First things first! A rain-geared backpacker makes sure her feet are protected against blisters. The park offers more than 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) of trails, including 110 kilometers (70 miles) of the Appalachian Trail that stretches from Maine to Georgia.
It is difficult now to appreciate the pressure once exerted on the Appalachian highlands by human settlement. Back when land meant livelihood to a nation of agrarian people, the gradual pressure from the eastern coast, across the Piedmont, reached the Appalachian chain. The shortage of arable lands forced people into and finally onto the mountains in search of a plot of ground that would produce a livelihood. And so settlement came to the Great Smokies, gradually working its way up the mountainsides to the limits of cultivation. Grazing was eventually pushed beyond those limits all the way up the mountain to the balds. Combined overgrazing, overfishing, destructive logging practices, and overhunting would soon turn dense wilderness into a ravaged landscape. The National Park was authorized in 1926, established for protection in 1930, and established for development in 1934. And now, about 50 years later, wilderness is again in ascendancy, as field naturalist Napier Shelton amply testifies as he takes you exploring in Part Two of this handbook.
The wilderness richness here is both astounding and close at hand. Richness? There are more species of salamanders here—22—than in any other part of the world. In the lush density of the Smokies forests there are more tree species than in all of Northern Europe. It is thought that this sheer density of forest cover and its attendant transpiration help account for the “misty” character for which the Great Smoky Mountains are named.
This forest richness continues to unfold for present-day biologists, as the recent discovery of the paper birch in the Smokies attests. It had long been held that this northern species did not occur in Tennessee. Its range generally swings southward into New Jersey and then simply jumps along the Appalachians, appearing here and there as elevation and other conditions simulate northerly climes.
Peter White, plant ecologist with the National Park Service’s Uplands Biological Field Research Laboratory in the Smokies, discovered several of the trees one day when he went out to verify a paper birch sighted by three North Carolina graduate students two years before. “It was located on a manway or unmaintained trail,” White said, “right on the trail, one of the steepest in the park. So if you knew what you were looking for there was no missing it. Actually what we have here in the Smokies is called the mountain paper birch, which may or may not be a different species than the classic white birch which would be called the true or typical paper birch.”
White is fascinated with unusual plant occurrences. A major passion of his here in the Smokies is to track down the mystery of the circumpolar twinflower, Linnaea, collected from “the mountains of Sevier County in Tennessee” by amateur botanist Albert Ruth in 1891. This is the only report of the plant south of certain bogs in West Virginia, and White hopes to verify it.
“Ruth misidentified this Linnaea as partridgeberry and it wasn’t known about until 1934, when it came to the University of Tennessee with the Ruth Collection from Texas,” White said. “Jack Sharp at the university recognized its true identity and its significance.”
The Ruth Collection came to Tennessee because the university’s plant herbarium was destroyed by fire in the 1920s and the university sought to build it up again. The twinflower was discovered by the great botanist Carl Linnaeus in Finland and named for him by a friend. It occurs from Eurasia to North America as a northern species, hence the “circumpolar” description.
“There are pluses and minuses to believing the plant came from here,” White explained. “Ruth was a careful field botanist with a good eye, and many plants are named for him. He collected many species for the first time. But we also know from his collections that some of his labels are vague.”