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WCU - Great Smoky Mountains - A Park for America

Early Explorers in the Great Smokies

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Item 1 - Early Explorers in the Great Smokies
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Early Explorers in the Great Smokies

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Early Explorers in the Great Smokies

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Item’s are ‘child’ level descriptions to ‘parent’ objects, (e.g. one page of a whole book).

  • Early Explorers in the Great Smokies 6/ From this point the chain gradually descends. The black verdure of the balsam firs which elsewhere crown the highest summits gives way to the green foliage of the Beeches and Oaks. After a short turn to the west it sends a long and powerful ridge, called the Forney Ridge, to the southwest, to the Little Tennessee. From the head of the Forney Ridge, the Big Stone Mt., 5614 feet, the main chain continues nearly due west, then curving gradually to the southwest, terminates near the deep cut of the Tennessee in the Great Bald, 4922 feet. All this portion of the Smoky Mountains from Forney Ridge is used by the Tennesseans for grazing cattle. Numerous paths, therefore, run up the western slopes, and along the dividing ridge. But the eastern slope is still a wilderness, little frequented. Here the Little Tennessee cuts that high chain by a deep, winding chasm, in which no room is left for a road on its immediate banks, the mountain nearby rising to 3000 feet above it and upwards, the point where it leaves the mountains being barely 900 feet- above the level of the sea. Much of Guyot's interest was centered in the ascertaining of the precise altitudes of the various mountains. He had neither the time nor the facilities necessary to run a line of levels to all these points, so he was forced to content himself with a barometric survey, a method that is always susceptible to much error. To guard against this, he enlisted the services of other interested persons as observers at his stationary instruments, while he, in the field, never relied upon a single reading, but took a series at each spot. The convenient and compact aneriod barometer was not in use in his day, only the much larger and more delicate mercurial instrument. To one who has pushed his way through the jungle-thick vegetation of the more remote parts of the Smokies, even in this late day when trails of, a sort exist, there can be no more striking illustration of the zeal that actuated this great explorer than a mental picture of him, with but a single companion, struggling up the steep, trackless, laurel-tangled slopes of Smoky, burdened with supplies for a week or more, and handicapped still more by a bulky, fragile barometer, that must be most carefully protected from any rude contact that might wreck beyond repair its delecate mechanism. But though laboring under such difficulties, so painstaking was Guyot with his observations and subsequent calculations that the figures he cites for the various points in the Smokies seldom vary
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Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).

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Great Smoky Mountains - A Park for America

This digital collection was created to contribute to the public's understanding of the forces and ideas that led to the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934. The most vi...

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