CHAPTER 5
“The Mountains Are Calling”—and They’re Not Happy
The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.
—Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Coker Creek, Tennessee — For Muir, Kingston proved unremarkable. What lay ahead, though, would enchant the young rambler barely two weeks into his trek to the Gulf. He walked in a southeasterly direction, crossing “small parallel valleys that flute the surface of the one wide valley.” The dirt paths meandered and confused Muir, frustrating his journey to the mountains. He consulted “a buxom Tennessee ‘gal’” who steered him toward the Unicoi Trail, which crossed into North Carolina. He spent the night with a blunt-spoken “negro teamster” who knew the region well. Finally, Muir reached forgettable Philadelphia and, without tarrying, headed to Madisonville, which he deemed “a brisk village.” The Unaka Range, or “White Mountains” in Cherokee, “entranced” Muir as he started the long ascent up the southern Appalachian chain that reaches upward of six thousand feet. The peaks, like the nearby Smokies, were draped in a white haze and afforded what he called a “most glorious billowy mountain scenery.”
Muir took his time on the uphill slog, spending two nights with an elderly and loquacious mountain man who showed him the region’s natural and commercial specialties. They visited gold and (maybe) copper mines, grist mills, and blacksmith shops. Muir observed “wild, unshorn, uncombed men” with bags of corn and coon-skin caps emerging from rhododendron-shrouded trails. They were headed to mills, alongside fast-falling creeks, that appeared terribly unsophisticated to the mechanically astute Muir. The mountaineer said that earlier generations of farmers had “skimmed off the cream of the soil,” leaving the land worn out and unproductive, a pattern of natural-resource abuse that has plagued the region since the 1700s.
“This is the most primitive country I have seen, primitive in everything,” Muir wrote in A Thousand-Mile Walk. “The remotest hidden parts of Wisconsin are far in advance of the mountain regions of Tennessee and North Carolina.”
The farther south Muir traveled, the more the Civil War’s toll appeared. Eastern Tennessee was no hotbed of Confederate support; locals had voted two-to-one against secession. Cotton and slavery weren’t kings among the yeoman farmers tending small plots. In fact, thirty-one thousand Tennesseans, mostly from the east, joined the Federal army—more than from any other Southern state. Seven thousand of them died, depriving rural communities of fathers, husbands, and brothers. Farms failed. Families moved away. Local governments collapsed. Churches and schools closed. Confederate guerrillas terrorized the countryside for years after the war’s end; Muir came across at least one group of highwaymen. A local historian said “bloodshed and destruction” were East Tennessee’s reward for a war it didn’t want.
“The seal of war is on all things,” Muir wrote.
Except botany. Muir catalogued oaks, hemlocks, mosses, laurels, azaleas, asters, liatris, Joe Pye weed, and many different types of ferns, including the Christmas, interrupted, and ebony spleenwort. Finally, upon reaching the North Carolina state line on September 18, most likely near Coker Creek, Muir near-hyperventilated over the waves of Blue Ridge ranges stretching across Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama.
“The scenery is far grander than any I ever before beheld,” he said. “Such an ocean of wooded, waving, swelling mountain beauty and grandeur is not to be described. . . . Oh, these forest gardens of our Father! What perfection, what divinity, in their architecture! What simplicity and mysterious complexity of detail! Who shall read the teaching of these sylvan pages, the glad brotherhood of rills that sing in the valleys, and all the happy creatures that dwell in them under the tender keeping of a Father’s care?”
A bit florid, perhaps, but those hills have forever seduced travelers. Including me. A three-hour drive from Atlanta brings me to a backpacker’s paradise in the Chattahochee, Cherokee, Nantahala, Pisgah, or Great Smoky forests. The Appalachian Trail (AT) runs along the spine of the highest mountains. I’ve hiked these hills since the 1980s, when I moved to Winston-Salem. They’re steep, grueling climbs oftentimes rewarded with 360-degree views from grassy balds, or hilltop meadows. I’ve vaulted roaring streams with tree limbs as poles. I’ve skittered past black bears and jumped over timber rattlers. I’ve surprised ginseng hunters and lovers in flagrante delicto. I’ve awakened to a foot of fresh snow outside my tent. I’ve gotten lost, found (in the literal, not biblical sense), frustrated, angry, and euphoric, and I keep coming back for more. It was Muir, not me, who famously said “the mountains are calling and I must go,” but I wholly agree. The mountains are my playground, gym, church, happy spot, and therapist’s couch.
