Chapter II: Part 3: Guide and Adviser 98 (1)

Topical Reference 101
Going to the Great Smokies 101
Park Map 102
Visitor Centers 104
The Smokies by Car 107
Wildflowers and Fall Colors 110
Activities 112
Hiking and Backpacking 114
Accommodations 118
For Your Safety 120
Nearby Attractions 122
Books to Read 125
Index 126

1 Welcome to the Great Smokies

The Appalachians at Their Best

At first glimpse there appear to be two Smokies: the mountains' wild nature, and the folk life. The mind calls up both the sweeping mountain vistas whose peaks succeed peaks to the far horizon and the rustic cabins and barns set off with the split rail fences of 19th-century mountain life. The mountains are everywhere, punctuated by restored settlements, by Cades Cove, Mingus Mill, Cataloochee, and Little Greenbrier. But this is not the full story for there are many, many Great Smokies, a double fistful of which may be just for you. There are as many Great Smokies as there are people who come here intent on discovering their secrets: the folklorist's and amateur historian's Smokies; the trout angler's Smokies; the Smokies of the backpacker, day-tripper, and trail walker; the botanist's, ecologist's, and birder's Smokies; and the automobile tourist's Smokies. Take your pick.

You can walk into the Smokies, into the heart of the wilderness. You can drive through the Smokies, through the jewels in the crown of the Appalachian highlands. You can enter them through North Carolina or through Tennessee. But you can also enter them through any strong interest _you_ may have, for there are as many Smokies as there are ways you can see them. And one good way to see them is through the eyes of a native son whose love for these mountains is exceeded only by his love for people. Such is Glenn Cardwell.

Glenn Cardwell took his aging mother and father down to the Noah "Bud" Ogle cabin just after the National Park Service finished restoring it. Glenn works for the park and would conduct nature walks at the cabin, so he wanted to see what his folks would say. They used to live nearby and his mother's Aunt Cindy and her husband, Noah, built the cabin just off Cherokee Orchard Road out of Gatlinburg.

"Well I'll tell you," Glenn said, "my mother got to reminiscing not one step off the parking lot and stopped at every rock and spot in the yard and told a tale. It must've taken the better part of an hour just to get her through the yard and down to the porch."

Glenn's mother took one look at the porch and said, "They put the step [a big flat rock] in the wrong place." And so the restoration team had ... but it was another rock that bothered Mrs. Cardwell most.

Walking back to the car she stopped dead in her tracks and said despairingly, "What have they _done_ to Cindy's rock?"

Glenn had no idea what she meant although he could see the road cut close to a big boulder. The road had been relocated but Glenn recalled nothing unusual about the rock.

His mother, still staring, repeated her question. Glenn's father shrugged, "Looks to me like somebody blowed hell out of it."

"I still couldn't figure out what was bothering my mother," Glenn said.

But now, in the 1980s, he will tell you that everyone in the Smokies had scaffolds in their yards back in Aunt Cindy's day for drying fruits and vegetables for winter storage. Everyone, that is, but Aunt Cindy. She used the big boulder across from their cabin, or what used to be the flat part of it. Many's the time Glenn's mother, as a little girl, helped Aunt Cindy spread produce to sun dry on the rock.

Glenn Cardwell is an affable walking encyclopedia of Smokies life at the time the Smokies changed from a piece of Tennessee and North Carolina real estate into our second national park in the East. Stories such as Glenn's--and there are many--supply a compelling human resonance to this wilderness land. Glenn's enthusiasm is a bit unusual, because his father was bought out _twice_ by the Federal government as lands were being acquired for the park. And each buy-out meant an unplanned relocation for the family, moving and building anew.

"I think if my mother hadn't had me on the way at the time of the first buy-out," Glenn said, "my father would have pulled up stakes and gone back to Cumberland, Virginia, like many, many of our other relatives did." But the Cardwells stayed on near the park and Glenn embodies a transition, bridging new and old ways of doing and seeing things here. His father was bitter at first, but when he visited the Noah "Bud" Ogle Cabin years later he admitted he was glad the park had come along so that some things remained unchanged. It was nice, he said, that he and others could still see the land as it had been.

The Great Smokies represented a new direction in national park policy in the 1920s. The eighteen national parks then in existence in the West had been created from lands already owned by the Federal government. The Smokies lands authorized for park purchase beginning in 1926 were all in private ownership in more than 6,600 tracts. The lion's share was owned by eighteen timber and pulpwood companies, but 1,200 other tracts were farms. Worse, there were also more than 5,000 lots and summer homes. Many of these had been won in promotion schemes and their owners had never bothered to pay taxes on them. This created an awesome land acquisition headache.

The Federal government would not purchase land for national parks in those days, so in 1927 the Tennessee and North Carolina legislatures each provided for appropriation of $2 million to purchase the land. Already, $1 million had been pledged. The legislation also created State Park Commissions in each state to handle the buying. The John D. Rockefeller family supplemented the fund drive with a $5 million donation. This was considered one of the biggest and most important accomplishments of the entire national park movement. The two states eventually purchased the needed lands and donated them to the Federal government.

Ten years of dogged, full-scale activity and several more years of tying up loose ends were required to get the acquisition job done. Despite this tremendous impact of human land use in the Smokies, however, about forty percent of the park's 209,000 hectares (517,000 acres) constitutes the East's most extensive virgin forest. Forest recovery is now well underway throughout the park despite the former blight left by logging and subsequent forest fires, and landslides, and other forms of erosion.

