Southern Appalachian Digital Collections

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Great Smokies

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

  • Tuckaseegee Falls on the border of the great park eastward the visitors will behold a sea of wooded mountains as far as the eye can reach. At times the touring parties will be above the clouds; at times they may witness the strange phenomena of thunderstorms or rainbows far below them in the mountain gulfs. East of the Indian Gap, on the way from Mt. Collins to Mt. Guyot, there is a different formation. Here is the roughest and wildest mountain region in all eastern America. The divide here is saw-toothed and so sharp-edged that an adventurous mountaineer is dizzly poised above slopes so steep on either hand that a misstep might plunge him hundreds of feet down into Tennessee or North Carolina, according to which way he slipped. So rugged is this part of the Smokies that no road will ever be built over it, nor even a bridle path. It is better so. Let its crags and peaks remain forever inviolate for the enjoyment of those hardy and daring climbers who wield the alpenstock and carry their bed and board upon their own backs. The most luring feature of the Smoky Mountains is their extraordinary variety of trees and plants. Botanists, from Bartram in 1791 to Trelease in 1924, have found here the richest collecting ground in the United States. In a two-day ramble and scramble among the Smokies one may see more species of indigenous trees and shrubs than in a cross-continent trip from Boston to the Pacific Coast. The forests of all Europe have only eight-five species of native trees; the Smoky forest has one hundred and twenty-seven, not counting many shrubs that here assume arborescent form. There is a huckleberry tree that grows twenty to thirty feet high; the mountain laurel and the great rhododendron reach thirty to forty feet, with trunk diameter of twelve to eighteen inches. Going from a neighboring river valley up to "the top o' Smoky," one passes successively through the same floral zones, in a twenty-mile hike, as he would view- in a trip from mid-Georgia to southern V J
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Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).