Mountaintop Writing Retreat

I just returned from a 32-hour solo mountaintop writing and hiking retreat. I left our 3000’ valley as April’s first thunderstorms, and first real rain in 6 weeks, flushed the forest with late-spring green. When I arrived at my 6000’ basecamp, spring was just beginning. On the mountain, I bedded down as the hermit thrush sang his evensong in the dusky mist and woke to his haunting harmony in the misty dawn. The rest of the day was filled with cheerful songs of black-throated greens, Canada warblers and winter wrens, the chittering of juncoes and golden-crowned kinglets, beeping of red-breasted nuthatches, and the fearsome shrills of broad-winged hawks and peregrine falcons (a first for me!).

Thick haircap and stairstep mosses line the cloud forest’s dense stands of fir. By forcing moist air currents into cooler elevations, the mountains make gauzy clouds that gently soak these mosses on a near-daily basis. At lunchtime, I climbed a rock face I’d been eying for a year and a half. The mountain’s orography had also done this. In late September 2024, the air mass from the Gulf was uncommonly sodden and the ridgeline escalated it into a violent deluge. The inundation caused this slope to fail, shrugging off the moss and hundred-year-old spruce trees, and exposing bedrock. These mountains rose long ago – too slowly to be perceptible even if we had been here then. When they were young they towered like the Himalayas. Their loftiness, like Icarus, is their undoing; mountains into riverbeds under our watch. 

Left to right: clouds make a cloud forest; moss-lined fir stand; wakerobin Trillium; fiddleheads of mountain wood fern; most of the common mountaintop birds could be heard all at once from the slide; junco nest with eggs; looking up the fresh rockface; thanks, Merlin!; looking down the rock face and towards the Blacks (Celo Knob to Mt Mitchell).