At one time no sharp edge separated two aspects of nature in the Great Smokies: man and the wilderness. Cherokee Indians lived here in ways ironically similar to those of the whites who would soon displace them. They cultivated crops, hunted, believed in one god, practiced a democratic form of government, and lived not in teepees but in mud-and-log structures. "The place of blue smoke," _Shaconage_, they called this mountain hunting ground. And here amidst the haze lived also the spirit of their people; it, too, could not be divorced from the land itself. Treaty after treaty saw the Cherokees lose more and more homeland, up to and finally including the Smokies. In one of the great human tragedies that blots American history they were forcibly removed westward, "relocated" to Oklahoma via the "Trail of Tears." One fourth of the people died along the way. A few Cherokees had resisted removal, staying behind in small groups and hiding out in the mountains. Troops could not relocate them because they couldn't _locate_ them. Later the Cherokees were allowed to return and reclaim the borders of their old homeland. They live there today on the Cherokee Reservation.

It is difficult now to appreciate the pressure once exerted on the Appalachian highlands by human settlement. Back when land meant livelihood to a nation of agrarian people, the gradual pressure from the eastern coast, across the Piedmont, reached the Appalachian chain. The shortage of arable lands forced people into and finally onto the mountains in search of a plot of ground that would produce a livelihood. And so settlement came to the Great Smokies, gradually working its way up the mountainsides to the limits of cultivation. Grazing was eventually pushed beyond those limits all the way up the mountain to the balds. Combined overgrazing, overfishing, destructive logging practices, and overhunting would soon turn dense wilderness into a ravaged landscape. The National Park was authorized in 1926, established for protection in 1930, and established for development in 1934. And now, about 50 years later, wilderness is again in ascendancy, as field naturalist Napier Shelton amply testifies as he takes you exploring in Part Two of this handbook.

The wilderness richness here is both astounding and close at hand. Richness? There are more species of salamanders here--22--than in any other part of the world. In the lush density of the Smokies forests there are more tree species than in all of Northern Europe. It is thought that this sheer density of forest cover and its attendant transpiration help account for the "misty" character for which the Great Smoky Mountains are named.

This forest richness continues to unfold for present-day biologists, as the recent discovery of the paper birch in the Smokies attests. It had long been held that this northern species did not occur in Tennessee. Its range generally swings southward into New Jersey and then simply jumps along the Appalachians, appearing here and there as elevation and other conditions simulate northerly climes.

Peter White, plant ecologist with the National Park Service's Uplands Biological Field Research Laboratory in the Smokies, discovered several of the trees one day when he went out to verify a paper birch sighted by three North Carolina graduate students two years before. "It was located on a manway or unmaintained trail," White said, "right on the trail, one of the steepest in the park. So if you knew what you were looking for there was no missing it. Actually what we have here in the Smokies is called the mountain paper birch, which may or may not be a different species than the classic white birch which would be called the true or typical paper birch."

White is fascinated with unusual plant occurrences. A major passion of his here in the Smokies is to track down the mystery of the circumpolar twinflower, _Linnaea_, collected from "the mountains of Sevier County in Tennessee" by amateur botanist Albert Ruth in 1891. This is the only report of the plant south of certain bogs in West Virginia, and White hopes to verify it.

"Ruth misidentified this _Linnaea_ as partridgeberry and it wasn't known about until 1934, when it came to the University of Tennessee with the Ruth Collection from Texas," White said. "Jack Sharp at the university recognized its true identity and its significance."

The Ruth Collection came to Tennessee because the university's plant herbarium was destroyed by fire in the 1920s and the university sought to build it up again. The twinflower was discovered by the great botanist Carl Linnaeus in Finland and named for him by a friend. It occurs from Eurasia to North America as a northern species, hence the "circumpolar" description.

"There are pluses and minuses to believing the plant came from here," White explained. "Ruth was a careful field botanist with a good eye, and many plants are named for him. He collected many species for the first time. But we also know from his collections that some of his labels are vague."

White's quest for the elusive twinflower growing far south of its normal range symbolizes an aspect of the Smokies. The park has been designated an International Biosphere Reserve. As one writer put it: All the world of ecology comes to the Great Smokies ... Scientists and students come to observe the richness and density of life forms; the misplaced species; the dramatic impacts of catastrophic landslides and fire scars; and the unknowns, those tantalizing areas of knowledge still withholding their secrets despite careful scrutiny. What really happened here during the glacial periods? Where were the trees then? How much forest burning did Cherokees use for game and vegetation management purposes before Europeans came? Speculations aside, what is the true story behind grassy balds? What are the seasonal migration patterns of the juncos that stay in the park year-round? These remain questions stirring the expert and amateur alike to earnest inquiry.

Perhaps you may come to make one of these questions your own. Nature, it turns out, is an unfolding process. It is a continuous coping, albeit gradual, with change, so that our knowledge always remains limited and there is ever much more to learn. If you have questions, do feel free to ask them. Ask them of a ranger, a naturalist, or the people behind the counters at the visitor centers. But the more closely you observe the nature of things here in the Smokies, the more likely your questions will be to draw a blank. Don't be disappointed by this. Be encouraged: your question without an answer, should you pursue it, might hold the key to understanding some facet of the natural world tomorrow. But you will have to look at the Smokies, really look with honest and inquiring eyes, to stump the likes of Glenn Cardwell and Peter White or any number of other people you might meet here in the park.

