Ultimate Smoky Mountains by Andrew Kyle Saucier

Author:Andrew Kyle Saucier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781493029327
Publisher: Globe Pequot Press

Thanks to the founding of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park these forests remain a national treasure, and the incredible diversity of species that entranced Asa Gray, Horace Kephart, Theodore Roosevelt, and millions of others can thrive once again.

The Balds

There is a great mystery to the balds, these rounded mountaintops that seem inexplicably bereft of the trees that cap nearly all the other summits. Are they somehow natural meadows? Were some of them cleared by man for mountaintop grazing or use as hunting camps? Were there giant prehistoric bison or mastodon that fed upon the vegetation, leaving nothing but grass? No satisfactory answer has appeared to finally quell the speculation. Yet their allure is undeniable.

There are several such balds in the Great Smoky Mountains, with many more existing across Southern Appalachia, outside the bounds of the park. Some of the balds that existed at the time of the park’s creation have slowly become forested again. Others have not. As for Andrews and Gregory Balds–which may be the park’s two most well-known and often visited–the National Park Service deliberately maintains their baldness, such that some joke that they’re actually shaved.

Because these balds are at least partially if not completely clear of trees, their summits provide sweeping views of the surrounding landscape uncommon to other summits of similar altitude. This fact was not lost on author and artist Robert Mason, who was speaking of the view from Gregory Bald when he said: “No artist could paint it. To do so he would need to compete with the Master Painter using the heavens for a canvas, the sunset and rainbow for the palette, purple mists and winds out of the west for brushes.”

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