vo l ume 9 #2
The old frontier, that put the hard fibre in the American spirit and the long muscles on the American back, lives and will live in these untamed mountains to give to the future generations a sense of the land from which their forefathers hewed their homes.
SMOK IES LIFE MA GA ZINE
—President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his dedication speech for Great Smoky Mountains National Park
E.E. Exline photograph of George Laymon, who lived in the Gum Stand area near Gatlinburg.
401014
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USA GSMA
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From the Editor: Who’s Preserving Your Heritage?
R
ecent stories in the national news have folks near and far talking about preserving heritage. While talking about preserving heritage is all well and good, the hard work of actually doing so is something else entirely. Here in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, several heroic individuals and organizations come to mind when the topic of successfully and accurately preserving history arises. The park’s historic preservation crew, including full timers Ted Chambers, Curtis Middleton, and Dale Stinnett, are responsible for painstakingly preserving over 100 historic structures so that the public can know something of 19th century mountain life. The structures range from elaborate and ornate frame churches to working gristmills to cantilevered barns to corncribs. Many years ago a local historian quipped that protecting a historic log building in the Smokies “is like preserving a paper plate in the rain.” Yet that is exactly the nature of their task and that is what they must accomplish. You may see them going about their business replacing the thousands of wood shingles that protect the massive barn at the Mountain Farm Museum, repairing the 19th century iron turbine that turns the stones at Mingus Mill, or shoring up the 18 cottages and other structures at Elkmont that were recently added to their already daunting “to do” list. The Adopt-A-Cabin volunteers do more than talk the historic preservation talk. They have chosen to spend their leisure hours watching over their assigned historic buildings while they clean up trash and graffiti in places like Cades Cove, Roaring Fork, and Little Greenbrier. Ditto for the historic demonstrators who offer us a glimpse of the past by making sorghum molasses, apple butter, hominy, quilts, cornmeal, music, and wooden toys. And if you have never attended one of the
free ranger-led tours of places like old Elkmont town, or a church in Cades Cove, or the Mountain Farm Museum, you owe yourself the pleasure of seeing history come alive through the words of a talented interpreter. In Columbia, SC, retired USC professor Dr. Michael Montgomery has dedicated much of his later life to preserving Smoky Mountain history by continuing the work of Joseph S. Hall, the linguist and songcatcher who so successfully documented mountain speech and culture during the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. Hall lugged notebooks and heavy recording equipment all over these mountains so he could document the vocabulary, speech, stories, and music of mountain farm families. Dr. Montgomery has toiled to both protect this documentation and to make it public. Despite having lost most of his eyesight and hearing, Montgomery and his assistants have produced such enduring works as the 710-page Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, the upcoming 1,000+ page Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English (UT Press, 2016), and a popular website of Hall materials. Readers of this issue’s article on Wilma Dykeman (pages 36-51) will note that when the future Tennessee State Historian decided she did not like the way her South was being portrayed by various journalists, she did more than grumble about a lack of respect for her heritage. Wilma and husband James Stokely loaded up the family truckster and embarked on a 13-state tour of the South. Up and down the backroads and byways they went, thoughtfully
interviewing hundreds of people, black and white, poor and rich, about their evolving attitudes toward race and their relationship to the land. Over the course of 18 months, Dykeman and Stokely turned these interviews into an award-winning book titled Neither Black Nor White so that future generations could know the details of their heritage. In their monkish “cells” beneath Sugarlands Visitor Center, librarian and archivist Michael Aday and curator John McDade work long hours at the often tedious and meticulous tasks of cataloging, cleaning, organizing, digitizing, protecting and presenting hundreds of thousands of historic photographs, letters, journals, documents, and artifacts so that scholars and citizens (if they be so inclined...) can discern an accurate picture of their forefathers and heritage. When the National Park Service approached Friends of the Smokies and Great Smoky Mountains Association for $1.6+ million to build a new historic collections preservation center to finally protect and present the Smokies vast artifact collection in the proper manner, the two nonprofits begged, borrowed, and begged some more to make the dream a reality (completion in 2016). Anyone passionate about their heritage needs to know that preservation doesn’t happen by default. If we want to walk the historic preservation walk as well as talk the historic preservation talk, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Give. Visit. Volunteer. Read. Respect. Attend. Make note. History really is every bit as fragile as a paper plate; and the forecast always calls for rain.
