Today’s batch of burning questions, my smart-aleck answers and the real deal:
Question: On Aug. 10, I happened to see a half dozen or so U.S. Secret Service uniform motorcade motorcycles with D.C. and Virginia tags pull into Marco’s Centreville Luncheonette in Woodfin. What’s the story?
My answer: Hey, have you tried these sandwiches? ‘Cuz I’ve heard they’re worth a drive down from D.C. Let’s just hope these guys weren’t AWOL-WEDS (Absent Without Leave, While Eating Delicious Sandwiches).
Real answer: Clearly, it’s taken me a while to answer this one, but in my defense I was waiting on an answer from the Secret Service.
Yep, still waiting. I guess that’s why they have “Secret” in their name.
Happily, other sources were pretty chatty about this, including the Luncheonette’s owner, Marco Lacagnina.
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“It was quite a surprise seeing Secret Service agents coming in here for lunch,” Lacagnina told me. “I thought maybe they were looking to lock up some politicians in our basement.”
Oh, if only, Marco. If only.
“They were just here for training with the local police department,” Lacagnina said. “They were on their motorcycles, doing training with maneuvers.”
I did check with the Secret Service field office in Charlotte, which said it would check with D.C., but I didn’t hear back.
Knowing the Asheville Police Department has a motorcycle unit, that seemed like the logical local partner for a training exercise.
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APD spokesperson Bill Davis tracked down some information.
“Yes, there were members of the U.S. Secret Service motorcycle division here,” Davis said via email. “They were here participating in joint training with some of our motor officers. Police motorcycle officers must conduct frequent skills maintenance training, as their operations are inherently dangerous.”
Davis said the mountains are also part of the appeal, as the terrain is so different from the nation’s capital.
“We have had a relationship between our motor units for several years now, and the topography of this area provides an excellent backdrop for the on-road portions of their training,” Davis said. “Lunch at Marco’s is an added bonus for making the trip to WNC.”
Question: There is a scar on an adjacent ridge you can see (through a long lens) across from the summit at Craggy Gardens. It’s in an otherwise totally pristine-looking environment that’s stood as wooded wilderness since I started hiking there in 1976. I’m curious about what might have caused such a washout at such a high altitude. Could you check in with the Forest Service and give us a read-out on this?
My answer: My standard answer in any question involving earth moving is, “It must be a new hotel/brewpub/taco emporium, but that seems unlikely in this case. That’s why I go to sources who actually know something for a read-out.
Real answer: This one goes back to those torrential rains of August 2021.
“We had landslides caused by Tropical Storm Fred last August,” U.S. Forest Service spokesperson Cathy Dowd said via email. “This one looks like one of those.”
In these cases, the Forest Service typically leaves the land as is, as these slides are a natural phenomenon.
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“We focus our efforts on clearing landslides that have impacted roads or other infrastructure, but (we) would otherwise leave as is,” Dowd said.
Dowd said they didn’t get any reported injuries from landslides after Fred.
As this is along the Blue Ridge Parkway, I also checked in with spokesperson Leesa Brandon.
“It looks like that landslide that happened last year from Fred, and it is on the Stony Fork Road that leads from Bee Tree Gap (Craggy Picnic Area) down into the U.S. Forest Service (land),” Brandon said via email. “This slide is easily seen from Craggy Pinnacle.”
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Jody Kuhne, a geologist with the N.C. Department of Transportation, said this slide was “the head accumulation of a debris flow location.” He also added another fascinating little nugget about these kinds of slides, which the state tracks in some detail.
“Anywhere that happens on our peaks, we know that when it hits 5 inches of rain in a 24-hour period, it generates debris slides,” Kuhne said. “That’s a site where obviously something like that hit.”
Much of the mountains got hit with torrential rains in August 2021. Haywood County was hit particularly hard, getting more than 14 inches of rain during about 12 hours.
Craggy Gardens, in Buncombe County, got less than that, but it clearly exceeded that 5-inch threshold. On another note, Kuhne said that while the land has remained the same since at least 1976, as the reader pointed out, that’s really just the blink of an eye in geological time.
This is the opinion of John Boyle. To submit a question, contact him at 232-5847 or jboyle@citizen-times.com
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