special pride in the grove of bigtooth aspen he found. He also loves to tell about the larch grove he stumbled across one day in a meadow down off the road up to Mount Mitchell. A non-native species from Japan, the larches mark the last ghostly traces of settlers on land now reclaimed by the mountain wilderness.

Today as we round a switchback on the main trail up Looking Glass Rock, we veer into the brush and head cross-country. We head across the face of a densely treed slope toward a rise strewn with granite boulders the size of houses. Down through a slippery gully and around a moss-covered ledge, we emerge at the top of a knoll, ringed by eastern hemlock that have seen more winters come and go than anyone alive today: our grove.

Beneath the trees, there’s just rocks and flat ground. Even though the spindly hemlock boughs don’t provide any real shelter, you still get a feeling of enclosure as you stand in their midst-a feeling of separateness from the surrounding forest, a coziness that encourages you to linger.

As we sit, Larry’s dog, Eubie, chases squirrels up a tree. The sun peaks out again. I take off my jacket. We talk about the normal random stuff hikers talk about-why Larry avoids green in his paintings, when buttons were invented, the make-believe world dogs live in most of the time. When we get back to town, we go get some coffee. As the sun begins to set, it still hasn’t snowed.

Marcus Wohlsen is senior editor of Blue Ridge Outdoors. He can be reached at marcus@blueridgeoutdoors.com.