All questions aside, however, one thing is certain: millions have come here in pursuit of recreation and gone away fully satisfied, to return again and again. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a great place to _do_ things, things we describe in Part Three of this handbook, your "Guide and Adviser." May _you_ return again and again.

2 The Nature of Things In the Highlands

A One-day Walk to Maine

Every spring a number of enterprising people set out to walk more than 3,000 kilometers (2,000 miles) on the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. Those who finish typically arrive some four months later. You can experience nearly the same thing--in terms of the natural history and particularly forest cover--in a single day by hiking from the lowlands to the crest of the Smokies. Because of the climatic change accompanying this gain in altitude, as much as 1,500 meters (5,000 feet), such a walk can take you, as it were, through the oak and pine forests of northern Georgia, the oak-hickory forests of central Virginia, the northern hardwoods of Massachusetts, and into the spruce-fir forests of Maine and Canada. And along the way you get many glimpses of the natural processes that shape and control the national park's marvelous assemblage of life.

If you're not quite ready for such a long, hard climb, why not join me for an armchair ascent of the mountains?

It's early on a summer morning and the sky is clear, but knowing the frequency of rain in the Smokies, we tuck ponchos into our packs. As our boots crunch pleasantly on the gravel of an old mountain road, we listen to the neighboring stream and look at the forested hollow it drains. Just a few decades ago farm children played in the stream, and cornfields bordered the road. Now we can enjoy the stream in the shade of yellow-poplar trees that now stand thick and straight where the grain once did.

Around a bend the stream gradient steepens and so does the road. We are still in young forest; here it grows where cattle formerly grazed or lumbermen felled its giant ancestors. For some time we labor upwards, the road becoming a trail and a few big trees appearing along the tumbling creek. Then, rather suddenly, there is a striking difference in the environment. We have crossed the line into primeval forest, into territory where the axman has not been and most of the trees are big. This is Great Smokies virgin cove forest, a type unrivaled in the northern hemisphere for combined variety and size of trees. Here it is cool, shady, and moist. The tree trunks shoot high above into the canopy, which intercepts most of the sunlight and seems to enclose us in a private world. The ground around us is covered with the greenery of small plants. We hear bird songs but cannot see the singers.

The peace and grandeur of the forest are interrupted by a slight movement off to our right. In the leaves beneath a large, rotting log a tiny shrew restlessly sniffs with its long nose. It moves in short thrusts through the dead leaves, searching with a fierce intensity for worms, crickets, or any animal small enough to overcome. Impelled by hunger, this normally nocturnal animal has been emboldened by the shadiness to venture into the cove forest's subdued daylight. The shrew is just one infinitesimal part of the great forest, in which thousands of living things seek the energy and nutrients needed for survival. The shrew hunts, as it were, a fragment of the sun's energy, transmitted through plants and then through the small plant-eating creatures that it preys upon.

Crossing a log bridge below a waterfall, we see fish darting under boulders. Spray from the falls drifts over us and onto the dark thickets of rhododendron crowding the stream banks. We try to keep the cool water in our minds as we start up the long switchbacks ascending the valley's south-facing slope. Trees of the cove forest, buckeye, hemlock, sugar maple, and their many associates, gradually become scarcer, and oaks and hickories become the dominant trees. Halfway up the slope we have climbed from coolness into warmth. Here in the more open oak forest, the sun beams down through the foliage, heating the ground and air.

A few gulps from the canteen and we can face the last switchbacks up the slope and onto a sunstruck, rocky ridge. The sun has real authority here. Winding more gradually upward along this ridge, the trail now takes us beneath pines, trees that are adapted to such hot, dry situations. If it weren't for the trail, we would have a tough time making our way through the thickets of mountain-laurel spread beneath the scattered pines. A towhee, lover of such thickets, calls its name as we pass. In one stretch we go through a brown patch of dead pines. After several mild winters, southern pine beetles have multiplied and feasted here. If the next winter is not cold enough to kill most of the beetle larvae, the patch of dead pines may increase greatly in size.

The trail now slants off onto the north side of the ridge. Right away the air is somewhat cooler here where part of the day the ridgetop shields it from the sun. The pines quickly disappear, and beeches, yellow birches, maples, and buckeyes form the forest. You New Englanders should now feel quite at home, among these tree species that accompany us all the way across the mountain's north and east flank. Then, as we approach the 1,500-meter (5,000-foot) level, the dark spires of scattered spruces begin to appear, signaling the nearness of the Smokies' crowning forest.

But before we make the final ascent, let's take a short detour to a nearby knob, which promises a spectacular view, a welcome visual release after being shut in so long by foliage. Going up the side of the knob, we quickly leave the forest and begin tunneling through dense thickets of rhododendron and mountain-laurel. Trees don't grow here at all. On top, the shrubs become smaller and we can look out over them. Perched on the end of a spur from the side of a giant valley, we look up to high ridges on both sides and down to a stream far below. Is it our imagination, or do we really hear that stream whispering to us of the humid, secret world way down there under the big trees? For many minutes we are lost in contemplation of the Smokies' green-blue spaces.

