Great Smoky Mountains

• 1. Introduction

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  The Great Smoky Mountains draw more than 11 million visits every year, which makes the national park built around them the busiest in the United States. Long before visitors arrived, the Cherokee had their own name for this range: Equa Dutsusdu Dodalv. The mountains run along the border between Tennessee and North Carolina and form part of the wider Appalachian chain. Yet they hold records that have little to do with crowds. The range shelters the largest stretch of old-growth forest east of the Mississippi River. It also holds a salamander population richer than almost anywhere outside the tropics. Why does a range in the eastern United States hold so much life? What made the name Smoky stick? And how did a landscape stripped by loggers become one of the most protected places in the country? The answers begin with the air itself.

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• 2. Smoke and Summits

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  A haze of natural fog gives the range its name. From a distance, it looks like plumes of smoke rising from the ridges. The vegetation itself is the source, because the plants release volatile organic compounds that easily turn to vapor in ordinary conditions.

  The tallest peak is Kuwohi, which stands 6643 feet high and is the highest mountain in Tennessee. Its old official name was Clingmans Dome, and the Cherokee name means mulberry place. Mount Le Conte is the tallest from base to summit. It climbs 5301 feet from Gatlinburg to a top at 6593 feet. Many peaks carry the names of people. Mount Guyot honors the surveyor Arnold Guyot, and Mount Kephart honors the author Horace Kephart. Mount Collins recalls a mountain guide named Robert Collins. Thunderhead Mountain earned its name from the cloud that clings to it.

  The height of these peaks shapes the weather. Mount Le Conte rises more than a mile above its base, so the range catches far more rain and snow than the surrounding lowlands. Flash floods often follow heavy rain. In 2004, the remnants of Hurricane Frances brought flooding and landslides, and Hurricane Ivan soon made matters worse. Hurricane Hugo had done similar damage in 1989.

  Winter brings a subtler danger. Between October and April, mountain waves can send damaging winds down the foothills a few times a year. Those winds flatten trees and strip roofs around Cades Cove and the Camp Creek community. They also helped fuel the Gatlinburg fire on the 28th of November 2016. The deadliest weather is only one part of the story, because the rock beneath it is far older than any storm.

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• 3. Ancient Rock

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  Over a billion years ago, a primordial ocean collected marine sediments and igneous rock that later hardened into gneiss and schist. These are the oldest rocks in the Smokies, and they dominate the Raven Fork Valley near Oconaluftee. Younger layers called the Ocoee Supergroup make up most of the range. They are slightly metamorphosed sandstones, phyllites, schists and slate. Cambrian limestone appears in the outer foothills and in coves such as Cades Cove.

  The mountains themselves arrived through a collision. According to the source, the North American and African plates met during the Ordovician period and destroyed the old ocean. That clash began the mountain-building epoch that raised the Appalachians. In the Mesozoic era, erosion stripped away the softer sedimentary rocks and exposed the older formations again.

  Around 20,000 years ago, subarctic glaciers pushed south across the continent. They never reached the Smokies, but they chilled the climate and increased the precipitation. High slopes lost their trees to tundra, while spruce-fir forest spread through the valleys below about 4950 feet. Repeated freezing and thawing piled up the large fields of loose boulders found at the foot of steep slopes.

  When the ice retreated between 16,500 and 12,500 years ago, the tundra vanished. Hardwoods crept in from the coastal plains, and the cold-loving conifers withdrew to the summits. That retreat set up the layered forests that visitors climb through today.

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• 4. Three Forests

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  The National Park Service estimates that 187,000 acres of old-growth forest survive in the Smokies. Most of the rest is mature second-growth woodland, since loggers once swept through the range. Its 1,600 species of flowering plants include more than 100 native trees and 100 native shrubs. There are also over 450 species of non-vascular plants and 2,000 species of fungi.

