After 43 years of nature research, environmental education, and resource conservation activities at Hilton Pond Center for Piedmont Natural History in York, South Carolina, a variety of factors (including rapid encroachment by developers) led us to move our entire operation in late February 2024 to the Blue Ridge Mountains of upper Ashe County, North Carolina. Near the town of Lansing, we’re now ~100 straight-line miles due north of York and less than 10 miles south of the Virginia border. We are now Hilton Pond North!
Here, at an elevation of more than 3,000 feet, we relocated to a beautiful 35-acre tract of mixed hardwood-White Pine forest with rock outcroppings and several stands of Rosebay Rhododendron (above)—plus ground-level expanses of Christmas and Hay-scented Ferns, with lots of Spicebush in the shrub layer. Several springs and rivulets flow into a small impoundment—the eponymous Hilton Pond North—thence to Silas Creek and on to North Fork of the New River.
