A walk across Stokes County

I have friends editing the book at the moment, so–to stretch my legs–I took two days to hike the 28-mile Sauratown Trail that spans across Stokes County, North Carolina. I started at Pilot Mountain in Surry County in the west and finished in Hanging Rock State Park in the east.

One of the most iconic features of all of North Carolina is Pilot Mountain, a tree-topped teat jutting from the round udder of the Piedmont. The mountain is a 2,421-foot tall “metamorphic quartzite monadnock,” also referred to as “Mount Pilot” in The Andy Griffith Show, which was set in the fictional town of Mayberry.

Stokes County, abutting the southern border of Virginia, is home to 47,401 residents who live in small villages and along country roads. The county formed in 1789, and was named after a Revolutionary War captain, John Stokes. For decades, the county residents were involved in the mining, iron-making, and tobacco-farming industries, but around 1850, Stokes began to develop into a “resort town.” Affluent visitors from Winston-Salem would travel to Stokes to stay at one of three grandiose, Shining-like hotels nestled in the Sauratown Mountains, where European orchestras would entertain.

The hotels burnt down long ago, and Stokes, today–without a flagship industry–seems to be suffering from a mild identity crisis. Much of the rolling farmland has gone fallow, and the old barns–careening green-bearded Pisas–have been left to rot. There are hideous chain restaurants in the towns, ruthless crystal meth murders, and obese kids who have calves as meaty and round as roast chickens. The place just feels old and forgotten, but that’s not entirely a bad thing. There is a silver lining to neglect and disinterest. The woods still grow tall and green, the streams run wild and clear, and the farmland is some of the most glorious scenery I’ve ever set eyes on.

While most of the Sauratown Trail goes through forest, a great deal of it leads the hiker over private farmland. While there are, no doubt, benefits to immersing yourself in wild man-less, machine-less country for days or weeks on end, leaving the trees for a short sojourn on bucolic farmland is always a treat for the eyes. It is just one of those timeless complementary combinations of pleasure: wine and cheese, milk and cereal, beer and pretzels; if there is anything that makes you want to plod on, it’s a variegated landscape.

A good portion of the trail takes the hiker down backwoods country roads.

Pine and poplar forest.

Lots of holly, mountain laurel, and rhododendrons in some of the lower, shadier elevations.

Hanging Rock is in the distance.

The cave below is called “Torey’s Den.” During the Revolutionary War, there were several skirmishes in the area between the American patriots (called the Whigs) and the British loyalists (called the Tories). In one such skirmish, a gang of Tories, who had been removed from their land, stole provisions from (and allegedly the daughter of) Colonel Martin, a Whig leader. About 100 Tories were hiding in this cave. None escaped Colonel Martin’s wrath.

How to make shiitake mushroom logs

Last year, I inoculated two oak trees with shitake mushroom spawn. For the longest time I thought I didn’t do it correctly because the logs, after almost a year, had yet to bear any mushrooms.

That all changed last month when they started producing. We’ve stir-fried a couple of them and they were delicious.

Please don’t consider the video “expert advice,” as those were just my first logs. We bought our spawns from Maine. You can find additional advice here.

New Look

I figured it was about time that I spruced up the old blog. If just for the different colors, I liked the above picture (that’s Duke Chapel in the background), but I never liked the name “The Spartan Student.” I thought it was a touch too self-promotional and I was always a little embarrassed by the whole thing. Plus, I haven’t been “poor” or “desperate” for a long time. And I’m more frequently pitching articles to magazines, so I desired a more professional look. The old look had to go.

I guess I need some sort of new title for this blog because my Duke years are over and my life is headed in a new direction. What that direction is, I’m not exactly sure, which is why I’m struggling to think of the proper words to capture the blog’s themes. (The new picture above is me standing on an unnamed mountain in the Brooks Range next to Walker Lake. It was taken by my ranger-friend, Adam.)

A couple other housekeeping notes:

– My new domain name is www.kenilgunas.com. You can access the blog by using this new address, or my old one (spartanstudent.blogspot.com). (PS: If you’re thinking of starting a blog, I can’t say enough good things about Blogger/Blogspot; they’ve really made it easy for the average person to make a decent looking website. Plus, the new domain name will only cost me $10/year.)

– I liked the narrow text columns I had in the old blog template (because I thought it made for some easy-on-the-eyes reading), but these new wider columns permit me to post really big pictures, which is a feature I’m excited about. If there’s anything about my new format that you find disagreeable, please email me or post a comment and I’ll see what I can do.

– In an effort to post more than once a week (which is a rate I clearly haven’t been able to maintain lately), I think I might do a “weekly quote” post. I have 162 single-spaced pages of interesting quotes/passages I’ve written down over the years–many of which aren’t to be found on the Internet. I thought such a weekly post would be an easy way for me to bring a little more activity to this blog; my life hasn’t been incredibly blog-post-worthy of late because I’ve been doing little more than book-editing for the past many months. Perhaps I need to find new ways to compensate.

– Anyway, thanks again for your readership. The comments and emails and well wishes are always encouraging. I never would have thought that I’d still be “blogging” after three years, but it’s been incredibly fulfilling.