Welcome to our seventh and final weekly Fall Color Report for the North Carolina Mountains around Asheville, Black Mountain, and Old Fort. It makes us a little bit sad to know that this is our last report on fall foliage for the year, but we still have some color on the trees and before we know it, spring will be here. Guess we do have to get through winter first. But until then…
| Time for color to come out at our elevation |
Late October brings us to Week 5 of our Fall Color Reports for the North Carolina Mountains near Black Mountain, Asheville and Old Fort. Finally! Mother Nature has turned up the color at our elevation of 2,300 feet inside Pisgah National Forest, three miles east of Black Mountain.
While we’re not quite ready to break out our Christmas decorations and sing carols, we’re definitely looking forward to 2013 Christmas at Biltmore beginning November 2, because, well, they’ve known how to do a spectacular Christmas celebration ever since George Washington Vanderbilt opened his Asheville home to family and friends on Christmas Eve of 1895.
This year at Biltmore Estate in Asheville, the tulips and azaleas are battling it out for everyone’s attention! We have never been to Biltmore — located 20 minutes from the Inn on Mill Creek — when the azaleas and tulips were in full bloom at the same time. Just, wow.
April is a great time to visit Biltmore Estate in Asheville if you love flowering trees and shrubs. As promised to our Facebook fans, here are some photos we took on April 12, just before the 80,000 tulips stole the show…enjoy!
| Azaleas at Biltmore bloom in late April / early May |
Azaleas. Do you like them? If so, then you should check out the thousands of amazing azaleas at Biltmore Estate in nearby Asheville, NC, during late April / early May. They have an entire garden — at 15 acres, it’s more like a park — dedicated to this lovely spring-blooming shrub.
Happy New Year! We hope you’re off to a great start in 2013. Have you made any resolutions? Perhaps you’ve resolved not to make resolutions! But if you have made some, may we suggest adding the resolution to relax more and stress less. We have lots of ways you can accomplish that by coming to the mountains of Western North Carolina, and we’ll be sharing those with you this year.
| Standing on the South Terrace looking toward the Library Terrace |
Early November in the mountains of Western North Carolina can be, in a word, temperamental. Different elevations can see different weather. For example, the higher elevations such as Mt. Mitchell (highest peak in the eastern United States) saw several inches of snow earlier this week! We had cool temps with some rain and even some snow flurries at our elevation the first part of the week, which was the earliest we remember it snowing since we arrived in 2007.
| [Photo Credit: Biltmore] |
When we mention to guests that Biltmore Estate in Asheville decks its halls with bows of holly for the Christmas season, we’re talking 175,000 square feet of halls, living rooms and dining rooms and gathering rooms, bedrooms and more, completely decked out in Christmas grandeur. When the annual tree raising ceremony at Biltmore Estate happens (at 10am on November 1 this year), it’s a 35-foot Christmas tree for the seven-story banquet hall inside Biltmore House, which also happens to have a massive fireplace that’s actually three fireplaces in one. Santa definitely has his choice of chimneys to come down at Biltmore — there are 65 fireplaces in total.
