Southern Appalachian Digital Collections

Tramping in the Great Smokies

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  • \°)Z7 DESPITE THEIR WILDNESS, THE GREAT SMOKIES ARE THE FRIENDLIEST MOUNTAINS IN THE WORLD With illustrations by I lie author' T F hit's mountains you want you've shore got 'em here, just as many as your eye can look at." My Smoky Mountains guide settled himself on a rock, took a chew of tobacco and gazed contentedly about him. It was my first trip to Siler's Bald, one of the noteworthy peaks on the high central range of the Great Smokies, which for sixty miles marks the boundary between Tennessee and North.Carolina, and I was standing practically in the center of the proposed Great Smoky Mountains National Park area. The guide was right. There were mountains all around us, more than the eye could see or the mind could comprehend. I was standing at the apex of a dome-shaped grassy meadow several acres in extent, fringed with a grove of beeches dwarfed by wind and weather. Looking out over an unending sea of mountains cl tumbled and massed confusingly, I suddenly realized that "Top of Smoky" as the main divide is affectionately called by the mountain people, is literally the tops of many high ridges, which branch off into North Carolina and Tennessee and are connected by other mountains or narrow ridges. To reach Siler's Bald we had motored fifty-two miles from Knoxville to Elkmont, through Sevierville, up the •Copyright, 1927, by Laura Thornborough. gorge of Little Pigeon to Gatlinburg and over Sugar- land Mountain, climbing from-600 feet at Knoxville to 2.400 feet at Elkmont, where the real climb begins. We took the Dripping Rock Hill trail up Miry Ridge, then followed the top of the ridge to where it "heads Up on Smoky." Dwellers in the North or East who aspire to real mountain climbing need not travel to the Alps or Apennines, to the Rockies or Sierras, for Miry Ridge and Siler's Bald and Mt. Le Conte are less than a thousand miles away, half that from the National Capital. Almost at the front door of two thirds of the population of the United States is a land of primeval forests, beetling cliffs, sheer precipices and high mountains, some of them still unnamed and unexplored. In the wildest sections of the Great Smokies impenetrable forests, jungles of laurel and rhododendron, unscalable cliffs, bar the way of the would be explorers. To reach Siler's Bald I had climbed all of eight miles, part of it up what seemed like a deep well lined with wet, slippery, moss-covered rocks. On top of the ridge I found a deep, rich loam into which I sank over my shoe-tops when I skated off the roots of rhododendron which formed an arch over head. But those hours I spent on Siler's Bald in silent contemplation of Nature's masterpieces well repaid me for the climb. Here was unbelievable wildness and grandeur; here were a -Wn-, nmtnc&n T^c^sie ij^f*, *^r\ &osst~ L.^o ( /^UL^u^f |<S&7
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