Happy New Year! And yippee! Our first snow of the winter season arrived on January 6, 2017, blanketing Pisgah National Forest around Asheville, including our neck of the woods at the Inn on Mill Creek with several inches of beauty. Stillness. Peaceful. Calming. Quiet. A great way to kick off the new year.
Hear a noise that sounds like a cat who’s gotten itself stuck in the branches of a tree? Well, if you hear that “Mew Mew” at the Inn on Mill Creek, it’s likely you’re listening to the Gray Catbird, our final pick of the year in our monthly Birding at the Inn series on the blog.
The end of the year and beginning of the next always brings out the DIY-ers in your innkeepers as we prepare our list of projects that are going to enhance your stay at the Inn on Mill Creek. Let’s see if your favorite room or garden space is on the list!
We’re big fans of the Eastern Screech Owl, a small raptor with a distinctive set of songs, none of which sounds like a screeching owl to us, but more like a bubbly, warbly, trilly, whinnying owl. So let’s meet our November 2016 selection in our 12 Months of Birding at the Inn blog series.
Coming to the Asheville area for the Thanksgiving holiday? We’ve got a handful of restaurants to share with you that will be open for dining on Turkey Day.
Finally(!), oak trees are changing en masse, with bold orange and rust-colored tones dominate the landscape at our elevation of 2,300 feet in the North Carolina mountains. This will be our final fall color report for 2016, and it’s been a beautiful fall season.
While peak color has ended in several areas above 3,500 feet, color remains at elevations below that, including the immediate Asheville area. We still have green leaves on our oak trees, in fact. Fall is going to linger on into November, yay!
Fall color has quickly worked its way down the mountainsides near Asheville, NC, adding some nice hues to the landscape at elevations between 2,000 and 3,000 feet heading into the last part of October. Some oranges and reds are lingering at higher elevations as well, but those areas above 3, 500 feet will be slipping past peak soon.
For our October 2016 pick in our 12 Months of Birding at the Inn blog series, we’ve selected a bird that, like us, loves to be in the woods. Since the Inn on Mill Creek B&B is situated inside Pisgah National Forest, keep an eye out for one of its year-round residents, the Cooper’s Hawk.
Oh la la, fall color is making a real splash at elevations above 3,500 feet in the mountains around Asheville, NC, this week, with peak color set to arrive at those elevations over the next few days. Meanwhile, here inside Pisgah National Forest at 2,300 feet, the fall foliage is starting to quickly dominate the landscape in some parts of the forest (as you can see from our cover photo of our labyrinth taken on Oct. 16).
