Back at The Swag

 This week Trish and I are back at The Swag, the beautiful country inn outside my home town of Waynesville where I tell stories and we lead hikes two or three weeks each year.

The Swag property abuts the Great Smoky National Park boundary along the Cataloochee Divide and the Cataloochee Divide trail just inside the Park is a trail that I started hiking about sixty-five years ago.  The trail goes through a wonderland of trees and wildflowers and each day’s hike is filled with beautiful natural discoveries.

Most of the trilliums have finished blooming by now, but we discovered a whole hillside filled with the late-blooming Vesey’s Trillium on our first hike.

Later on we came across this lovely and rare pink lady slipper wild orchid.  Some of our hikers sometimes ask me whether I took all of this beauty for granted growing up here.  No...in all of my childhood and growing years I was never anything but amazed at the beauty and wonder of these mountains.  This is perhaps because my parents so loved, appreciated, and taught me about so many of the things that surrounded my childhood.

I learned early on that individual people may own the land, but we all own the landscape forever!