I was at Lazy Hiker brewpub in Sylva enjoying a meal with Moses Creek friends and talking about the neighborhood trash pick-up that was planned for the morrow — part of Jackson County’s “Cleaning Up the Mountains” campaign — when one of them mentioned another person who lives up the creek and predicted that we’d see his Michelob Ultra empties along the road. My friend had picked up after him more than once. 

Ready?” I shout over my shoulder up towards the pond. I am straddling the end of a long, white plastic pipe filled with water, its end taped shut with a wrap of 5-mil plastic.

I was hiking in the woods above our house at sunrise when coyotes began to howl behind me, and they howled and howled.

It takes something special to draw me out of Moses Creek — there’s so much here to see and do and write about.

The air was still and frosty when I started up the trail that November morning to watch Black Mountain light up in the sun.

If happiness can be found in simple things, then Moses Creek is the place to look. And often those things are seasonal, which adds the element of pleasurable anticipation to their arrival. 

I hiked up the ridge behind our house early one July morning and saw an eastern box turtle with a millipede in its mouth.