The crack of thunder suddenly wakens us from our reverie. A bank of clouds, dark underneath and contorted with churning air, is rolling over the ridges and into the head of the valley. The clouds shoot lightning toward the slopes below. Hypnotized by the spectacle we remain rooted to our rocks until the first drops fall, then we pull on our ponchos, determined to greet the storm. Soon the valley view is blotted out by boiling clouds. We and a circle of shrubs, both whipped by rain and wind, are all that exist in the world. Our foolhardiness on this exposed knob is soon revealed as lightning flashes so near that its crackling sound is almost instantaneous. We hurry down the trail, now a small torrent where it tunnels through the rhododendrons, and in a few minutes we reach safer ground. We eat our lunch under sheltering hemlocks. When we sense the end of the storm, we head toward our day's goal, the top of the Smokies. The deciduous forest rapidly turns into a coniferous one, the beech, birch, maple, buckeye, and others giving way to a nearly solid stand of spruce and fir. This is an enchanted forest. Carpets of mosses and ferns, struggling, as it were, for growing space, make delicate patterns on the forest floor. Limber-stemmed shrubs lift round or toothed leaves to the pale, post-storm light filtering through the thick evergreen foliage of the trees above. Out of the stillness, like the voice of some tiny fairy, comes the tinkling medley of a winter wren. We stop and listen. We watch a drop of water fall from the tip of a fern. We feel the coolness, a coolness born of altitude. We have reached Maine right here in the Smokies.

A short distance beyond, the trail breaks out onto the top of a cliff, opening to us the whole breadth of the mountains. This is our final reward; and as we sit here we see, without knowing it, a summary of our day's experience. We see landslide scars on the mountainside that probably came during a storm like the one we just experienced, when the earth, heavy with water and lying thinly over the smooth rock beneath, could no longer hang on and slipped in a crashing avalanche down the slope; like the pine beetle, landslides are one of the many natural forces that challenge the forest's powers of recuperation. Chimney swifts pick insects from the air and we hear the chatter of a red squirrel interrupted in its hunt for cones. Like the shrew, each in its own special way is busy gaining the fuel to stay alive. Each, through its interaction with plants and animals, affects the total fabric of Smokies life. Far below, the trees of a cove forest march up a stream valley; on the slopes above them spreads a mantle of oaks. A narrow ridge far down and off to the right bears the dark green of pines. Nearer, we see the ragged lower edge of the spruce-fir forest, where it fingers into the northern hardwoods below it. But we sense an overall unity because each kind of forest merges into the next, creating an unbroken mantle that lies over all the ridges as far as the eye can see.

There is no true alpine tundra in the Smokies, such as we might find atop certain mountains in New York and New England and atop many mountains in the West. But alpine experiences aplenty await us here for the climbing. They can be had on ridges, peaks, and, even pinnacles, from atop which we gaze out over a forested sea of peaks. It is a rare reminder of the mantle of forest that once lay unbroken over the eastern United States. It is often said that when Europeans first encountered America, a squirrel could walk from the Atlantic Ocean to the Mississippi without touching the ground!

Clouds drift over the mountain waves. Like the clouds of many yesterdays, they have dropped their burden of excess moisture on the forests, maintaining the wetness that encourages the lush plant growth of the Smokies. Then, through a break in the clouds, the sun finally shines, sending renewed charges of energy into the forest and ultimately through all the life of the forest. Much of the pattern of forest types is determined by the way the sun's rays strike the mountain slopes. Through changes in its daily duration and height in the sky the sun makes the seasons. Through its powers to evaporate ocean water and provide the energy that moves air, it can even be said to bring the rain itself.

Georgia to Maine, Straight Up

A hike from Cades Cove to Clingmans Dome simulates walking from North
Georgia to Maine. You will begin in Cades Cove amidst oak and pine
forests which also grow in northern Georgia. Your walk will end atop
Clingmans Dome in spruce-fir forests characteristic of Maine and
Canada. In between you will hike beneath the canopies of
oak-hickory-red maple forests that characterize Virginia, and the
northern hardwoods of Massachusetts. The reason for this localized
insight into the whole of the eastern United States forest types is
the vertical rise of the Great Smoky Mountains. The Smokies' highest
peaks stand 1,500 meters (5,000 feet) above its lowlands.

The axiom is this: here in the Smokies, elevation gain simulates a
shift to more northerly latitudes. Of course, this is a
generalization. On an actual hike from Cades Cove to Clingmans Dome
you would have to detour a lot to take in all the variety of eastern
U.S. forest types. But all except true alpine tundra are here,
although not laid out in a straight line.

In rough attempts to measure the Smokies' _local_ climates, the rule
of thumb is that spring advances up the mountains. At lower
elevations, for example, spring beauty blooms by early March. At 1,500
meters (5,000 feet) elevation, however, it may still be in full bloom
two to three months later.

Remarkably, the Smokies provide a plant laboratory encompassing most
of the eastern U.S. major forest vegetation types. This, and the fact
that virgin forests are rare in the East, make it no wonder that the
Great Smoky Mountains National Park has been designated an
International Biosphere Reserve.

This international recognition of and commitment to preserving the
Smokies underscores the park's wealth of natural history.

You need not be an expert to observe this. Sharp eyes and curiosity
will in themselves unfold great portions of this natural history lore
for you to ponder.

Along streams and on the shaded slopes below 1,220 meters (4,000
feet), look for rosebay rhododendron, yellow buckeye, basswood,
yellow-poplar, and other cove hardwood "indicator" species. They
signal that you still have a ways to go in your day's climb.

