South River

South River Overlook, on your left, has a V of a view down the valley of the South River, out to the Piedmont. The picnic ground is just past it, also on your left, with vault toilets, no water and no fires. The picnic ground's trail runs to South River Falls Observation Point, with eight hundred and fifty feet of climb. Plan on a hike for the waterfalls in this park. You won't see them from the road, and most of them drop over ledges of this same old lava. The South River is also known for spring wildflowers, down low along the water. This mountain used to feed people every fall. The rivers gave fish and shellfish in spring and summer, and the mountains were favored in the fall, when the chestnut and hickory forests dropped their harvests. Archeological evidence suggests that by about fifty-five hundred years ago, chestnut forests on the high Blue Ridge were strongly shaping where people camped. A single mature tree could produce six thousand nuts in a year. Think about a whole slope of them, and thousands of Octobers. Small bands moved through these hollows and passes for those nuts and for deer. The dark green rock of this ridge was part of the living too. People made small and large tools from the greenstone. Far later came people who stayed, and on a walk near here you can learn to read what they left. First a patch of young sweet birch. Then a depression in the hillside, outlined by leaf-covered rocks. Near it, a smaller one. Somebody a few generations back liked that spot, built a home there, and dug a root cellar. After he left, the birch seedlings claimed the opening, and the soil began its slow creep back toward the old shape of the slope. Once you know the shape of a lost home, you start to see it.