I follow Muir’s likely path from Coker Creek along a forest road to the Benton MacKaye Trail, a three-hundred-mile, lesser-traveled alternative to the AT named for the man who conceptualized the AT. The trail section above runs along the North Carolina–Tennessee border. The section below, along the Hiwassee River, is called the John Muir National Recreation Trail. Muir might’ve followed a trail along the river from Tennessee into North Carolina, but I’m not so sure.
I scurry up the grassy Benton MacKaye, pass underneath a power line and down to the intersection with the Unicoi Gap Trail. I’ve not much time. I need to get back to Atlanta. Plus, the sky is darkening. But I jump at any chance to follow in Muir’s actual footsteps, since virtually all of his route today tracks highways or well-trafficked byways. And the mountains, despite centuries of hunting, logging, mining, and development, harken to an unblemished past that Muir would recognize, particularly in the federally protected parks and forests.
It’s now dark. I hurry to my car and head home. I return four months later, though, keen to continue my meander through the very hills Muir embraced.
I leave Atlanta early on a Monday morning in January to beat traffic. The forecast calls for no rain and full sun by Tuesday. The weatherman is wrong.
The hilltops disappear into the clouds as I head higher into the Cherokee National Forest. The Hiwassee spills over its banks, rendering impassable the lower Muir trail. Upwards I drive through frost-wilted rhododendron groves and second-generation hardwoods. I park again at the intersection of the forest road and the Benton MacKaye Trail, shoulder my too-heavy pack, and slip under the power lines. This time, though, I stay on the BMT and continue up the ridge. Recent rains and snow ensure a slippery climb. Fog blocks the usual miles-long views. I spook a flock of wild turkeys pecking a tattered carpet of acorns. Bears or wild boars had beaten them to the spot, however. The turkeys squawk and climb awkwardly skyward, their wings sounding like the whomp-whomp of tiny helicopters. A hard climb gets me to the ridge and a wintry wonderland of frozen trees enshrouded in mist. Crystalline rime blankets the bushes with icicles pointing due west whence the winds come. In The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Muir shares a similar wonder of a winter scene.
“The view of the woods,” he wrote, “was something never to be forgotten. Every twig and branch and rugged trunk was encased in pure crystal ice, and each oak and hickory and willow became a fairy crystal palace.”
I camp nine miles in at Sandy Gap in a hollow shielded from the wind. A small stream runs down the middle and provides the evening’s soundtrack. I try to build a fire, but the wood is too wet. Snow and sleet chase me inside my tent. I sip some whiskey and listen to the stream and the silence, broken occasionally by airplanes high overhead.
Muir, of course, didn’t have a sleeping bag or tent. If shelter wasn’t available, he stretched out alongside a trail or in a copse of trees and slept on hard ground. He didn’t have the relative luxury of ramen noodles, a Jetboil stove, or a Mountain Forecast app. He also didn’t hike the Appalachians in winter with temperatures in the teens and frozen water bottles.
I’ve hiked these mountains in every season and prefer the solitude of winter. Edward Abbey, in Desert Solitaire, put it best: “I find that in contemplating the natural world my pleasure is greater if there are not too many others contemplating it with me, at the same time.” The trails are empty, the animals unsuspecting. Firewood is abundant. And the views, through leafless trees, are marvelous.
I wake at seven as the sky lightens. My tent and fly are covered in ice. I unzip the door, sink deeper into my sleeping bag, and stare down the cove. Snow dusts the rhododendrons. A ridge line appears gray and indeterminate through the heavy mist. I listen to the wind whipping high on the ridge. Unwillingly, at eight, I creep from my bag, hurry into my clothes, answer nature’s call, retrieve my food bag, and hustle back to my tent. I brew some tea, eat an apple and three granola bars, pull water from the stream, and hit the trail. The frozen tent adds considerable weight to my pack. Four arduous hours later I’m back in my Subaru. I haven’t seen a soul in twenty-four hours.
The timeless beauty of the southern Appalachians is a myth, one I willingly embrace. People think the awe-inspiring trees, mountains, and vistas have always been such. Muir, in an 1897 article for The Atlantic entitled “The American Forests,” wrote that “the forests of America, however slighted by man, must have been a great delight to God; for they were the best he ever planted.” At one time that was true. Not today. Four hundred years of European influence, and destruction, laid waste to the forests, and their sylvan ideal.
The Cherokee ruled most of western Carolina, yet lived lightly on the land before the white man arrived in the 1700s. The original Americans hunted for food and pelts, cleared small plots along rivers, and periodically burned the fields and forests to scare critters into the open and rejuvenate the land. But there was no avoiding the English and Scottish traders who brought horses and guns and paid good money for beaver, bear, elk, buffalo, and deer hides. Hundreds of thousands of pelts left the mountains for the ports of Savannah and Charleston for shipment to Europe to be turned into hats, gloves, and bookbindings. Beavers were nearly wiped out by the middle of the nineteenth century; the buffalo, elk, and deer were next.