Cove Hardwood Forest

A degree of romance or mystique surrounds the cove hardwood forest.
The name was used as early as 1905 in professional forestry
literature, but was probably coined much earlier, perhaps in the days
of settlement.

The coves share all of their predominant trees with the neighboring
plant communities, and no common animal or plant is restricted to cove
forest. The key to its recognition is _variety_, particularly in the
make-up of the canopy, the name given to the roof level of any
woodland. Cove forest is not restricted literally to topographic flats
and hollows; it may also occur on steep slopes, where soil moisture
conditions are suitable.

In its best development, cove forest may sustain 20-25 tree species
tangling branches far overhead. Look for white ash, sugar maple,
magnolia, American beech, silverbell, and basswood. If most of these
are present, with or without buckeye, holly, yellow birch, and
hemlock, you are being treated to cove hardwood scenery.

Oaks, hickories, red maple and yellow-poplar (tulip tree) will also be
present, but these widespread species are not really useful in
settling the question. One often workable rule of thumb is the
presence of yellow-wood, but this small tree is absent from the cove
hardwood forest community in many parts of the park.

Many of today's typical cove hardwood trees have also been found as
fossils in rocks of Cretaceous age in the eastern United States. This
match up--and the recognition that the southern mountains have been
continuously available for land plant growth since Dinosaur Days--has
given plant geographers much food for thought. Cove forest is now
plausibly regarded as a very ancient mixture of species. Probably, it
was the ancestor of several other widespread forest communities.
Perhaps it was the haven of refuge sought by many plants and animals
during the Pleistocene glacial period. Its significance today is its
wealth of species composition and its heritage--millions of years of
forest evolution. We are fortunate that significant stands of this
forest type survive uncut in the Great Smoky Mountains.

A great benefit of these rich, lush forests for hikers is the
refreshing coolness they afford on hot summer days. Many people have
described them as "green cathedrals" because of the coolness, rest,
and peace they seem to engender.

Forest Openings: The Balds

Most mountains show mosaic patterns of vegetation noticeable at a
distance, or on scenic postcards. In the Smokies high country this
zoning is conspicuous. These mountains rival the Rockies for all such
contrasts, except for naked rock above timberline.

There is no climatic treeline--roughly an elevation above which trees
cannot survive--in the Smokies. But two important treeless
communities, called "balds" by the early settlers, give this
above-timber effect here.

The baldness is not that of bare rock, but rather a mountain-top
interruption to the forest cover. The two types, grass balds and heath
balds, are alike only in appearance from a distance, and in their
preference for mountain summits.

The Cherokees wove the balds into their religion and folklore.
Mountaineers grazed stock on the grass balds and cursed the heath
balds as "slicks" or "hells." Botanists began to publish explanations
for these balds a century ago but you can still formulate your own
theory because there are no agreed-upon answers. The more careful the
study, the more puzzles arise. But the key in both cases seems to be
_disturbance_, the successive destruction of generations of tree
seedlings.

For heath balds the most obvious tree-killing agent is fire and so
fire was advanced as an explanation for their origin. Shrubs can burn
to the ground and grow back quickly, sprouting from their roots.
Mountain laurel, rhododendron, blueberry, huckleberry, and sand myrtle
all do this. It was theorized that where fire knocks out the tree
layer, there are the heath balds. But the rub is that some balds show
no signs of fire and yet are not nursing young trees.

Landslides eliminate trees, and winter winds may also discourage tree
growth. Heath balds persevere where slopes are steep, soil is peaty
and acidic, and the elevation tops 1,200 meters (4,000 feet).

Today the grass balds are a mosaic of shrubs, grasses, and young
trees. Open patches may be clearly dominated by grasses but the total
number of plant species present on grass balds is greater than the
number present on heath balds.

Explanations of the origin of grass balds have been much debated but
no theory has been accepted for them all. We do know that most grass
balds were used as high elevation pastures in the 1800s and early
1900s, and when the park was established the grass balds were more
open than today. Most Southern Appalachian grass balds are being
quickly invaded by trees and shrubs. The National Park Service is
developing plans to keep two Smokies balds open. Despite their
appearance, grassy balds have no floristic relation to true alpine or
arctic tundra vegetation.

The Trout's World

The rays of the early morning sun bombard the tops of the trees spread above the headwaters of Forney Creek. Some penetrate the canopy to make light patches in the lower layers of the forest. But few break through the rhododendron thickets along the stream to illuminate its mossy rocks, its foam, and its clear pools. Down in the darkness beneath overhanging shrubs, hanging in the current near the bottom of a pool, a brook trout waits for the stream to bring it food. With dark mottling along its back, red spots on its olive sides, and pale orange edging on its lower fins, the fish is beautiful. It is also small, about 18 centimeters (7 inches) long, and lean, for it lives in a harsh environment where food is scarce, the water is cold and acidic, and floods and thick ice can scour. This is one of only a few trout in the pool because there is not enough food for many.

The trout fed little during the night and now its hunger is acute. Carefully it watches the rippling surface for insects, spiders, crayfish, salamanders, and worms, or any animal life caught and carried down by the current. But nothing appears. It noses up to a rock where earlier in the summer it had found caddisfly larvae fastened in their tubular little cases made of tiny pebbles. Now none are left on the surface of the rock accessible to the trout. It searches other rocks and eventually finds one caddisfly larva and a small mayfly nymph, flattened against the under side. The trout dashes at a small salamander, which escapes under another rock. Three crayfish also inhabit the pool but they are too big for this particular trout to eat.

