The story behind this and any other pictures from this location is somewhat amusing, and more than a little obnoxious. We'd arrived in Asheville relatively on time, and were looking up where we wanted to hike, when I saw this "Max Patch" location on a website. It advised a one-and-a-quarter mile hike to the top of a bald mountain. We chose a route we thought would avoid a three mile gravel road... Only to wind up on it anyway. We reached the end of the road, at "Max Patch Road", and were left with a bit of a mystery. Left, or right? We went right a ways, and gave up, turned around, and went back the other way. Mind you, we'd been driving for a couple hours on back mountain roads now. We finally found a sign pointing to Max Patch... Back the other way.
So after fighting a nasty snarl of people for parking, hiking to the top, taking in the view, taking photographs, and generally being in awe of the splendor, its time to come back down. Someone remarked they thought going the other way, away from where we came, might be a shorter way back to civilization. Away we go! We start going down that path, and set the GPS. It says there's a route, so we plunder on. About twenty minutes later, it has us make a right into a camp ground... That forms a closed loop. My VW GPS insisted there was a way out. I finally got exasperated and set my route for the nearest gas station, which brought us about sixty miles west of Asheville on top of I-40 in Hartford, Tennessee.

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