  The lowest zone is the cove hardwood forest, found in stream valleys and on lower slopes. Some 72,000 acres of it remain old-growth. More than 130 tree species grow here, among them tulip tree, sugar maple, yellow buckeye and basswood. The Albright Grove, beside the Maddron Bald Trail, is an easy place to see some of the oldest and tallest trees. The American chestnut, once beloved by the people who lived here, was wiped out by chestnut blight in the 1920s.

  Higher up, northern hardwoods take over, led by yellow birch and American beech. About 28,600 acres of this forest are old-growth. Its strangest feature is the beech gap, a high mountain pass dominated by twisted beech trees. The source says no one knows why red spruce fails to move in.

  The summits belong to the spruce-fir forest, a relic of the ice ages, with about 10,600 old-growth acres. Red spruce and Fraser fir dominate it. Fraser firs once ruled the ground above 6200 feet, but the balsam woolly adelgid, an insect that arrived in the early 1960s, killed most of them. Gray skeletons of dead firs still crown Kuwohi and the slopes of Old Black. Some red spruces may be 300 years old.

  Between the forests lie the balds, patches where trees are strangely absent. Some are grassy meadows, and others are thickets of rhododendron and mountain laurel. Their blooms in May, June and July climb the mountainside from low to high.

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• 5. Bears and Salamanders

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  Black bears weigh between 100 and 300 pounds in most adults, though a few exceed 500. The Smokies hold the densest population east of the Mississippi River, and the bear has become the symbol of the park. Around it lives a crowd of other animals. The range counts 66 species of mammals, over 240 of birds, 60 of fish, 43 of amphibians and 40 of reptiles.

  Some residents arrived by design, and others vanished. White-tailed deer multiplied once the park was created. The bobcat is the only wild cat that remains, though people still report seeing cougars. European boar were brought in as game animals in the early 20th century. They root up plants, and the park service has paid hunters to kill them and leave the carcasses where bears will find them. River otters and elk have been successfully reintroduced. A red wolf release in the early 1990s failed, and the wolves were moved to the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina.

  The real superstars are small and wet. Five of the world's nine salamander families live here, with up to 31 species. The red-cheeked salamander lives only in the Smokies. The imitator salamander lives here and in two nearby ranges, the Plott Balsams and the Great Balsam Mountains. The hellbender hides in swift streams.

  Trout tell a story of competition. The brook trout is the only native trout. Rainbow and brown trout were introduced in the first half of the 20th century, and the larger newcomers drove the natives upstream. Most brook trout now live above 3,000 feet.

  Each mid-June, the firefly Photinus carolinus puts on a synchronized light show, with its population centered near Elkmont, Tennessee.

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• 6. People Before the Park

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  Native Americans have probably hunted in these mountains for 14,000 years. Archaic period artifacts, including projectile points, turned up along likely animal migration paths. Woodland period sites yielded ceramics about 2,000 years old. Later, farming drew people out of the game-rich forests and into the river valleys. In the 1960s, archaeologists uncovered substantial Mississippian villages at Citico and Toqua along the Little Tennessee River.

  Most of these villages belonged to a minor chiefdom centered on Chiaha, on an island now beneath Douglas Lake. Hernando de Soto passed through the region in 1540, and Juan Pardo followed in 1567. Pardo's notary recorded the villages of Chilhowee and Citico under the Muskogean names Chalahume and Satapo.

  By the late 17th century, when English explorers arrived, the Cherokee controlled the region, and the Smokies sat at the heart of their land. One legend describes a magical lake hidden deep in the range, out of reach for humans. Another follows a captured Shawnee medicine man named Aganunitsi, who traveled to the remote mountains in search of the Uktena in exchange for his freedom. The Cherokee called Gregory Bald Tsitsuyi, or rabbit place, and believed the Great Rabbit ruled it. They called the Chimney Tops Duniskwalgunyi, meaning forked antlers.

  Only one permanent Cherokee village is known inside the modern park boundaries: Oconaluftee, on the Oconaluftee River. Other settlements lined the outer valleys, including the Overhill towns of Chilhowee and Tallassee and the Middle town of Kittowa, which the Cherokee considered their oldest.

