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

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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 uhaka system, corresponding to the Alleghanies farther north. The Saoky range runs parallel with the Blue Ridge, some forty to fifty miles away. It is part of the northwestern escarpment of the Appalachians, over* looking the great valley that spreads thence westward to the Cumberland plateau. The crest of the Smokies is the state line between North Carolina and Tennessee. The Smokies are unknosn to the world of tourists simply beoause there are no roads through them, nor oven 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 accurate map of the district 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 baok 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 Isolation! For the Great Smoky Mountains are not on the other side of the earth or somewhere remote in tropic or arotio solitudes they are midway between the Atlantio and the Mississippi, midway between the Great Lakes and the Gulf, and nearer the
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Object’s are ‘parent’ level descriptions to ‘children’ items, (e.g. a book with pages).