A Hike Into Heaven's Hell

A Hike Into Heaven's Hell Tim Homan Last Fall, on the Friday before Halloween weekend, I led a Georgia Conservancy hike up Alum Cave Trail for an overnight stay in the rustic cabins on Mount LeConte, one of the highest peaks in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Tucked in the fir trees and mist near the summit, a concession left over from the days before the Park was created offers hikers a roof and dining-hall meals (supplies hauled by pack llamas) near the renowned vistas from Myrtle Point and Cliff Top, the seemingly symmetrical sentinel points on either side of the highest rise, called High Top . Half a dozen treks to the top of LeConte had long convinced me that the cabins offered the ideal over-night situation: the chance to avoid both carrying a fullbackpack and sharing the mountain's three-sided shelterwith strangers—a muchhigher -thanimagined percentage of whom view sunset as the universal signal to start drinking and yahooing. Many hikers, myself included, rank Alum Cave Trail—with its cascading streams, jutting cliffs, overhanging bluff, hole-in-the-wall windows, spruce-fir forest, numerous open views into the South's wildest mountain country—the most unusual and scenic path in the Park, and perhaps the most spectacular route in all of the Southern Appalachians. The five-mile-long treadway, which starts at an elevation of 3,840 feet and ends at approximately 6,320 feet, was once known as "the path with a continuity of thrills." Before the trip I wrote two speeches. The first talk, which I intended to give at the trailhead, consisted primarily ofbackground information concerning the mountain and its spruce-fir forest. The second speech, which I hoped to deliver atop LeConte, dealt with the current plight of the SouthernAppalachian spruce-fir community. I read my first speech to my wife, Page, seeking her advice: LeConte's Spruce-Fir Forest Our southern mountains, specifically the Blacks and Smokies, rise to the rooftop of the Appalachians—the longest seam of wildness still gracing the East. At 6,593feet, Mount LeConte is thefourth highest peak in the Southern Appalachians, which also ranks it thefourth loftiest summit in eastern North America: tall enough to plow upside-down furrows in passing clouds. The mountain now bears the name of Joseph LeConte, a nineteenth-century 55 geographer and naturalist. Because the silhouette ofits three rounded peaks resembled afrog's head, the Cherokee revered the mountain as Walasi yi, our tongue's attemptfor their great green mythicalfrog that once sat astride the mountain's highest ridge, blending in with the dark viridian ofthe conifers. The last in a long series ofglaciations, known as the Wisconsin Ice Age, began grinding southward some 75,000 years ago and continued, with occasional thaws, until roughly 16,000 years ago. During the peak of this onslaught, approximately20,000years ago, theglaciers entombed the northern halfto two-thirds ofNorth America. In the East, these Pleistocene ice sheets, oftenforming unbroken domesfrom one to more than three miles thick,flowed southward intopresent-dayPennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The interglacial period we are in now, the Holocene, reachedfull stride about 10,000 years ago. Even though the glaciers never scoured the South, the climate was rockcrackingcold in the highAppalachians. Then, as now, Mount LeConte's height dramatically compressed latitude, creating an ecological island in the sky: tundra, a land without trees. Twenty thousand years ago, an alpine zone of tundra clenched the land here above 4,500feet in permafrost. Downslopefrom the sub-alpine band ringing the mountain, Walasi yi wore a skirt of boreal forest that surged southward into middle Georgia Trees are not the sticks-in-the-mud that most people imagine. The North Country species marched ahead of the advancing glaciers, a slow-moving migration to thesouth. As the wall ofice retreated and the land's prison melted to longflood, the conifers struck outfrom their base camps and recloaked the highest peaks in the South. As the weather continued to warm, the conifers followed their genetic imperativesfurther north and higher up the southern mountains. Today, the SouthernAppalachian spruce-firforestand its attendant community are stranded up high on islands ofCanadian Zone refugia Always helpful and...