Steve Kemp Steve@GSMAssoc.org
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Volume 9 Number 2 $6.95 Publisher Great Smoky Mountains Association Contributing Editor Steve Kemp Lead Designer Lisa Horstman National Park Service Publications Liaisons Kent Cave, Elizabeth Dupree Designers Joey Heath Karen Key Editorial Assistance Claire Ballentine Julie Brown Cyn Slaughter Research Assistance Michael Aday John McDade Advertising Sales Curt Talbot ©2015 Great Smoky Mountains Association. No portion of this magazine may be reproduced without written permission from GSMA. Executive Director Terry Maddox Marketing & Membership Director Lisa Duff National Park Service Coordinator Elizabeth Dupree Great Smoky Mountains Association Board of Directors Danny Bernstein Geoff Cantrell Mitch Crisp, Treasurer Herb Handly, Vice Chair William A. Hart, Jr. George Kimberly Dan Lawson Carolyn Leahy, Secretary Cheryl Light, Chair Tom Massie Wayne Shepherd Ken Smither Cover photograph by Bill Lea Attention Retailers To carry Smokies Life in stores, contact Curt Talbot, Curt@GSMAssoc.org or (865) 436-7318 x350 Advertisers: Contact Curt Talbot, Curt@GSMAssoc.org or (865) 436-7318 x350 416 Cherry St., Gatlinburg, TN 37738. Printed in the U.S.A.
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Smokies Life (ISSN 1937-0725) is published semi-annually by Great Smoky Mountains Association, a nonprofit organization. P.O. Box 130, Gatlinburg, TN 37738-0130 (865) 436-7318. www.SmokiesInformation.org This magazine is a premium for members of Great Smoky Mountains Association. To join, change an address, or make other membership inquiries, contact membership and special events coordinator Judy Collins at the address above or Judy@GSMAssoc.org. Memberships start at $35 per year. No submissions of manuscripts, photographs, or art, please. Written queries are welcome. Copyright 2015by Great Smoky Mountains Association. Send address changes or other membership queries to Judy Collins at the address above or Judy@GSMAssoc.org. Periodicals postage paid at Knoxville, TN. Postmaster: Send all address changes to Judy Collins, GSMA, P.O. Box 130, Gatlinburg, TN 37738-0130 or Judy@GSMAssoc.org. www.SmokiesInformation.org
This magazine is printed on paper certified to the environmental and social standards of the Forest Stewardship Council® and is printed with vegetable inks.
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In This Issue Smokies Life Magazine Volume 9 Number 2
Wagons Without Wheels: The Humble Land Sled Inexpensive, simple to construct, and perfectly suited for mountain terrain, the land sled was an integral part of farming life. by Tom Robbins
Life in the Canopy What goes on in the uppermost layers of the forest? Does anything live up there? And who’s going to climb up there to find out? by Rose Houk
Deadly Derecho page 36
On July 5, 2012, one of the most violent and deadly storms ever to strike the Great Smoky Mountains ravaged the park’s extreme western region. With the power out, radios down, cell service nil, who ya gonna call? by David Brill
Wilma Dykeman: A Voice for the Smokies (and Humankind) Author Wilma Dykeman’s career spanned more than fifty years and included almost twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and hundreds of newspaper and magazine pieces. In her forthcoming book about women of the Smokies (excerpted here), Courtney Lix reveals the woman behind the writing. by Courtney Lix
Christmas in Cades Cove Styles of celebration changed over the years, culminating with an interesting blend of Santa Claus, New Year’s Eve, and the 4th of July. by Courtney Lix
From the Artifact Collection How did CCC enrollees spend their leisure time? Well, constructively, of course.
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Wagons Without Wheels: The Humble Land Sled by TomRobbins
For many, the word sled brings to mind children
sliding down snow covered hills, but for old-timers who grew up in rural areas where snow was a rarity, the word can trigger very different memories. On mountain farms of the past, what were sometimes called land sleds, ground sleds, or ground slides, were used yearSmokies Life
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round. Pulled by horses, mules, or steers, these “homegrown� pieces of farm equipment were employed for a variety of chores ranging from hauling firewood and crops to moving rocks out of fields. Smokies Life
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COURTESY SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, ANTHROPOLOGY ARCHIVES
At left, a Southern mountain sled loaded with hay.