Frontiersmen and settlers followed the traders into the mountains, clearing the land along rivers and streams for crops and pastures. Their unpenned cows and pigs trampled the forest undergrowth, furthered erosion, and vacuumed up the acorns that wildlife depended on. The Cherokee, too, became farmers with cattle and swine roaming the lands. The pioneers convinced state officials to place bounties—three dollars a scalp—on bobcats, red wolves, and Eastern cougars. The Federal Road between Nashville and Augusta (gateway to the Savannah River) ran through Cherokee country and, by the time it was completed in 1807, had supercharged the farm-to-market economy for cows, hogs, sheep, and goats.
Nothing, though, so devastated the southern Appalachians as the growing nation’s insatiable appetite for wood. Mature, towering stands of red oak, eastern hemlock, pignut hickory, Fraser fir, tulip poplar, and red maple blanketed the mountainsides. Chestnut trees—maybe ten men with arms outstretched could encircle one of those ancient monsters—filled a quarter of the forests. Prior to 1800, timber cutting was limited to stands below 2,500 feet. Iron makers soon discovered the abundant southern forests crisscrossed by numerous and bountiful streams. They needed wood, and lots of it, to make charcoal hot enough to melt ore. Pigeon Forge and the Cades Cove Bloomery ran full out in the Smokies, originally known as the Great Iron Mountains. Tens of thousands of timbered acres were denuded in the region’s short-lived iron age. Northern industrialists, though, were just getting started on their carpetbagging pillage of Appalachia’s natural resources.
Copper mining, mostly where eastern Tennessee meets north Georgia, demanded limitless amounts of timber to fire the furnaces. The first mine opened in Ducktown, Tennessee, in 1850 and gobbled three hundred bushels of wood daily. It was “one of the most environmentally destructive industries in the Southern Appalachians during the antebellum period,” wrote Donald Edward Davis in Where There Are Mountains: An Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians. Other mines soon followed, and within two decades nearly forty square miles of trees vanished. Making matters worse, the furnaces belched tons of sulfur dioxide into the sky, ruining forests and streams farther afield and prompting the state of Georgia to sue Tennessee for environmental damages.
It wouldn’t take long for the era of “industrial logging” to reach unprecedented heights. Northern money, and the Shay steam engine, a geared locomotive that could run on any track, targeted the hardwoods above three thousand feet. Quick-buck lumber companies simply rolled up the tracks once a grove was depleted and moved them higher up the mountain. Flatbeds full of massive trees would return downhill without having to deal with fickle streams or reluctant oxen. One billion six hundred million board feet of timber was cut across the southern Appalachians in 1880, according to Jack Temple Kirby’s Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South. In 1912, more than fifteen billion board feet were cut.
Profit wasn’t the region’s only scourge. An invasive pathogen from Japan decimated the remaining chestnuts, starting around 1920. Towering hemlocks currently succumb to another Japanese import, the woolly adelgid. Only 3 percent of old-growth forest remains across the region. From time to time I visit the old-growth Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, with its four-hundred-year old trees, named for the poet who wrote “Trees.” A forest fire roared through in 2017 and did considerable damage.
Destruction of the forests, not surprisingly, ravaged the surrounding countryside and the variety of habitats. Streams silted over and warmed without the oaks, poplars, and canebrakes. Native trout populations dropped sharply. Carolina parakeets, the only parrot species in the East, once blackened the skies like passenger pigeons, but disappeared along with their bottomland habitat. A mighty chestnut yields ten bushels of nuts, so their demise wiped out the pantries of squirrels, turkeys, bears, and raccoons. By 1800, Chinese appetites had nearly rid the north-facing mountains of ginseng. “Forests and wildlife were brutally used,” wrote Albert Cowdrey in This Land, This South: An Environmental History. “In the course of a generation or two, beginning in 1860, the first major regional extinctions since the last Pleistocene took place.”
Without trees holding the hillsides in place, the rainfall flowed freely into the creeks and rivers of the Appalachians. A flash flood near Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1924 sent ten feet of water down a narrow valley, killing eleven people. The Mississippi Valley bore the brunt of the Great Flood of 1927, but weeks of rain swelled Appalachian streams, flooded towns and fields, and provided impetus for the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority six years later.
