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THE LIVING BEAUTY OF THE BLACK MOUNTAINS
By Stephen Schoof
[originally published April/May
1999 Blue Ridge Country]
 Last October I had the rare chance to hike my favorite
mountains in perfect weather. Stephen Thacker and I stumbled
upon three days when North Carolina’s Black Mountain Crest
Trail was neither locked in clouds, as it is 80 percent of the
summer, or blocked by road closures, like it is much of the
winter. This time, warm sunlight illuminated valleys of peak
leaf color and views stretched to infinity. The sky was so clear
we gambled on the fickle mountain weather and left our bulky
tents behind.
By far the most popular of the Black Mountains is 6,684-foot
Mt. Mitchell, the highest in the East. In recent years, Mitchell
is known more for its acid rain and insect-killed forests
than for its high-altitude appeal. Predictably, Stephen and I
left the summit parking lot on a narrow path surrounded by tall
gray toothpicks that were once healthy Fraser firs.
Less predictably, this was the worst spot on the route, and it
didn’t last long. Soon we dropped into a living forest, where
cold-tolerant evergreens and boreal animals still evoke the
Canadian heritage of an ecosystem pushed south by glaciers
18,000 years before Christ.
Seeing more dead trees didn't spoil our
trip. We leisurely covered twelve miles of forest and vista,
sleeping under the stars and climbing six 6,000-foot
summits. As we reached trail’s end
below the secluded headwaters of Bowlens Creek, I knew, once
again, how Thomas Nuttall felt after exploring Linville Gorge
two centuries ago: "I could not think of a better life than
climbing the mountains."
Modern camp stoves and well-worn trails take away little of
the wildness that greeted the Blacks’ first explorers. No one
knows who reached the summits first, although Cherokee Indians
held mountain ceremonies and white settlers grazed animals
in high meadows. Famed botanist Andre Michaux climbed high enough to
observe northern species in the late 1700s, but it wasn’t
until 1835 that a scientist, minister, and professor named
Elisha Mitchell put the peaks on the map.
 Mitchell made the week-long trip from Chapel Hill in June of
that year, focusing his studies on "Geology; Botany; Height
of the Mountains; Positions by Trigonometry; Woods, as of the
Fir, Spruce, Magnolia, Birch; Fish, especially trout; Springs;
Biography, &c. . .". It was a plan befitting a man
known on the UNC campus as "the walking encyclopedia,"
with a schedule that would make many an ambitious baby-boomer
sick with envy. Not only did he teach eight subjects, he wrote
textbooks, preached at one of two churches most Sundays, and
filled a variety of civic positions. He also happened to have
five children, whom he taught himself.
Mitchell traveled the Blacks with local guides, using
barometers and complex formulas to calculate elevations for
several summits. The work exhausted the energetic 41-year old.
"The roughness of the sides and top of the Black Mountain
is likely to prevent [its] being often ascended from motives of
curiosity and pleasure," he once predicted. His day trip to
present-day Mt. Mitchell covered eighteen miles with a
3,800-foot elevation gain, where ". . . between one and two
miles, it is thro’ thick laurels and along a bear trail."
For his efforts, Mitchell showed that his mountain was
probably the highest in the United States, which at the time
extended no farther west than Missouri. More importantly, he
destroyed the old assumption that New Hampshire’s Mt.
Washington was higher. The enthusiastic editor of the Raleigh
Register took new pride in his state, proclaiming, "we
now have it in our power . . . to LOOK DOWN upon such of our
arrogant sisters of the [nation] as may insolently venture to
taunt us with inferiority."
The professor’s work was not without controversy. In 1855,
Congressman Thomas Clingman climbed the high peak, then claimed
that Mitchell had never done so. Two men who were once close
friends grew farther apart as each defended his claims in
newspaper articles and personal pamphlets. Just when Clingman
had the upper hand, Mitchell died suddenly in the Black
Mountains, instantly becoming a martyr to his cause.
My personal obsession with the Blacks began with summer work
at Mt. Mitchell State Park. Living in a barracks an hour from
civilization, I had plenty of time to discover a vast expanse of
rugged lands just beyond the busy park facilities. In addition
to rare alpine ecology, morning and evening hikes revealed
fantastic sky colors, storm clearings, moonrises, and occasional
alpenglow. Nighttime drives caught bear, deer, and bobcat in the
headlights.
 Yet, I realized how little of this is apparent to the many
visitors who drive to the summit parking lot, walk 300 yards to
an observation tower, and leave, all at midday when the Black
Mountains are least impressive. In either harsh, hazy sun or
spooky low clouds, the infamous dead trees stand out like
needles in an oversized pincushion. Rangers hear "What’s
killing the trees?" more than any other question.