Although “dry land sleds” could be found throughout the mountains and many other rural areas, little has been written about them, especially when compared to other farm equipment like plows or wagons, even though they have a long and distinguished history that stretches back thousands of years. The ground sled, or more appropriately “the sledge” to differentiate it from those used on snow, is the oldest COURTESY NATIONAL PARK ARCHIVES type of vehicle used by humans to move cargo. Its ancestry dates to prehistory to the first humans who realized they could move their few possessions more efficiently with a simple conveyance. Those first prehistoric vehicles were nothing more than two parallel poles with a platform made of wood, fiber or animal skin attached between the poles, sort of a wheelbarrow, minus the wheel and pulled instead of pushed. By using one end of the
poles as handles while the other end dragged on the ground, more cargo could be transported than could be carried on a person’s back. The “A” frame sledge, which is usually referred to as a travois in dictionaries, is often associated with the Plains Indians of North America. It was well suited to their environment where the ends of the poles moved easily across the grass lands of the plains. Those tribes first employed dogs, then horses after they were introduced to the Americas by Europeans. Using a travois, a dog could haul 20-30 pounds of cargo while a horse could move 100 pounds or more. The next step in the evolution of the sledge was the addition of runners. Just as with the travois, prehistoric people eventually discovered they could move larger loads using a vehicle with runners. This was especially true if the load was being moved across snow, ice, wet ground or even grass. The runners were made from poles or small logs with a platform attached to the tops of the runners. Depending on the size of the sled and the load, it was pulled by one or more people and later draft animals. There is evidence of land sleds being used on large-scale ancient construction projects. Some archaeologists believe the massive stones of Stonehenge in England, which was built 4,000-5,000 years ago, were moved using large sledges. Based on the weight of the stones, it’s estimated that at least 500 men using ropes were needed to pull the sledges. The ancient Egyptians employed sledges to move the massive
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Above, a Blackfoot Indian travois.
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COURTESY NATIONAL PARK ARCHIVES
COURTESY NATIONAL PARK ARCHIVES
Above, Jackson Ownby and his sons, Giles holding the reins and Lenard bringing up the rear, using a sled to haul wood for making shakes.
stone blocks used to build the pyramids. An Egyptian wall painting, dating back 4,000 years, shows 172 men hauling an immense statue by means of ropes attached to a large sledge. The oldest known existing sledge is a 4,600-year-old ceremonial chariot with runners that was found in a Sumerian (modern day southern Iraq) burial chamber. All of this might seem to indicate that sledges are something relegated to the ancient past, especially after the invention of the wheel at least 5,500 years ago. One encyclopedia entry about sledges even goes so far as to say that, except for those sleds designed specifically for use on snow and ice, “the arrival of the wheel and axle ended the use of the sledge.” However, farm sleds continued in year-round use long after wheeled wagons were readily available and for the same reasons they were still in use on some farms well into the 20th century. Historically, farm sleds were perfectly suited for use in the Southern mountains, where roads were sometimes nothing more than rough paths. Mountain residents even called these trails “sled roads” to indicate they were not suitable for any sort of wheeled vehicle. As one Smoky Mountain resident put it, “We just had sled roads. You couldn’t get over them with nothing but a sled..., and it’d go up over them big rocks and bumps.” Even place names like Sled Runner Gap on the North Carolina-Tennessee border are a reminder of how important these vehicles were in the past. In addition to rough roads, the topography of some mountain farms was another reason for the continued use of farm
At right, Press Ogle with a typical small sled.
sleds even for families with wagons. A wagon going down a steep hillside could prove difficult to control and there was always the danger of a wagon running over the animal pulling it. A sled was a safer alternative. Because of the friction between the runners and the ground, a sled was much less likely to slide out of control except on the very steepest slopes. In those situations, additional drag was provided by the use of a “rough lock,” a piece of heavy chain,wrapped around the front of a runner with the free end of the chain dragging under the runner to hopefully prevent the sled from going too fast. The bed of a sled was generally lower to the ground than that of a wagon so a sled was less likely to tip over on a steep slope The higher bed of a wagon had another disadvantage. When loading heavy objects, such as rocks to be
