Off to Owl’s Roost

Our friends Jan and Rex invited us to come to the mountains for the weekend. There is no better place to spend the weekend than Owl’s Roost in Todd, NC. There certainly are no better hosts.

Jan encouraged me to get here as early as possible, which meant in day light hours, because the mountain road, which is the last twenty minutes of a three hour drive, was next to impossible when the road is covered in leaves. As I have been here a few times I understood why she was saying this. The “road” is pioneer like. Meaning there can be sharp drop offs on either side and heaven forbid you have another car, or worse a truck, coming at you. Even if you are driving with the mountain on your side, the gully between the mountain and the road made by rain runoff is between three and six feet deep. If you are driving on the non-mountain side the drop off is closer to 30 to 600 feet.

Tropical storm Nichole had some serious rain bands coming through North Carolina today. There was a lot of rain this morning, but the sky was blue when we left Durham. It only took until Greensboro before the rain started again. I would say there were only about 25 minutes of scary driving, when the rain was so hard that my fastest or fast wipers made no difference. Thankfully Russ and Shay were asleep in the back of the car for that part.

We got to the continental divide and I knew that the turn off for Todd was not much further. Leaving the highway, we traveled the last twenty miles on small winding country roads, which took forty five minutes. A good portion of that trip we were on the Todd railroad grade road which ran right beside the South fork of the New River. The New river is supposedly the oldest river in North America. I am not sure who is verifying the birthday’s of rivers, but that is the claim the New river makes. (I do think if it were named the new river that might mean there was an old river, but I’m not going to argue.)

The storm had caused the New river to flood over it’s banks. As we drove along looking at how far the breach of the river had gone I was getting worried that we might come to a point where the river covered the road. I had been worried about leaves covering the road and had not considered the worse water emergency. We were really out in the middle of no where so when I saw a car coming towards us I took that as a good sign that the road was not washed out ahead.

After about six miles the road finally split from the river as the river made a big bend. Now I felt like we were safe, until we came to the much smaller river that flows under the bridge to get into Jan and Rex’s neighborhood. Thankfully that creek, now more like a river had not crossed the bridge.

We made it up the mountain, I think with fewer leaves, thanks to the big rain washing them off the gravel road. We arrived safe and sound at Owl’s Roost with a few minutes of daylight to spare. Let’s hope that’s the biggest adventure of the weekend.