The park’s 3/4-mile Balsam Nature Trail tackles the
issue on the first page of its guidebook. Hikers need
only feel brisk winds and cool air in July to appreciate the winter
weather that has always killed some trees. Gusts over
100 miles per hour whip into spruce and fir heavy with rime
ice in temperatures as low as -32E
F.
The remaining stressors are man-made. Beginning in 1912,
Mitchell’s virgin timber fell to unregulated logging practices
that had about the same environmental impact as napalm. Intense
fires burned deep into soils that eroded as forest canopies
vanished. Less than three years later, adventurer D. R. Beeson
explored the range and remarked, "The whole mountain from
here to the top on the east side is bare and burned over and not
a pleasant sight at all."
Governor Locke Craig wasn’t impressed either, especially
after being invited to a grand opening of the mountains’ new
logging railroad: "When I looked all around, where I had
been bear hunting as a boy, and saw this vast desolation all
below, I told them they had gotten the wrong man to come up and
celebrate the opening of their railroad. I felt like a man that
stood amidst the ruins of his home after the conflagration had
destroyed it." Craig described Mt. Mitchell as a
"sacred place" given by God, and went on to establish
the first 525 acres of North Carolina’s first state park in 1916.
Though the scattered meadows where Stephen and I camped are legacies of "scorched earth" logging,
the forests largely recovered. Today's standing dead timber is
the result of quieter but far more complex processes that
increase the pressure of natural stresses.
Visitors have to look hard to find the white fuzzy patches on
bark that give away balsam woolly adelgids, microscopic insects
that attack Fraser firs but ignore red spruce. Often considered
a natural threat, adelgids were actually imported to the U.S.
from Europe on transplant trees, making them a human input.
Since 1955, they have fed heartily in the Blacks, usually
attacking older trees whose cracked bark permits easy entry. The
new saplings that sprout beneath dead timber will probably succumb as soon as they reach maturity.
Meanwhile, the soupy low clouds that obscure visitors' views and give
park workers claustrophobia pose serious threats for
plants. High elevations make acid "rain" irrelevant, as trees absorb toxic compounds from
clouds
themselves. Cloud-borne nitric acid, sulfuric acid, and
other pollutants arrive from as far away as the Ohio Valley. When
rain does fall, heavy metals accumulate and soil acidifies.
 Pollution from power stations and automobiles also react with
organic compounds to produce low-level ozone, which hinders
plants’ metabolic processes. Though present at other
elevations, ozone persists longer and causes more stress at high
elevations, particularly at night. Coupled with acid
deposition, we get burned needles, withered roots, and
weakened trees.
So, which factor does the most damage? This is a bit
controversial and, perhaps, ultimately irrelevant. Logging is
spilt milk, harsh weather is beyond control, and the
balsam woolly adelgid has eluded predators and safe
insecticides. Air pollution is all the public can change, but
proving its part in forest decline has been difficult,
politically speaking. Suffice it to say that the same pollution has
been proven to harm human health and limit visibility by 80% in the
southern Appalachians, which gives a hike on some trails the
same basic effect as climbing a Houston high-rise.
Still, the mountains of Michaux and Mitchell have hardly
disappeared. Consider that the moody cover of S. Kent Schwartzkopf’s A
History of Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains portrays a
whole foreground of skeletal trees – not surprising, except it
comes from an engraving made way back in 1874. On a purely
aesthetic level, perhaps the greatest difference between the old days and now is not
the condition of the forests but the way we typically travel
them. By 1929, veteran hiker C. Hodge Mathes was already
writing of Mt.
Mitchell’s new roads and tower with a sense of loss:
This mountaineering de luxe does not give much of a thrill
to those of us who used to camp under the big [rock] just below
the top. . . . Dearer to us were those never-to-be-forgotten
nights under the stars, where the cool wind in the balsams and
the occasional scream of a wild cat or a mountain owl gave us a
weird sense of solitariness, knowing we were the only human
beings in the vast loneliness of the Black Mountains."
The park for which I worked has grown considerably from its
founders’ vision. With 1,800 acres at last count,
opportunities for both "mountaineering de luxe" and
primitive wildness flourish in keeping with a 1937 master plan
that limited development in some areas while allowing creature
comforts in others. Sweaty hikers can finish remote, multi-day
treks at the park restaurant, where fine steaks, mountain trout,
and tender chicken are served under a high wooden ceiling with picture windows overlooking Mt.
Mitchell’s southwestern slopes.
 The park’s limited official acreage belies the sizable
expanse of wild lands contained in the Blacks but managed by
other agencies. Drivers are understandably confused after
turning from the National Park Service’s Blue Ridge Parkway
onto N.C. Highway 128, which leads to Mt. Mitchell State Park
through land managed by the U.S. Forest Service. A huge private
hunting preserve separates public land between the two major
ridgelines.
