Part 3 of 41 NC State Parks
It’s that time of year where I start to experience what I’ve decided to call “The Fall Panic.” North Carolina has been ungodly hot all summer, to the point where it’s kind of miserable to be outside at all unless you’re submerged in water. Then October comes, and in between all the rain storms, the weather feels the way it’s supposed to. It’s beautiful out, the way that I remember summers of my childhood feeling like. So every single pretty day that happens, I want to do nothing but exist outside in nature.
This is also the time of year that the photography industry gets the busiest. So I’m working constantly, and get intensely and unreasonably sad every moment that I’m stuck inside working on a beautiful day. I’m always convinced that it’s going to be the last day of nice weather to ever exist, and I’m not taking advantage of it. I had written “Do Something Fun” on my calendar for the one Saturday I had free, and we chose an adventure that would keep us close to home for the day.
Occoneechee Mountain was this little inconspicuous state park listed in our passport book that we’d thought of as some sort of off-shoot from the Eno River State Park, near Durham. I didn’t really take the word “mountain” seriously, the Triangle area has lots of mild elevation change, but nothing too crazy. We thought.
We figured we’d do the 2 mile loop around the perimeter of the park, say we experienced it, get our stamp, and move on. It was a nice casual walk, lots of people with their kids and their dogs, a few nice boulders, pretty trees, and the river. There were also the ruins of an old wall that used to be part of a mill, and broken glass that had unearthed itself from a time where people used this land for the convenience of the river. Then the path seemed to split, where the left took you further along the river, and the right had something intriguing about it, calling our names at the top of a little hill.
We said “let’s just see what’s up there real quick.” It was this wall of crumbly white and pink rock that reminded me of petrified wood and mulch, so different than any of the boulders we saw along the way, different than any rock we’d ever come across, actually. Fascinated, I hadn’t even looked up to notice the spectacular view until Kevin directed my attention to the horizon. Holy shit, we were on a mountain.
I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves, but we had no idea this was here. We walked up a foot path on the crumbly rock that I don’t think is a designated trail, so due to legal reasons, I do not recommend it, but you could tell a lot of people had gone this way before us. We kept walking and found ourselves on the opposite side of a fence where people were gathered at the park’s official “overlook” spot. So we hopped the fence and took in the view like the rest of the tourists there.
