Storyteller's Rock

  We went to North Carolina for our 20th Anniversary, back to the same Inn we'd stayed at for our honeymoon.  We had a lovely time.  While we were there we got in some hiking.  One trail, the Nuwati Trial, on the Blue Ridge Parkway, lead up to a place called Storyteller's Rock.  I'm a geologist, let's go see the rock.  Now, I was expecting a big rock, but this was more then I had imagined.  

  Storyteller's Rock sits at the end of a 1.6 mile trail up a gentle mountain valley.   The trail was well marked and well traveled.  It crossed many a spring meltwater stream, tunneled through mountain laurel groves and crossed forest floors covered in princess pine.  The end of the trial was one of the steeper parts, but terminated at a campsite at the foot of a large outcrop, Storytellers Rock. 

  Standing approximately 40 feet, at best guess, above the ground on the downhill side, Storyteller's Rock has been split along an old faults that runs through it.  It was hard to tell without a fresh surface exactly what Storyteller's Rock was made of. and while the base had metamorphic characteristics, the top looked igneous, if not granitic.  

  The trail signs kept indicating a "view" and so harkening back to my younger geological days, I wandered through a large crack in the rock and started climbing.  While the slope behind the outcrop was steep, it was well vegetated, and to the best of my best "billy goat" nature, I scrambled up the slope and found my way to the top of the rock, with Edward pulling up the rear.  

  To my delight, there was the view, looking back across the valley we'd just climbed.  But there was more.  Across the top of this part of the rock, several parallel gouges scored the surface.  There is only one thing these could be.  Glacial striations.

  A glacial striation is a grove cut in the surface of a rock by another rock embedded bottom of the glacier's ice as it moves downhill.  They are commonly found on mountain tops in areas that were glaciated during the last ice age.  But we were in western North Carolina. The continental glacier did not reach this far south, and we were by no means at the top of the mountain.  

  The striations also indicate the direction that part of the glacier was moving.  Behind us the rose part of Grandfather Mountain.  It was no stretch to imagine an alpine glacier having formed above us, then flowed down into the valley below.  Here was proof of that glacier existence.  

  After we got back home I did a search online.  In 1973, L.A Raymond and J.O Berkland documented "glacial polish, grooves, and striations" at the headwaters of Boone's Fork.  They surmised that the glaciation occurred during the Pleistocene.  Confirmation.

  I know that I am not the first to see those long lost traces of a glacier that had passed across the top of that of Storyteller's Rock, possibly a little as 12,000 years ago.  My fingers will not be the last to trace the smooth grooves and look down the valley that had, in part, been carved by the glaciers passage.  Today that valley bears more of the v-shape indicative of being carved by countless streams flowing down it's heart.  But, these marks, hidden under the sun, tell a story of something greater that passed this way, leaving only a few telltale cravings behind, a story that can be heard, if only you know what to "listen" for.