Flood control, navigation, and electricity were the TVA’s original goals, though a Depression-era jobs program for one of the nation’s poorest regions certainly helped sell the massive public-works project. Norris Dam, north of Knoxville, opened in 1936 and created a reservoir seventy-three miles long along the Clinch River. Today, forty-nine dams control the waters that drain into the Tennessee Valley and allow barges to run from Knoxville to Paducah, Kentucky, on the Ohio River. In fact, every river in the southern Appalachians, including the Little Tennessee, Toccoa, Duck, Nolichucky, and French Broad, is controlled by a TVA dam. The environmental damage was severe. More than a million acres of land—river bottoms, swamplands, canebrakes, lowland prairies—was submerged. Thousands of miles of streams were straightened. Hundreds of mussel species vanished. Eels, gar, paddlefish, and sturgeon all but disappeared. Rainbow trout were imported from California, but the interlopers decimated native brown trout in many streams. By World War II, the TVA had become the nation’s largest buyer of coal and the source of millions of tons of sulfur dioxide that rained down on Appalachian forests.
Muir and fellow environmentalists began sounding the southern ecological alarm in the late nineteenth century. In the Atlantic article, Muir wrote of the devastation of the eastern wilderness: “When the steel axe of the white man rang out in the startled air their doom was sealed. Every tree heard the bodeful sound, and pillars of smoke gave the sign in the sky. . . . The Atlantic coast from Maine to Georgia had been mostly cleared and scorched into melancholy ruins.”
The cri de coeur resonated widely as a newly wealthy nation embraced tourism and the salubrious benefits of mountain air. Trains and newfangled automobiles carried visitors deeper into the hollows and higher onto the mountains. The newcomers made it abundantly clear that they didn’t like their hard-won views marred by stumpy and denuded hillsides. Charles S. Sargent, a famous botanist and first director of Harvard University’s arboretum, advocated for a forest reserve in the southern Appalachians. George Vanderbilt hired a young Gifford Pinchot to manage his Biltmore Estate in Asheville, which became the foundation of the Pisgah National Forest. Pinchot, who believed that forests can be both preserved and logged, became the nation’s top forestry official in 1898. A year later, the Appalachian National Park Association was founded in North Carolina by citizens concerned that the beautiful mountains were being destroyed.
Even the logging industry got religion. Sort of. The large landowners endorsed the creation of forest reserves whereby the land they had already destroyed would be reforested with taxpayer money, thereby relieving them of tax burdens. The push for federal government oversight accelerated after the devastating 1907 floods and the public’s newfound understanding of the need for watershed protection. Nature lovers also rightly pointed out that the West had Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks while the East had bupkis. Knoxville hosted the National Conservation Exposition in 1913, a two-month festival that warned of the finite nature of the Appalachians’ natural resources. A million visitors, including Booker T. Washington, Helen Keller, and William Jennings Bryan, watched fireworks, motorcycle races, and “a Herd of Trained Elephants.” They also took in exhibits on clean water, soil erosion, and sustainable logging. The expo fueled talk of a national park in the nearby mountains. But it was Acadia in Maine, three years later, that was designated a national monument and, eventually, the first national park east of the Mississippi.
In 1911, President William Howard Taft signed the Weeks Act, which allowed the federal government to buy “forested, cutover, or denuded lands within the watersheds of navigable streams.” The landmark legislation, one of the nation’s most successful conservation measures, has protected twenty million acres east of the Mississippi and led to the creation of the Pisgah, Cherokee, Chattahoochee, and (my favorite) Nantahala National Forests.
Nearly a half century after Yellowstone’s creation, the nation’s wilderness system was in disarray, with little funding or guidance, and overseen by a hodgepodge of federal agencies. President Woodrow Wilson established the National Park Service in 1916 with the proviso that any public parkland must be donated to the federal government. Stephen Mather, a borax millionaire and nature lover from Chicago, became the Service’s first director and undertook an aggressive PR and lobbying campaign to increase the size and number of national parks. He raised money from friends, and kicked in his own, to buy land. He supported the road-building frenzy and the auto clubs whose members wanted pretty places to visit. He introduced concession stands and visitor centers to cater to an increasingly mobile society.
President Calvin Coolidge signed legislation in 1926 creating the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Tennessee and North Carolina legislatures ponied up two million dollars each, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. added another five million, to buy three hundred thousand acres straddling the state line. Finally, in 1934, after years spent wrangling with small farmers and large timber companies, the park was officially established by Congress.
The hard work, though, was just beginning. The Depression greatly reduced logging and mining across the southern Appalachians and gave the Civilian Conservation Corps time to plant trees, fix eroded hillsides, and restock trout streams. The white-tailed deer population exploded. Bears, beavers, and wild turkeys returned to their once-abundant lands. The CCC’s dollar-a-day boys also built roads, trails, culverts, and campsites, readying the forests for the hordes of tourists to come.
