The alarm went off well before dawn, and I'll be honest, for a second I wanted to ignore it. Then I remembered: sunrise, Parkway. It was time to get up.
I headed up to the East Fork Valley overlook on the Parkway, pulled on my gloves and down vest against the chill, and waited for the sun. When it came, it found the mountain laurel first: pale pink scattered all along the ridgeline, glowing in the golden hour light. Below the overlook, the valley opened up, ridge after ridge stacking off into the distance.
Cold hands, big views, blooming laurel everywhere I looked. Worth the alarm I didn't want to hear.
FIELD NOTES
These aren't the spring ephemerals — the trout lilies and trilliums down on the forest floor that I love and that are, sadly, mostly finished for the year. What's blooming across the ridgelines and the balds right now comes from the big native shrubs: mountain laurel first, then rhododendron and flame azalea climbing in behind it.
And they climb in more than one sense. Gaining a thousand feet of elevation is roughly like driving a couple hundred miles north, so the bloom doesn't arrive all at once. It works its way up the mountain over weeks. The laurel on the Parkway was early. Up on the high balds, the show was just getting started.
HIGHER UP
Catawba Rhododendrons along the trail
So last weekend I went and found that show. I hiked up to Grassy Ridge in the Roan Highlands, and the balds were doing something completely different. Bold swaths of fuchsia rhododendron and orange flame azalea thrown across grass gone deep green from all the rain we've had.
It was warmer than the Parkway, but windy, and the clouds were moving fast: fog rolling in, then tearing open to blue sky, then closing back over. That mix of fog and morning light can be some of the best conditions there are. It can also make you a little crazy. By the time I had the tripod set, the whole scene had already shifted. I waited. Conditions changed again. Reminded myself I had nowhere else to be. Watched the fog gently roll over the blooms, adding depth and drama to the saturated spring hues. Click. Click. Click. That fast, unpredictable light is exactly the thing that gets me up the mountain in the first place.
flame azaleas on a foggy morning on Roan
WHAT'S INSPIRING ME
I just started David duChemin's Light, Space & Time: Essays on Camera, Craft and Creativity, and I'm only halfway through, but it's already a book I want to underline on every page. It isn't about gear or settings. It's about how we see — and it's landed as equal parts inspiring and validating, like someone found words for things I've felt on the trail but never quite managed to say out loud.
This line really stuck with me:
"We see the world through a lens of thought; seeing is not a task of the eyes alone but also of the mind." — David duChemin
If you care about the why behind the work and not only the how, pick it up.
WHAT'S NEXT
I'm deep in prep for five weeks in Norway this summer: living and shooting out of a lodge near Voss, then a hut-to-hut hike before I fly home. I'll be writing to you from the road. More soon.
Photographer and marketer Tanya Triber writes from the trail to the train to her desk overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains: stories from the field, honest notes on the craft of making (and marketing) beautiful images, and the tools, places, and ideas worth your time. One thoughtful email a month, from Appalachia to the Arctic.