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A story related to me more than 30 years ago recounts how a farm sled has been an integral part of one family’s oral history. At the time the story was told to me I was responsible for the day to day operation of the national park’s Mountain Farm Museum located next to the Oconaluftee Visitor Center. One day, while working at the Farm Museum, I noticed an elderly lady standing at the entrance to the barn. She was talking to a group of ten or twelve people who, I found out later, were part of her extended family including some of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. As the rest of the family eventually moved on, the lady remained standing there, leaning on her cane, smiling and staring at one of the Farm Museum’s ground sleds. Curious as to why the sled seemed to hold her attention, I decided to ask. She said she was remembering a story from her own childhood that she had just been relating to her great-grandchildren. She said late one fall, when she was was about five years old, her father decided to build a new sled for the farm. He gathered all the materials he needed for the project and after breakfast the next morning began work on the sled. She told me that next to their house was a small building, enclosed on three sides and open on the front, half of which was used as a wood shed, the other half her father used as a sort of a work shop. It was in front of this building that he began building the new sled. Oh, and one thing you need to know,” she said, was that “our farm house was located along a single lane wagon road and was just a short distance from several churches, the local school, and the community general store and post office.” Because of its location, people walking, on horse
back, or in wagons passed their house on a regular basis. That day, as her father worked, neighbors passing by stopped to visit and make suggestions as to features they thought should be incorporated into the new sled. Her father, she recounted, was a quiet man who would never intentionally offend anyone, so he dutifully included each neighbor’s suggestions into the sled. She said her father finished the sled just before supper that evening and promptly dragged it out to the edge of their yard so it was just five or six feet from the wagon road. It was the last time the sled would ever move. The next morning he began work on a second sled and just like the day before, it wasn’t long before a neighbor stopped to make a suggestion about its construction. This time, however, she said her father pointed to the sled at the edge of the road and said “That’s your damn sled over there. I built that one for everybody else, this one’s mine.” She said as long as her father was alive the family never talked about the sled by the side of the road. It sat there, year after year, through the passing of her father and later her mother. Over the years as the wagon road became a two-lane dirt road then eventually a paved road, the sled still sat there slowly decaying and melting into the landscape. Through the years as the family gathered for reunions, birthdays and funerals, the story of her father’s sled was retold for succeeding generations. Even some of the elderly lady’s great-grandchildren could tell the story although they weren’t exactly sure what a ground sled was. On their visit to the park’s Mountain Farm Museum their great-grandmother was able to show them one and once again tell them the story of her father’s designed-by-committee land sled. —T.R.
moved from a field, it was much easier to lift and load them onto the lower bed of a sled. Additionally, the runners of a sled, which were usually made from small trees, had a greater surface area and tended to slide over soft or muddy ground where the narrow wheels of a wagon might bog down or become stuck. Sleds could also be used in forests, snaking between trees, where a wagon might not be able to go. Money was also a factor. Almost anyone with some woodworking skills and a few basic tools could build a sled. The same was not true of wagons, especially the wheels, which required special tools and skills to build and meant
that wagons had to be bought. In 1900 a small farm wagon might cost $20-$25. That doesn’t sound like a lot but in North Carolina in 1900 the average annual farm income was less than $200. A wagon would have been a major financial investment for many families. Because of their ease of construction, sleds could be built for a variety of jobs on the farm. One of the simplest sleds was one referred to as a forked sled because it was made from the fork of a young tree or a large forked limb. The sides of the “V” of the fork formed the runners while the point of the “V” was the attachment point for the draft animal’s harness. A
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Tom Robbins at the Oconaluftee Mountain Farm Museum uses a sled to move cornstalks from a field.
bed for this type of sled was created simply by nailing some boards across the legs of the “V.” In the North Carolina mountains the forked sled was often called a “lizard,” a name derived from its use in logging. When used for logging, a crosspiece was attached to the top of the runners so it spanned the open end of the “V.” Two uprights, called standards, were placed in large holes drilled into the top of each runner near the end of each leg of the “V.” To move a log with a forked sled, the butt, or bottom end of the log was placed on the crosspiece between the standards and secured in place with a chain or rope. As
the horse or mule pulled the forked sled, the log trailing behind it evidently reminded people of a lizard’s tail, hence the name. While some farmers used one sled for a variety of purposes, others built a different sled for each job on the farm. For example, a sled used primarily for moving large rocks might have a low bed resting directly on the runners or it might even be built without runners so that the solid plank bed slid on the ground allowing large rocks to be rolled directly onto the bed. Sleds used in the woods often had higher beds so they
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COURTESY NATIONAL PARK ARCHIVES
A boy works on a long land sled. Note the strongly curved runners, probably made from a sourwood tree. Sleds were better suited for the mountain terrain than wheeled wagons and easier to build and maintain.