All told, the range offers more than 20,000 acres to the
public, the equivalent of a quarter of the total Parkway. Sixty
miles of hiking and horse trails vary in degree from the wild
and woolly Black Mountain Crest Trail to the unusual Trail of
Four Senses on the restaurant lawn, where blind visitors follow
a roped course while cassette tapes interpret points of
interest.
Those who want the full experience must search their favorite
guidebooks and relevant topo maps. The park brochure leaves off
many of my favorite haunts, such as the northern eight miles of
the Black Mountain Crest Trail and, on the southern end of the
range, five exquisite miles of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail (see
Elizabeth Hunter’s article on page 48 of the Sept/Oct 1997 BRC).
It also ignores the entire western arm of peaks, where a
six-mile path alternates between needled stands of old-growth
spruce and grassy groves of beech and birch. Here, Elisha
Mitchell climbed an outcropping, scanned the crest, and first
noted that Mt. Mitchell was probably the highest point in the
area.
Distinct plant communities have always made the Blacks more
than a sky-high playground. Andre Michaux and Elisha Mitchell
began a scientific tradition that seized the chance to study
Southern Appalachian hardwoods and Canadian conifers within 3
miles of each other. This diversity was one good reason for
forming one of the U.S. Forest Service’s first Research
Natural Areas in the Middle Creek drainage below three of the
Blacks’ highest peaks.
 Set aside for "the purposes of maintaining biological
diversity, conducting non-manipulative research and monitoring,
and fostering education," more than 250 RNAs now allow
long-term studies in varied ecosystems across the country. The
Black Mountains’ RNA covers 1,263 acres, with more than 3,500
feet in elevation between the flanks of the South Toe River and
the summit of Balsam Cone. The writers of a 1932 reconnaissance
report extolled the tract’s virgin timber, commenting on the
"steep slopes and inaccessibility" that kept human
development to a minimum. I felt like I’d traveled in time as
I looked at an old map that showed isolated grazing fields,
mining prospects, and acre after acre of chestnut forests, just
recently infected with blight.
Whenever I mentioned the Middle Creek area, Don MacLeod’s
name came up. The botanist from Mars Hill College established
permanent field plots in 1981, then surveyed the relationships
between plant communities and environmental factors. His results
helped model future work in both the Blacks and the Great Craggy
Mountains, while university students used his plots for later
studies.
When I finally called MacLeod at home below the peaks, I
sensed the same spirit of adventure that drives others into the
mountains for sheer recreation. He, too, had discovered the
range’s unique appeal, both on and off established trails.
When he mentioned the time he felt like the "first white
person" to set foot in a certain cove, I could relate. The
joy of traveling such wild terrain often depends less on its
beauty than on the accompanying belief that no one else is
around to appreciate it.
Perhaps the whole long line of Black Mountain scientists and
explorers was similarly inspired. After Elisha Mitchell,
geographer Arnold Guyot painstakingly remeasured the major
summits, producing figures that fall within forty feet of the
N.C. Geodetic Survey’s 1993 satellite data. Paleontologist
Edward Cope appeared in the 1860s, hypothesizing that many of
the animals he observed were identical to those 1,000 miles to
the north. William Brewster and J. S. Cairns proved him right in
the 1880s and ‘90s.
The U.S. Weather Bureau made Mt. Mitchell an official
recording site in the 1920s and ‘30s, giving observers the
dubious thrill of gathering high-altitude data on long, windy
nights near the summit. (Mt. Mitchell has yet to beat its old
rival, Mt. Washington, which boasts the "world’s worst
weather" and the planet’s all-time wind record of 231
mph.)
In the 1980s, Dr. Robert Bruck investigated acid deposition in
various plots on the mountain. Though his work supplied
convincing evidence that pollution plays a major part in tree
decline, funding was cut within ten years. Bruck still checks
his old plots every year, and a station on Clingman’s Peak
monitors cloud chemistry, but, as of this writing, that is the
extent of acid deposition research in the Black Mountains.
Elisha Mitchell’s death in the Blacks in 1857 caused quite
a stir, beginning with the immediate problem of finding his
body. The terrain was so formidable that, at one point, the
hardy search party suggested giving up until vultures circled
over his location. Only  after a local tracker named Big Tom
Wilson took over did they pick up Mitchell’s trail. Scrambling
alone in the tangled underbrush, the professor had slipped from
a 40-foot waterfall, drowning in the pool below.
Today, no trail connects the crest to the falls, which is on
private land. On a clear July morning, Stephen Thacker and I
plunged into dense forest above Mitchell Creek, hoping to find
the historic spot. After endless contortions through
rhododendron thickets, slick boulders, and downed timber, we
reached a loud cascade above an unmistakable dark pool. I set up
my camera for long exposures while Stephen climbed a rock beside
the water. The resulting images bear a striking resemblance to a
picture in the park museum, with Big Tom sitting on the same
rock around the turn of the century.
Experiences like this remind me that the Black Mountains are
very much alive, despite the tragic decline of two prominent
tree species.
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