The trout's hunger increases and still nothing edible washes over the miniature waterfall at the head of the pool. But suddenly sand and gravel begin dropping in and there is a pulsing in the flow of water. Upstream a bear has crossed and in its crossing it has knocked a beetle off an overhanging branch. The beetle floats down one little cataract after another, its legs kicking wildly and its wet wings vainly buzzing. There is a splash as the trout strikes. The beetle will sustain it through one more day.

In contrast to the brook trout's life in the headwaters, the rainbow trout would appear to have an easier time in the lower reaches of park streams. Here the pools are larger, the stream gradient is less, the water is less acidic, and nutrients are more abundant. These conditions allow more plant and animal life to exist, and therefore create more food for trout. Also, at these lower elevations, where the water is deeper, winter ice cannot form so solidly as higher up. These waters are not exactly teeming with aquatic life, but they are adequate for rainbow trout.

Trout do not generally remain active continuously. They tend to feed in the late afternoon, at night, and early in the morning, resting at the bottom of a pool during midday. Both brook and rainbow trout will have resting sites, day and night, and feeding sites.

A favored feeding site is often the head of the pool, where a trout will have the first chance to seize insects or other organisms carried into the pool. It also has the option of hunting many of the forms of life that live in the stream with it: insect larvae and nymphs of many kinds, aquatic beetles and spiders, crayfish, leeches and worms, water-mites, snails, salamanders, tadpoles, and the smaller fish.

Among the more common fishes that live in rainbow trout territory in low elevation, low gradient streams are sculpins, dace, hogsuckers, river chubs, shiners, and stonerollers. Hogsuckers, which reach 30 centimeters (a foot) or more in length, can be seen in many large, quiet pools. There they search for food on the bottom with their downward protruding lips. Dace and shiners, members of the minnow family, are very small fish and some species are brilliantly colored. The river chub and stoneroller, also minnows, are larger; the stoneroller occasionally reaches 28 centimeters (11 inches). Locally known as "hornyhead" and enjoyed as a food fish, the abundant stoneroller may limit the numbers of rainbow trout in some stretches of stream because of its own spawning activities. Rainbows lay their eggs on gravelly areas in early spring. A month or so later, before the trout eggs have hatched, stonerollers frequently build their nests in the same places, covering or scattering the trout eggs in the process. This sort of competition was probably not expected or considered when rainbows were introduced to the Smokies; nevertheless, the trout do manage to perpetuate themselves.

No doubt the most peculiar creature in the lower sections of park streams is the hellbender, a huge, grayish salamander with a loose fold of skin along each side. Commonly reaching 30 centimeters (a foot) and occasionally more than 60 centimeters (2 feet) in length, hellbenders hide under rocks and debris in swift water and feed on fish and other animals up to the size of crayfish. Below elevations of about 500 meters (1,600 feet) smallmouth bass, rock bass, and brightly colored little darters appear in park waters. Brown trout, an introduced species that has apparently entered the park from farther downstream, live in the lower sections of some streams, and may be found in the headwaters of some streams. Of the three species of trout in the Smokies, browns generally prove most difficult to catch.

Since early in this century when rainbow trout were introduced, and possibly even before, brook trout have been retreating upstream in these mountains. In the late 19th century, brook trout occurred as low as 500 meters (1,600 feet); now they are found mostly above 915 meters (3,000 feet). The effects of logging and competition from rainbows are the most frequently suggested reasons for this retreat. Logging, which began on a large scale in the Smokies about 1900, brought with it many fires. The resulting exposure to full sunlight caused the warming of low-elevation sections of streams. Erosion of the denuded land added heavy loads of sediment to the streams. These changed conditions, and possibly heavy fishing pressure, apparently speeded the disappearance of brook trout from the lower elevations. Rainbows were introduced and proved able to survive. In the '20s and '30s it was noted that rainbows occurred in streams up to about the upper limit of logging, and that brook trout occupied streams above that point. Now, however, streams are once again shaded by forests their full length; but brook trout, instead of moving back down, seem to have retreated higher upstream. It appears that the larger, more aggressive rainbows somehow prevent brook trout from reoccupying their lost waters.

The National Park Service is concerned for the future of the Smokies' one species of native trout, and especially for the few isolated populations of brookies that may still remain unmixed with populations of brook trout introduced from other parts of the country. On some streams, waterfalls provide effective barriers to the advance of rainbow trout, and use of artificial barriers for this purpose has been considered. Stringent fishing regulations may help the easily caught brook trout--and the gluttonous poaching that sometimes eliminates large numbers of brook trout from long stretches of a stream must be stopped. This type of management problem, how to preserve native species and reduce the impact of exotic ones, is common in national parks. It is only one aspect of a larger problem: How do we maintain natural ecosystems in parks? This basic aspect of the national park idea is difficult to implement in a country where human influence is so ubiquitous.