“With some exceptions, the Depression years were good for the environment of the Southern Appalachians,” wrote Susan Yarnell in a history of the region for the US Forest Service.
Conservation took a back seat to war readiness in the 1940s as logging and resource extraction again boomed in the mountains. The TVA built 480-foot-high Fontana Dam along the Little Tennessee River in North Carolina, which provided cheap electricity, primarily for the aluminum factory in Alcoa. The Appalachian Trail now crosses the top of the dam—the tallest east of the Rockies.
Gatlinburg, at the foot of the Smoky Mountains, is known for many things: gateway to the national park; rococo Alpine splendor; the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditorium; shopping for stuff you don’t need; Dolly Parton; Putt-Putt Golf. I’d add Pancake Capital of the World to the list.
No fewer than six pancake restaurants dot the main drag that runs (crawls is more like it as I spend forty-five minutes driving from one end to the next) through the heart of town and its equally clogged side streets. It’s true. I count them. There’s the Little House of Pancakes. The Pancake Pantry. Atrium Pancakes. Log Cabin Pancake House. Flapjack’s Pancake Cabin. Reagan’s House of Pancakes. And those are just the pancake joints with the word pancake on their marquee. I’d proffer that virtually every other restaurant in Gatlinburg (pop. 4,100, off-season) serves them, too. So popular are pancakes that hour-long lines snake out the doors and down the streets of flapjack emporia. The customers don’t seem to mind the wait. Besides, there are enough commercial distractions to bide the time of the hungriest pancake lovers.
Look left and you’ll see: the Fudge Shoppe of the Smokies; Santa’s Clause-et; a Margaritaville Resort; and the Honeymoon Hills Cabin Rentals (with heart-shaped Jacuzzis).
Look right and you’ll find entertainment galore: the Ober Gatlinburg Ski Area & Amusement Park; museums dedicated to pinball, Hollywood cars, salt and pepper shakers, and The Dukes of Hazzard; and individual Ripley’s for fans of miniature golf, penguins, haunted houses, mirror mazes, and exotic fish. (Dollywood is in nearby Pigeon Forge.)
Look up and you’ll discover: the Space Needle; ski gondolas; a Sky-Bridge; zip lines; and . . . mountains. They’re the very reason for Gatlinburg’s existence and, presumably, why people come here.
Kirby, the Mockingbird Song author and one-time president of the Southern Historical Association, wrote that “the hamlet of Gatlinburg quickly grew into a nightmarish version of Las Vegas—nightmarish because Gatlinburg had the neon but no blowzy sex shows, much less gambling, and hardly ever the substantial architecture and confident self-mockery of Las Vegas.”
I drive up from Atlanta one warm October Friday and set up my single-man tent at the Cades Cove campground. It’s Columbus Day weekend and I’m lucky to get one of the last spots. I pull into the campground store to get my permit. A volunteer ranger tells a camper to avoid the picnic area because a small black bear with a white splotch is again scrounging for food. “He’s a hemorrhoid,” the volunteer says. “He’s a pain in the butt.”
I love backcountry camping; I like campgrounds. My kids, father-in-law, and I car camp a couple of times a year. The settings are usually lovely, with hiking trails nearby. Plus, you can bring chairs, bikes, blow-up mattresses, plastic pink flamingos, music, beer, and bacon. And there’s always somebody friendly watching football on a big-screen TV mounted on the side of their RV.
My small tent is dwarfed by the RVs and trailers at Cade’s Cove. Most campers are well into dinner or a postprandial stroll by the time I set up. A nattily dressed older gentleman in slacks, cowboy boots, and red MAGA hat happens by with his wife. Kids on bikes circle ever faster on the paved roads. Snippets of conversation waft from one side to the other.
“I caught two rats at my mother’s house, put ’em in a Walmart bag, and took ’em to the Mexican restaurant,” the elderly lady to my right tells her partner, who doesn’t appear to be listening. I never learn why she took rats to a restaurant.
It’s dark by 7:30, a three-quarter moon rising over the sweetgums and pines. Generators switch off. A dozen fire rings glow. Voices lower. S’mores get finished. Families climb into RVs awash with the telltale blue glow, or tents with Coleman lanterns turned low. An owl hoots.
Everybody warned me to hit the Smoky hotspots early in the day to avoid the crowds, but I didn’t listen. After futzing about the campground in the morning I finally begin the ascent up US 441 to Clingmans Dome—“the Top of the Smokies” at more than 6,400 feet. I’ve hiked and driven to the dome many times; the view is spectacular, especially from the spaceship-like observation tower. The drive up follows the west prong of the Little Pigeon River, past rocky Chimney Tops and Mount Le Conte with its hike-in lodge. The glitz of Gatlinburg fades quickly into the age-old serenity of the Appalachians. Until, that is, you reach the Tennessee–North Carolina border at Newfound Gap and the side road to Clingmans Dome. I come to a complete stop a mile from the top. Cars inch forward. I make half a mile in fifteen minutes. I ditch the car and hike the last stretch to the summit.