  War changed that. When the Cherokee sided with the British in 1776, American forces invaded. General Griffith Rutherford burned the Middle towns, and John Sevier burned several Overhill towns. By 1805, the Cherokee had given up control of the Smokies. Most of the tribe was forced west on the Trail of Tears in 1838. A few kept their land on the Qualla Boundary, largely through the efforts of William Holland Thomas, and they became the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

  In 1801, brothers William and John Whaley became the first settlers of what is now Greenbrier. William Ogle cut logs at White Oak Flats in 1802, and after his death, his widow Martha Jane Huskey returned with other families to found the community that became Gatlinburg. John and Lucretia Oliver reached Cades Cove in 1818, on land sold by the speculator William Tipton, nicknamed Fighting Billy. Farms averaged about 50 acres. Families lived in log cabins measuring 16 by 20 feet, and churches anchored community life.

  The Civil War split loyalties along the mountain crest. In Tennessee, 96% of Sevier County voters opposed secession, while about 46% in the North Carolina Smokies favored it. Neighbors raided each other's livestock across the ridgeline. Bushwhackers murdered Russell Gregory of Cades Cove in 1864, and George Kirk's raid on Cataloochee killed or wounded 15 Union soldiers recovering at a makeshift hospital.

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• 7. Axes and Rails

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  In the 1880s, the English Lumber Company floated logs down the Little River using splash dams. Operations on Hazel Creek and Alexander Arthur's ambitious project on the Pigeon River did the same. Floods destroyed the dams and booms of all three within a few years. Better logging railroads and band saws then made large-scale cutting possible.

  The Little River Lumber Company worked the Little River watershed from 1901 to 1939. It built company towns at Townsend, Elkmont and Tremont, and Townsend took its name from the company's owner and manager, Wilson B. Townsend. The Ritter Lumber Company logged Hazel Creek from 1907 to 1928, and its ruins still lie along the Hazel Creek Trail. By the 1930s, loggers had removed two-thirds of the virgin forest. The National Park Service says 80% of the Smokies was clear cut in the early 20th century.

  The same Wilson Townsend began advertising Elkmont as a getaway in 1909. The Wonderland Hotel and the Appalachian Club soon drew wealthy Knoxville families escaping the summer heat. In the early 1920s, club members including Colonel David Chapman began pushing for a national park. Chapman chaired the Great Smoky Mountains Park Commission and raised the money for land purchases.

  This park was harder to create than Yellowstone or Yosemite, which were already federal land. The commission had to persuade lumber companies to sell valuable timber rights and buy thousands of small farms. Entire communities had to leave. The state legislatures of Tennessee and North Carolina sometimes balked at spending public money. Even so, most major purchases were finished by 1932. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt presided over the opening ceremony at Newfound Gap.

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• 8. Pressures and Visitors

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  Smog rolls in from both the Southeast and the Midwest and sharply cuts visibility in the Smokies. The Environmental Protection Agency prepares daily smog forecasts for nearby Knoxville and Asheville. Air pollution is also linked to rising deaths among red spruce at high elevations and to oak decline lower down. Hemlock woolly adelgids attack hemlocks, while balsam woolly adelgids go after Fraser firs. Rangers have released Pseudoscymnus tsugae, a beetle in the ladybug family, to try to control the pests.

  Public help comes from The Friends of the Smokies, formed in 1993. The group raises money and awareness and supplies volunteers for projects that the National Park Service needs done.

  People are also part of the picture. The Park Service maintains 78 structures left by the Appalachian communities that once filled the valleys. Five historic districts and nine individual listings on the National Register of Historic Places lie within the park. The Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center opened in Townsend in 2006 to preserve the region's culture.

  Tourism drives the local economy, especially in Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg and Cherokee. Gatlinburg's SkyBridge stretches about 680 feet, which the source calls the longest skybridge in the United States. The Knoxville Smokies baseball team borrows the range's name, a small sign of how far the haze on these ridges has traveled.

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