Quite a few animals of the Smokies depend on streams and their organisms without living entirely in them. They live with one foot in the water and one foot on land, as it were. Raccoons out hunting at night patrol streams, alert for frogs, crayfish, and mussels. Mink pursue fish, crayfish, and other animals underwater, flowing downstream through the foam as effortlessly as water itself. Kingfishers perch on overhanging branches to plunge headfirst after small fish. Their loud, rattling calls can be heard on the lower courses of many streams. The small Louisiana waterthrush, a warbler, teeters on rocks in the torrent, searching for aquatic insects. It nests on stream banks or behind waterfalls. Its song, a lovely descending jumble of notes, cascades like the water of its haunts. Harmless water snakes, mottled brown somewhat like the water moccasin (which does not occur in the Smokies), like to sun on limbs or debris near the water. Frogs, fish, salamanders, and crayfish form most of their diet. Of the park's few species of frogs, the green frog is the one most likely to be found in streams. Aquatic turtles are even less common; most numerous is the snapping turtle, a wanderer that sometimes reaches the middle elevations in the park.

Ducks, herons, and other large aquatic birds, scarce in the park because there are no large bodies of water, do appear occasionally. On the section of Abrams Creek that flows through Cades Cove you may surprise a wood duck or green heron. Though not very productive of plant food, Fontana Lake on the south border of the park sometimes serves as a resting place for migrating waterfowl.

Perhaps we humans could be considered semi-aquatic ourselves, so strongly does water attract us. In the Smokies people love to visit waterfalls, plunge into favorite swimming holes, play among the rocks and white water, and fish up and down the streams. One of my favorite activities is simple stream-watching. Just pick a sunny rock, sit down with your lunch, and watch. That's all there is to it. Trout will eventually grow bold enough to come out of hiding. Birds fly out of the dense forest to feed in the sunlit shrubs along the stream. Butterflies wander down this open avenue, and dragonflies dart after winged prey. Sometimes the unusual happens. One fine October day as I was just finishing my sandwich, a little red squirrel appeared on the opposite shore, edged down a rock to the water, and plunged in. It drifted with the current and then scrambled out on a rock near me. A swimming squirrel I had never expected to see.

In the Smokies you are seldom far from the sound of water. These tumbling streams--the Little Pigeon, the Oconaluftee, Roaring Fork, Hazel Creek, and all their many brothers--have voices as various as a hound dog's. They talk, murmur, shout, and sing, rising and falling in tone. Porters Creek once actually convinced me that people were talking and playing guitars on its bank. This is the soul music of the mountains.

Smokies Trout

The streams and rivers of the Smokies are famous for their purity. All who come to these mountains are impressed by the beauty of the waterways that have carved their way into the lush wilderness. More than 300 streams flow throughout the park. To many of us these streams mean only one thing, trout. Actually, more than 70 species of fish have been collected in the park, such as chubs, shiners, minnows, dace, catfish, suckers, sculpins, darters, and even lamprey.

Trout live in fast-flowing water where their streamlined bodies enable them to maintain themselves in the current, often close to the stream bottom. Brookies, especially, require such pure water that they are often considered a clean water "index."

To rile up trout anglers just assert that one fly pattern is the best. But in fly fishing areas such as the Smokies, a few patterns inevitably emerge as favorites. Here as elsewhere, most artificial flies imitate five varieties of insects common to most waters: mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies, alderflies, and ants. There are, in all, about 5,000 sorts of human-tied flies in existence. Does that sound overwhelming? Well, there are probably hundreds of thousands of varieties of insects which trout may feed upon at one time or another. The following advice will help you narrow your choice.

Dry Flies _Mayfly imitations_: Light Cahill, Quill Gordon, Royal Coachman, Dark Hendrickson. _Caddis imitations_: Henryville Special. _Ant imitations_: Black Ant, Red Ant.

Wet Fly and Nymphs Black Woolly Worm, Hendrickson, Light Cahill, Hare's Ear, March Brown.

Streamers Olive Mateuka, Muddler Minnow (imitates grasshopper or sculpin).

Watch out for low-hanging branches!

(1) Head
(2) Wing
(3) Body
(4) Tail
(5) Hackle

We ask that you, however, please follow all fishing regulations!]

Logging

"These are the heaviest and most beautiful hard-wood forests of the
continent," read a 1901 report from President Theodore Roosevelt to
Congress. Lumber entrepreneurs were impressed, and the Little River
watershed was sold that year for about $9.70 per hectare ($4.00 per
acre)--all 34,400 hectares (85,000 acres) of it! Throughout the
Smokies, entire watersheds were staked off like mining claims. Largest
of all was a timbered plot owned by the Champion Coated Paper Company.
It included Deep Creek, Greenbrier Cove, and the headwaters of the
Oconaluftee River.

Logging came to the Smokies on a large scale about 1900. Settlers had always cut trees here, but the lumber companies and their money and methods injected a major new element. Instead of a few oxen dragging heavy logs to mill, the lumber companies introduced railroads, steam loaders, and steam skidders on the landscape. As you drive from Elkmont toward Townsend along the park road, you are driving atop the old railbed that was laid down by the Little River Logging Company.

New towns sprang up: Elkmont, Crestmont, Proctor, Ravensford, and Smokemont. These provided something new to the Smokies, a cash market. For a time, one egg would "buy" a child a week's supply of candy. Local families sold farm products to the loggers and sawmill men.

The Smokies yielded board feet of lumber by the millions. Cherry was the most valuable wood, and most scarce. Tall, straight yellow-poplar turned out to be the most profitable because of its large volume.