The South’s hot, dry fall persists and the trees don’t wear the typically brilliant oranges, reds, and yellows that attract leaf-peepers. No matter. Cars from Missouri to Florida crowd the parking lot, waiting for others to pull out. Lines to the bathrooms run forty deep. German, Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic is spoken. Bachelorettes from Tennessee take pictures with Lake Fontana far below as backdrop. A Park Service sign quotes Muir’s “going to the mountains is going home” adage and, sure enough, thousands of “over-civilized people” are atop Clingmans today. The more intrepid tourists hike, sometimes eight abreast, the paved pathway to the concrete lookout tower. En route, they see swaths of dead trees for miles into the blue-green distance. Another Park Service sign says that 70 percent of the park’s firs have succumbed to the woolly adelgid that is destroying the high-country canopy. Yet another storyboard tells visitors that the park’s telltale smokiness is, at times, “air pollution, sulfate particles mainly from coal-fired power plants.”
The Smokies are the nation’s most popular national park, with a record twelve and a half million visitors in pre-Covid 2019—more than a million more than the previous year and nearly double the amount of the second most-visited park, the Grand Canyon. Its cost (free) and day’s drive from Atlanta, Washington, Nashville, and other big cities make the park a natural destination for outdoor-loving motorists.
The Smokies, though, are being loved to death. Nearly $250 million worth of roads, trails, bridges, buildings, and water-treatment facilities need fixing, according to an NPS study. The super-crowded Sugarlands Visitor Center outside Gatlinburg needs a total overhaul. Nearby, the seventy-five-year-old headquarters needs five million bucks.
I leave Clingmans Dome and drive down to Newfound Gap, where President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the park on Labor Day 1940. “We used up or destroyed much of our natural heritage just because that heritage was so bountiful,” he told the crowd. “We slashed our forests, we used our soils, we encouraged floods. We are at last definitely engaged in the task of conserving the bounties of nature.”
Maybe so, but the nation’s sixty-three national parks need more than twelve billion dollars in upgrades after years of neglect, paltry appropriations, and the country’s growing love of the outdoors. We’re killing the very thing we profess to love so much. Abbey, the writer and wilderness defender, rightly noted that “industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks.”
I park at an RV-only spot (all the other spots were taken) where another sign warns that the popular Trillium Gap Trail is closed four days a week “for trail improvements.” I duck behind the memorial plaza for a quick hike along the AT, which runs seventy of its most beautiful miles through the Smokies. Later, I learn that the entire AT itself needs nineteen million dollars in upgrades to trails, shelters, and access roads. This stretch alone is eroding in spots and hikers have doubled its typical eighteen-inch width. The trail, though, soon disappears into the familiar white-blazed woods.
In early 2014, the US Forest Service published one of my favorite government manuals of recent vintage. Granted, I’m a public-policy geek. But the Outlook for Appalachian-Cumberland Forests: A Subregional Report from the Southern Forests Future Project forecasts the future of the natural world across the Blue Ridge mountains in 2060. It’s an alarming read. The report is part of a voluminous, multiyear study by thirty federal, state, and university researchers to gauge the future impact of population growth, climate change, invasive species, timber prices, and wildfire on the South’s public and private forests. Nowhere is the threat more pronounced than in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“The Appalachian-Cumberland highland is forecasted to experience the highest growth rate of urban land use,” the report intones.
Cities and suburbs across the region currently cover four million acres; by 2060 they could comprise eleven million.
More people, naturally, translates into more visits to the Smokies and other parks and forests. Here’s one of my least favorite stats from the report: today, there’s about one-third of an acre of federal or state park land for every Southerner; by 2060, there’ll likely be less than one-sixth of an acre.
Want to car camp? Expect as many as two-thirds more campers—and RVs, trailers, and traffic jams—at your favorite roadside sleep spot. Backcountry camping? Wilderness areas in the South’s national forests could see a 72 percent increase in visitors.
