So I'll start with what was the end of Blue Ridge Parkway. Just a reminder Blue Ridge is a 472.820 mile long parkway (trust me on the mileage), that goes from the Southern end of Shenandoah NP to Great Smoky Mountains NP. It's really a pretty drive, but it rains and it rains a lot. We fought the rain almost every day and the days we didn't, we fought the truck.
We had started BLRI on July 24th and we ended on September 5th. It's a big park, but it definitely shouldn't have taken 6.5 weeks. The last 5 days were tough, but we got something done everyday. We flew in on August 31st, picked up the truck from an alternator shop the next day (had to fix the 275amp alternator) and off to work. I think we collected a couple of routes until we started getting an error with our ultra-sonic sensors (give a profile of the road surface - rutting basically). Thought we got it fixed, but didn't get a chance to find out since it started raining.
Next day it came back, fixed it for the day, but we didn't get a lot done since the roads were still wet. Next day we figured out the problem with the rutbar for good (good is relative since we just spent 10 hours troubleshooting it on Friday and Monday). So the next couple of days were trying, but we got BLRI done by Saturday September 5th. Here are a couple of pics that I took from the last days with BLRI.
We had just driven up from Asheville in this pic. We were pretty worried that the roads were gonna be wet, as Asheville was shrouded in clouds. Turned out to be a perfect day for collection above the clouds.
Can't remember the name of this rock, but it's towards the end of BLRI. Kinda reminded me of the Rockier mountains of the West. So after Blue Ridge came Great Smoky Mountains. 2 things about GRSM... it's the most visited National Park in the system (9 million a year) = lots of dumb drivers and we started collection on a Saturday (of Labor Day weekend). It was tough... and it rained, rained everyday.