Fires and Flooding

The ravages of logging led to fires, and the fires led to flooding. Many fires were set by the flaming sparks from locomotives or log skidders. More than 20 disastrous fires took place in the 1920s alone. A two-month series of fires burned over parts of Clingmans Dome, Silers Bald, and Mt. Guyot. Intense destruction occurred in the Charlie's Bunion area of The Sawteeth in 1925. Hikers on the Appalachian Trail still see the effects of this fire.

The fires created conditions for massive flooding. Parched soils were no longer secured by living roots and the dense mat of plants that makes the Smokies world famous today. Streams and rivers flooded, carrying unusually heavy loads of sediment. These conditions were intolerable for the native Southern Appalachian brook trout and apparently speeded their disappearance from lower elevations.

Rainbow trout were introduced and proved able to survive. More recently brown trout were successfully introduced. The brookies now occupy less than half the territory they did in the 1930s.

What about fires today? Lightning-caused fire is as ancient as the mountains themselves and has always been a part of the forest's life process. Some tree species actually depend on fire for regeneration, such as the pin cherry. And the heath bald shrubs, such as blueberry and mountain-laurel, prosper after a light burn. Fire is necessary as well to dozens of flowering plants which quickly seed new forest openings the fire creates.

We have long viewed fire on wildlands as a catastrophe, and indeed it is often a piteous sight. But the urge to suppress fire completely sometimes results in other unsatisfactory conditions. On many large public land areas limited wildfires are now allowed to burn if they don't threaten private property or human lives.

The Evolution of Abundance

Diversity is the biological keynote of the Great Smoky Mountains. Within the national park have been found about 1,500 species of flowering plants, among which are some 100 trees. There are around 2,000 fungi, 50 mammals, 200 birds, and 70 fishes, or more than in the fresh waters of any other national park on our continent. There are about 80 reptiles and amphibians, among which are 22 salamanders, which is probably as many as can be found in any similar-sized area in North America. Present conditions, such as warmth, abundant moisture, and a diversity of environments brought about by the height and dissection of the mountains, are partly responsible for this biotic wealth. But time, the many millions of years this land has been above the sea and south of the ice, has also been an important factor. It has been a span long enough for a great many species of plants and animals to get here and find a niche and for other species to evolve in the region. The story of the arrival and evolution of the present flora and fauna is intimately linked with the dramatic history of our continent.

We can only guess what life existed here during the 130 million years of the Mesozoic era, because no rocks from this period exist in the Smokies. But we can imagine that dinosaurs and primitive birds and mammals roamed the region, as they did other parts of the continent. Toward the close of the Mesozoic, flowering plants evolved and rapidly became the dominant type of vegetation. We can guess that some of these first magnolias, elms, and oaks grew right here in the ancestral Smokies. Newly evolved bees probably helped to pollinate some of the flowering plants.

The story becomes clearer and the life forms become more and more familiar to us during the 65 million years of the Cenozoic, the present era. In the first half of the Cenozoic, subtropical vegetation grew in the southern United States and temperate vegetation grew north to the Arctic. As these plants would indicate by their ability to grow here, this was a time of warm or mild climates throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Land bridges between North America and Eurasia, by way of the Bering Strait and perhaps Greenland, allowed the spread of a remarkably homogeneous flora throughout the then-temperate parts of these two continents. The Great Smokies, with their feet in the South and, as it were, their head climatically in the North, must have had both subtropical and temperate vegetation early in the Cenozoic era.

During the second half of the Cenozoic, a cooling trend set in. The widespread "Arctotertiary" vegetation of the northern latitudes moved southwards through North America and Eurasia. By the end of the Tertiary, which includes all but the past two to three million years of the Cenozoic, the vegetation zones of North America were probably very similar to those of the present. In the Smokies the trees probably ranged from southern types, such as sweetgum, at low elevations through the great mixture of cove forests and possibly to spruce and fir at the highest elevations. After a long period of gradual change in climate, the stage was set for the drastic events of the Pleistocene.

It is hard for us to imagine what an ice age must have been like in our country. Perhaps the only way to imagine it is to visit the Antarctic or one of the great glaciers in Alaska, and to watch giant slabs of ice fall from those towering walls. Then ... mentally transport the scene to the Hudson River valley or to the flatlands of Illinois, while magnifying the thickness of those glaciers several times over. Then imagine the surface of that great ice sheet stretching all the way to northern Canada.

If you had stood near the front of that massive ice sheet, you would have felt the cold air flowing off it. How far south that cold, dense air flowed and to what extent it affected temperatures in the southern states are unanswered questions. But undoubtedly temperatures were lowered throughout North America and perhaps farther south. Some scientists postulate a drop of 5.5 degrees Celsius (10 degrees Fahrenheit) in mean annual temperatures in southern United States. The high pressure that developed over the ice sheet would have pushed storm tracks southward, increasing precipitation in the South.

Such continental ice sheets advanced at least four times as climates cooled, and as many times they retreated during warmer intervals. With each advance and the consequent cooler, wetter climate, there was undoubtedly a southward shift of vegetation belts. In the mountains there would also have been a downward shift of forest types, particularly those of the higher elevations. That is, the higher elevation species would begin to grow down the slope. In sheltered coves temperatures probably did not drop as much as they did higher up or out in the open lowlands, and soils in coves were deeper and more fertile. The coves of the Southern Appalachians thus may have formed a refuge for many temperate species of plants, including some forced southward by the spreading ice. This is a factor in today's biotic richness or abundance in the Smokies.