Depressed, and determined to reach real wilderness before dark, I hurry down 441 to the abandoned village of Elkmont. The old timber town once bustled with a schoolhouse, a Baptist church, a post office, a baseball team, and a rail line running from Clingmans Dome to Townsend, Tennessee. The Little River Lumber Company chopped down nearly eighty thousand acres and began selling lots in 1910, first to the Appalachian Club and, two years later, to the Wonderland Club. The Appalachian was a social club founded by Knoxville swells who wanted to fish, swim, party, and get away from the summer heat. The Wonderland started as a members-only resort before allowing guests at its hotel and cabins. It closed in 1992 and, two years later, Elkmont was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
I shoulder my pack and head up the abandoned rail line now known as the Little River Trail. The river hums, cascading around huge boulders and creating mini-waterfalls. I pass fly fisherwomen returning from a day on the exceptionally clean river, which is home to a wealth of aquatic life, including the rare eastern hellbender, the salamander fondly known as a “snot otter,” “lasagna lizard,” or “devil dog.” The trail is also renowned for the thousands of synchronous fireflies that, in late spring, light up the forest in a surrealistic light show. (The Park Service runs a lottery to manage the legions of bug lovers.)
I soon pass the day trippers and have the forest seemingly to myself. The oaks, poplars, and sycamores cloak the river in summerlike green. After an hour I reach my permitted camp site, but continue up the trail a bit to a hidden stretch of river shrouded in rhododendrons. The drought precludes a campfire, but that’s okay. Reclining on a boulder, inches above the water, bourbon in hand, I let dusk melt over the forest, and me. I’m all alone. Except, maybe, for the bears that, I hear, are as thick as two per square mile in the Smokies. I hang my food bag a good distance away before crawling into my tent.
The next morning I wake early, pack quickly, and hotfoot it down the trail to my car and, sigh, Gatlinburg. I’m on a mission, albeit an unpleasant one, and I want to get in and out of town before the crowds. Three years earlier, a wildfire fueled by eighty-seven-mile-per-hour winds escaped the Smokies and danced malevolently around downtown Gatlinburg. Fourteen people died. Twenty-five hundred buildings were destroyed. It was the deadliest wildfire in Tennessee history.
According to the National Weather Service, “exceptional” drought plagued the Southeast in 2016. The summer was the second hottest in history. I was covering the Rough Ridge fire one hundred miles to the south a week before the Smokies burned. Fifty thousand acres in Georgia and North Carolina were scorched; thankfully, the fire hit a little-populated area along the border.
I once thought Southern wildfires were rare. I was wrong. While the West loses more acres annually to fire, the Southeast tallies more wildfires than any region in the country. Most fires, including the Chimney Tops 2 Fire that started November 23, 2016, are arson. Two boys—one fifteen, the other seventeen—were hiking the well-traveled Chimney Tops Trail while playing with matches. Fire spread slowly through the desiccated underbrush but didn’t unduly alarm park officials who scouted the trail that afternoon. And the terrain, dotted with big boulders and imposing cliffs, was too steep for a fire line, according to an after-action report by the Park Service. It was a holiday week, too, and most firefighters were gone. An eighth of an inch of rain fell the following day, Thanksgiving, further assuaging Park Service fears. By then, only eight acres had burned.
The fire grew slowly over the weekend, to thirty-five acres by late Sunday, and remained near the twin-peaked Chimney Tops. Park officials began to worry; the forecast predicted strong winds Monday. Helicopters made their first water drops. Ground crews, though, deemed the terrain too risky and stayed away.
Everything changed Monday. High winds from the south and west swooped through the valleys, up the drainage basins, and over the ridges. The fire jumped US 441 and the Little Pigeon River and ignited the western slope of Mount Le Conte early in the day. More than 250 acres were burning. It spotted again—hopscotching back over the highway—and scorched a fifty-acre tract. And again, just a mile and a half from Gatlinburg.
“It bounced from ridgetop to ridgetop,” the incident commander told investigators. It “jumped roads, jumped trails, jumped wet drainages and wide creeks. . . . There’s no way this stuff could be humanly stopped.”
Just about all of the hundred firefighters, with their trucks and bulldozers, were sent to Mynatt Park on the edge of town and just a short hop to cabins, hotels, and downtown Gatlinburg. It was a last line of defense, and it was futile. The fire crossed 441 yet again and headed towards Ober Gatlinburg and its ski trails. Telephone poles snapped in the wind. Transformers exploded. Buildings all over town, mostly on the outskirts, were on fire. Downed trees blocked escape routes. Firefighters were overwhelmed, unable to respond to every blaze. Thick smoke disoriented the town’s panicked residents. Some never got out.
