Friends in High Places

“You were right,” I say to Fran in between steady uphill breaths. “Pisgah after some rain is magical.”

It’s still morning when we’ve already logged six hours on trail. We’re deep in the thick of the woods where the dawn sunlight sparkle still lingers softly on delicate galax petals. Rhododendron tunnels have shed their last blooms, carpeting the forest ground with hues of pink and ivory, a memory of the lushness of spring fresh past its peak. A step in these highlands is moist, full of life, like Earth itself reached out to the sky and the heavens responded with a bounty of water. This is the land of waterfalls, where the greens are greenest and a handful of soil will have more life than you could fathom. Sometimes when you’re lucky, time in the thick of the rainforest expands, then stops and makes you appreciate all you miss chasing epic panoramas. The green tunnels train your eyes to capture details—a nectar-drunken bumblebee napping on its own buffet, the balayage hues of a singular flower, translucent mycelial caps pushing through soft forest floor. We’re not even halfway into our single-day Art Loeb thru-hike and the forest has shown us so much beyond the landscape views of the southern Blue Ridge. In Pisgah, there is no shortage of wonder.

Western North Carolina is one of the premier outdoor recreation hotspots on the East Coast. You can hike segments of the Appalachian Trail, visit the Great Smoky Mountains, the busiest National Park of of the country, backpack in the Linville Gorge or thru-hike the Art Loeb Trail, camp alongside the Blue Ridge Parkway, climb Looking Glass Rock, descend Kitsuma, Heartbreak, Ridgeline, or any of the other 5-star downhill mountain bike trails, whitewater kayak down the Nantahala. There’s even a few ski resorts, although the area has mild winters that make most outdoor activities four-season options. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more biodiverse ecosystem within hours of multiple metropolitan areas of the country, which is why it attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists to its multiple offerings year-round. At least a few thousand of them end up deciding they want to come back for a longer time, maybe forever. As the largest city in the area, Asheville absorbs many of those transplants, but others find small mountain towns that meet their ultimate need for a slower life.

The exact details of how some of my friends and I met is a hazy memory for most of us, but I clearly remember first chatting up with Sam on one of the weekly Cognative group rides at Dupont State Forest last summer.

“Did you respond to one of my Asheville Facebook group posts once?” she asked me, and as I remembered the cold message I felt a rush of embarrassment, my desire for making friends in this new place I know no one suddenly exposed.

“Oh yeah, I think I did. I’ve been trying to meet people to ride with. I’m used to riding alone but out here I think I prefer company,” I offered with hesitance.

Sam is spunky and cheery, immediately likeable, with a love for people and movement alike. A physical therapist originally from Ohio, she moved to the outskirts of Asheville with a work contract and the dream of working hard and playing harder outdoors. We warm up to each other quickly, and by the end of the ride she says she looked forward to introducing me to some of her friends at the upcoming Dirt Skrrts monthly ride. I felt a glimmer of hope.

I met Heather on a hot and humid August morning on the slopes of Cherokee’s Fire Mountain. She’s a menace on a mountain bike, a strong climber with a calm demeanor on any downhill. We shared a few words during the ride but it wasn’t until the aprés that we were formally introduced by Sam. I learned she’s from upstate New York, spent years in Colorado, and recently got through the trifecta of life changes—an interstate move, marriage, and a new job. Before I leave, I have an invitation to a house potluck and another glimmer of hope. Maybe I can make friends.

Although we’d crossed paths before, I think I met Sarah at Heather’s house. I must’ve met Jane, a North Carolina local, and Fran, my Chilena trail twin and master Pisgah route planner, at future Dirt Skrrts. We remained loosely connected, catching up more by chance at random weekly evening rides than anything else. But with time, the random individual text became a group chat, we decided to skip a monthly ride to do our own thing, introduced our partners and cheered on burgeoning relationships, and kept building up our trust beyond trail talk. Sharing the pain of seeing our home and communities change after Tropical Storm Helene may have made us closer. With all these blocks, the structure of the complicated, yet incredibly rewarding adult friendships was built, with Pisgah dirt as its sturdy foundation.

We welcomed 2025 a few days after most of us were back in town, going up the snow-ladden southernmost slope of the Art Loeb, chatting about our holiday break activities and our year’s goals alike. The frigid winter air still carried the hope of adventure and camaraderie throughout the year, either through upcoming race plans or the promise of the longer summer days that’d bring us together in different ways. It was then that the idea of a full Art Loeb point-to-point day hike was floated. How lucky we were and are: to be in this beautiful place, have the spirit and health to experience it fully, and have found good people to share the stoke with.

Fran and I started training for April ultramarathon mountain bike races, and Heather seemed to be happy with tagging along most of our training rides, at least until they got to be 8 hours long. Fran’s husband and Pisgah Mountain Bike Adventure Race (PMBAR) partner Luke became a regular part of our training sessions, and week after week, a wet winter was made bearable by shared milestones, snacks, and a few “Fran plans” gone wrong. We saw each other push through difficult days and celebrated huge fitness and mental gains along the way. In March, Fran successfully peer pressured most of us to show up for the Whitewater Center Whole Enchilada race in Charlotte, with all of us breaking personal records by default of participation. We joked that we’d probably also broken the record for number of female participants.

Following our successful springtime races (Fran and Luke crushed PMBAR!), we opened up to a summer of spontaneity—of slow hikes, waterfall rides, and conversations along the full spectrum of womanhood. It’s with this freedom (and a healthy dose of naiveté) that a few of us officially saved the first day of summer for a southbound sample of Pisgah’s best scenery. With everything going on in the world and our own lives, we chose to spend 18 hours of a Saturday together, struggling from our undertraining, but committed to the task and each other. Along 30 miles and 7,500 ft. of gain, atop the Black Balsam ridgeline, taking a break at the Pilot Knob shelter, and feeling the relief of finally hearing the Davidson River alike, I felt fortunate to be spending a hot, sticky, glorious summer day with friends in high places.

Writing this, it seems natural that we’d all eventually connect—for all it’s worth, Asheville and WNC are small and everyone is at most a second-degree connection. How our lives converged is still a welcome opportunity I owe to the outdoors and the tight-knit community that surrounds the area. Moving to a new place and starting over gets harder with time and age, but finding common ground is easy in this part of the country. And while we’re all busy, our lives bending but never breaking, with plot twists that don’t always give us the chance to meet, the trails always give us a quick and easy way to stay connected.

Photo Credit: Alexandra Garcia