Rime and faux snow on a sacrificial mountain

From Christmas into the New Year, North Carolina mountains were weathery, especially at 5000 ft, as conditions even a few hundred feet lower were less interesting. New Year's Eve and Day were a sun sandwich between blowing cloud, thickest fog, gusty wind, rain and calm (perfectly paired for shooting only hours before blizzard conditions), and finally, on our last night, another variation on the wind-and-white theme, actual snow - but only on mountain tops. One night, rime, which turns out to be gnarlier than hoar frost, formed as forecast. I found it defined as "an accumulation of granular ice tufts on the windward side of exposed objects that is formed from supercooled fog or cloud and built out directly against the wind." And so it was. 

Sugar Mountain developments include a ski resort and various types of second homes (maybe someone lives here full time, can't say). Surmounting one of the mountain's peaks, though not actually the tallest, is Sugar Top, aka as the Cement Factory by those who excoriate it's ubiquitous presence, visible for miles from many vantage points. Whatever you call it, it's the shockingly incongruous icing on an already built-out cake. Without actual snow there is plenty of skiing and tubing on the pumped out stuff as conditions permit.

Grandfather snoozes above. 

I've fallen in love with the music on great radio stations (by happy luck a resolution was to put music back in my life in '14), the people and their speech, the weather, green forest coves with richest botanical diversity explored by more or less intrepid French, American, and Scots botanists Michaud, Gray, Bartram and Fraser - and the hundreds of miles of trails within spitting distance. This time we concentrated on the 13.5 mile Tanawha trail paralleling the Blue Ridge Parkway along its so called "missing link" the dramatic, high-tech stretch cantilevered from Grandfather Mountain...Next up (and shot with "bigger" camera.)