A visitor would be hard-pressed today to find signs of the fiery apocalypse that descended upon the “Gateway to the Great Smoky Mountains” (smoky indeed). I tried, though. I read a bunch of articles and plotted a map of Gatlinburg’s homes, shops, and hotels torched by the fire. Empty concrete pads on the eastern and northern hillsides overlooking the downtown offered unmistakable proof of the fire’s wrath. Only the automobile bays remained at Ogle’s Market and 73 Car Wash. El Soñador restaurant was gone, as was the Country Town N’ Suites motel, except for a set of concrete steps leading nowhere. At the Robert E. Lee Motel, a cliffside lodge renowned for shuffleboard, wall-to-wall carpets, and rocking-chair ambiance, a worker paused to assess the charred mess.
“Everything burned,” she said.
Will you rebuild?
“We’ll see.”
Most of Gatlinburg voiced no such hesitation. The Roaring Fork Baptist Church (“Come grow with us”) rebuilt quickly with original stone and beige siding. The Alamo Steakhouse looks as it did before the fire. Builders are busy replacing the cabins that once dotted the hillsides surrounding town. In the two years since the fire, Gatlinburg issued four hundred permits to rebuild properties. In the two years before, it had issued sixty-one.
Henri Grissino-Mayer isn’t surprised. But he is worried. Grissino-Mayer, a geography professor at the University of Tennessee in nearby Knoxville, and an expert on wildfires, spent the previous decade giving lectures entitled “Will Our Great Smoky Mountains One Day Go Up in Flames?” The professor describes the cabins rising one on top of the other as “fire dominoes.”
Gatlinburg is an extreme, though increasingly common, example of the “wildland–urban interface” phenomenon reconfiguring the American landscape where houses encroach upon forests and grasslands. WUI (pronounced “woo-eee”) has been the fastest-growing type of land use in the country in the last thirty years. Homes near forests pose two problems: more people means more chances a fire will start; and the wildfires, in turn, pose a greater risk to lives and property. Unlike rural, uninhabited areas, firefighters can’t just let the fires burn themselves out.
Nationwide, one of every three homes sits in the WUI, according to the University of Wisconsin. Increasingly, Americans are answering Muir’s call of the mountains: more than forty-three million new houses were added to the WUI between 1990 and 2010. And the South notched the greatest increase in WUI land in the country. Sixty percent of Sevier County, home to Gatlinburg, lies smack dab in WUI World.
“This is the greatest concentration of people in the wildland–urban interface in the nation,” Grissino-Mayer told the Knoxville News Sentinel. “We are ground zero.”
A warming climate, and droves of mountain-loving newcomers, will only make matters worse. Retiring baby boomers. Climate refugees. (A 2017 University of Georgia study predicts that rising seas will send tens of thousands of coastal residents to the southern Appalachians.) Snowbirds disdainful of Florida. Covid-fleeing urbanites. And, of course, all the service industry workers to cater to the invading hordes. With the national forests and parks off-limits to development, new homes will edge closer and closer to the wild—with deadly consequences. The Forest Service predicts a fourfold increase in the number of acres burned by wildfires by 2050.
I escape Gatlinburg and head home to Atlanta, but not before one final Smoky Mountains adventure. Alas, I’m too late. The early-morning crowds beat me to Cades Cove, the postcard-perfect valley with fields of goldenrod surrounded by fog-shrouded mountains. Cades Cove is the most-visited Smoky attraction due to the eleven-mile loop road that plugs visitors into nature without their having to leave their SUVs. That, and the “bear jams” when traffic comes to a dead stop so visitors can snap photos of the park’s iconic bruins. Sometimes people get out of their cars for a better shot. Sometimes they feed the bears. Sometimes people are dumb. Park Service signs warn self-styled bear whisperers to stay fifty yards away or else they “can be injured or killed.”
It’s not surprising that Cades Cove was almost destroyed. In the 1930s, a governor worried that nobody would visit the “impoverished farmland” and wanted to build a lake with a dam sixty feet high and four hundred feet wide because, after all, dam-building was all the rage at the time and the Western parks all had lakes for recreation, didn’t they? Thankfully, environmentalists won the day.
I join the five-mile-per-hour procession of cars and trucks on the loop road. The fog lifts. The scenery is lovely. But no tourist-friendly bears materialize on cue. A gristmill, three churches (Primitive Baptist, Missionary Baptist, Methodist) and numerous log houses and barns have been restored. A white hearse waits outside the one-room Methodist church while funeral-goers mill about. It reminds me of the Chimney Tops fire. Charges were dropped against the boys who allegedly set the fire, with the prosecutor pointing instead at the “unprecedented, unexpected, and unforeseeable” winds. The Park Service’s after-action report blames understaffing and an inability to anticipate the danger posed by the fire. It also takes the Service to task for not warning townspeople quickly enough. And it offers a warning.
“To be sure,” the report says, “these same conditions are likely to align again in the future to allow for a large-scale wildfire that leaves the park and burns into the urban interface.”