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Last of the Eastern Wilderness: An Article on the Proposed Great Smoky National Park

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  • wcu_great_smoky_mtns-11052.jp2
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  • Carolina, has repeated this blunder. It is like confounding the Alleghanies with the Blue Ridge in Pennsylvania. Let us get it right. In western North Carolina the Blue Ridge is the southeastern rampart of the Appalachian mountain zone. It fronts toward the Piedmont and part of it borders on South Carolina. The Smokies are a segment of the Tjhaka system, corresponding to the Alleghanies farther north. The Smoky range runs parallel with the Blue Ridge, some forty to fifty miles away. It is part of the northwestern escarpment of the Appalachians, overlooking the great valley that spreads thenoe westward to the Cumberland plateau. The crest of the Smokies is the state line between North Carolina and Tennessee. The Smokies are unknoTOi to the world of tourists simply beoause there are no roads through them, nor even trails in the wilder and rougher parts. Fully six hundred square miles of this region consist of uninhabited forest wilderness. Last summer it was neoessary to make an acourate map of the distriot for use of the Appalachian Park Commission. The work could not be done on the ground in time for the commission's report, and so an army aviator, Lieutenant Williams, flew back and forth over the Smokies for many weeks, making a photographic map from the air. He did not see a house or a human being, except in a few spots where some lumbermen were at work. What a strange survival of primitive conditions, what astonishing isolationl For the Great Smoky Mountains are not en the other side of the earth or somewhere remote in tropic or arotio solitude* they are midway between the Atlantic and the Mississippi, midway between the Great Lakes and the Gulf, and nearer the -3-
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