Brevard

The white squirrels are real. Brevard, North Carolina, has a population of white squirrels — leucistic Eastern gray squirrels, genetically distinct from albino, with dark eyes and white fur — that roam the downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods with the confidence of animals that have been protected by local ordinance since 1986. They are startling the first time you see one, particularly if you are accustomed to gray squirrels blending into bark. A white squirrel on a green lawn in October light is a flag planted for attention, and it gets it. I watched one cross Main Street on my first morning in town, and a pickup truck stopped to let it pass, which told me something about Brevard’s priorities.

What brought me, though, was the waterfalls. The Pisgah National Forest, which begins immediately outside town, contains more than two hundred named waterfalls within a compact area of mountain terrain so saturated with rainfall — averaging ninety inches per year in the higher elevations — that water seems to fall out of every hillside. Looking Glass Falls is the famous one: a sixty-foot curtain of water visible from the road, wide enough to walk behind, with a pool at the base where children jump from the rocks in summer and which runs clear jade-green in fall. I arrived at seven-thirty in the morning before the parking area filled and had it to myself for twenty minutes, which was enough time to understand why it has been drawing people here since the nineteenth century.

Sliding Rock is something else entirely: a natural water slide, sixty feet of smooth water-polished granite angled at a gradient steep enough to send you into the plunge pool at the bottom at genuine speed. The Forest Service operates it as a day-use area; you pay a few dollars, you wear appropriate swimwear, you sit at the top and push off and the cold water — always cold, even in August — hits you all at once and then you are in the pool, spluttering, and the people waiting at the top are already cheering. I am thirty-four years old. I went down four times.

The Davidson River, which runs through the campground at the heart of Pisgah Forest, is one of the finest trout streams in the southern Appalachians, and the stretch through the forest is managed as catch-and-release, which means the fish are there in good numbers and in good size. I watched a fly fisherman work a pool below the Davidson River Campground for an hour one evening, his casts landing with that particular soft precision that fly fishing develops in people who have been doing it for decades, and the light coming through the hemlocks was golden and the fish were rising to whatever he was throwing and I thought: this is what people mean when they talk about the mountains as a way of life.

Downtown Brevard is small enough to cover on foot in half an afternoon, with a main street of galleries and outfitters and the Square Root restaurant, where the kitchen takes the Appalachian pantry seriously — trout from local farms, sourwood honey, dried beans in preparations that have been cooking in the mountains since before anyone wrote them down. The Brevard Music Center runs a summer festival that brings serious classical musicians into a mountain town of eight thousand, and the outdoor pavilion concerts on summer evenings, with the ridge visible above the treeline, have an improbability that makes them more beautiful than they would be elsewhere.

When to go: May and June for the highest waterfall flows — the spring rains fill everything. Late September and October for fall color and cooler air, which makes hiking to the farther waterfalls genuinely pleasant. July and August are family summer season, best for Sliding Rock and Davidson River swimming but crowded. The waterfalls are worth seeing in any season; in winter, ice forms on the cliff faces around Looking Glass Falls and the forest is nearly empty.