could be pulled over rocks and stumps. A sled for hauling dirt or manure had high sides and was usually narrower than other sleds so it was easier to tip and dump the load. To quote an individual who was already an old-timer in the mountains of North Carolina when interviewed in the 1970s, “Dad made all his sleds. We had one we called a log sled...then we had a rock sled. And then we had one...we hauled our hay and corn and stuff like that. The rock sled would have a solid bed...and was built low down so we could roll rocks up from the ground on it.” Although sleds could vary greatly in size and construction, they often shared some common components including runners, a forepiece, the bed, and crosspieces sometimes called benches and standards. The runners were connected by the “forepiece,” a crosspiece that stretched between the fronts of the runners and was either mortised through or inset into the top of the runners. The forepiece had to be strong because it was the part to which the draft animal—horse, mule, or steer—was attached to the sled, so it was normally made from a tough wood like oak, hickory, or locust. In addition to the forepiece, flat pieces of wood, the crosspieces or benches, also spanned the gap between the runners. To create the bottom of the sled’s bed, boards paralleling the runners were usually nailed to the crosspieces. Or, if a sled with a low bed was needed, the crosspieces might be nailed directly to the tops of the runners. However, these crosspieces,
or benches, often rested on and were supported by the standards which were vertical pieces inserted into large holes drilled into the tops of the runners. Depending on the size of the sled there were usually four to six standards divided equally between the two runners. Because the standards also supported the sides of the sled, the taller the standards the higher the sides of the sled could be. Sleds with high sides were used for hauling things like corn and fodder while a sled for moving logs, fence rails, firewood, or cornstalks might have standards four to five feet high with no sides or ends on the bed. Of the primary components that sleds had in common, none was as important as the runners. As one source put it, a “sled is only as good as it’s runners.” While a number of different hardwoods could be used for the runners, in the Southern mountains sourwood (Oxydendrum arboreum) was the preferred wood. Sourwood is a small tree, mature ones are only about 50-60 feet tall, that has an unusual characteristic which makes it good for runners. While other woods had to be to be cut at an angle to create the upturned front of the runner, mature sourwood trees often have a natural bend about half-way to two-thirds of the way up the trunk. That natural bend, often just the shape needed for the front of a runner, along with the fact that the wood is dense, hard, close grained and not easily split, made sourwood ideal for sled runners. As one old-timer put it “made the runners out of sourwood mostly...Got them where they’d be crooked
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“We just had sled
with multiple tractors. Mules up…if we couldn’t get sourpulling narrow sleds with high wood, we got ash.” roads. You couldn’t sides were able to easily navThe question sometimes get over them with igate the space between the arises as to why sourwoods rows of tobacco plants. As have that natural bend. The nothing but a sled..., the tobacco leaves were hartree is a member of the heath vested, or “primed” as it was family, which includes shrubs and it’d go up over called, they were placed in the such as rhododendron and sled, which, when full, delivmountain laurel. Some botthem big rocks and anists have theorized that as ered the leaves to the tobacco the sourwood evolved from barn for curing. Of course as bumps.” shrub to tree it still retained tobacco farming changed and some growth patterns of became more mechanized, shrubs as evidenced by the natural bend of the trunk. sleds were eventually no longer needed. However, even the toughest, hardest wood used for runDespite sleds being so common in rural areas in the past, ners would eventually wear out. Sleds that were used frevery few original ones remain and their importance is often quently might need their runners replaced every six or overlooked. Because sleds were relatively easy and inexseven months, especially if used primarily on rocky ground. pensive to build, the construction of a new one would have One remedy to prevent them from wearing out so quickly caused little excitement for most families. At the same time, was to “half-sole” the runners with a tough wood like oak the purchase of a new wagon would have been a red letter or dogwood. The half soles were usually small diameter day because of the sizable investment needed to acquire one. trees, sometimes split in half along their length. They were Where the wagon might be parked in the barn where it was protected from the elements, a sled might not receive the attached to the bottom of the runners with wooden pegs same care since it was so easy to replace. Today, farm sleds instead of nails since the pegs would wear away at the same are mostly seen as artifacts, found primarily as static displays rate as the half-sole. Once they became too worn, the halfin agricultural exhibits, or if in use, reproduction sleds used soles were simply removed and replaced with new ones. This as part of a demonstration at a historic site or museum. v process would extend the life of the sled runners for years. Because of their ease of construction and versatility, ground sleds remained in use on some farms well into Author Tom Robbins of North Carolina worked as a park ranger and modern times. Growing up in tobacco farming country in historian in the Great Smokies and elsewhere for over 30 years. He has North Carolina in the 1950s and 60s, I remember mulewritten many articles for the Smokies Guide and other publications. drawn sleds still being used in tobacco fields even on farms This is his first story for Smokies Life.
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he C t a n n i o e py f i x L
It was a frigid October morning on Clingmans Dome. The concrete ramp up to the observation tower was slick with patches of ice. Crusty lichens on the trunks of the trees were draped with icicles. Clouds raced overhead, raking the spiked tips of the spruce. People were zipping up their coats and pulling on stocking hats and gloves. One woman, apparently by Rose counting on a balmy fall day, was swaddled in a beach towel emblazoned with a brightly colored map of Florida. We lingered only long enough to soak in the hawk’s-eye view from this high platform—at 6,643 feet above sea level Clingmans Dome is the highest peak in the Great Smoky Mountains, and
offers an unfettered sweep of the ridges and mountains and valleys. In every direction too is an impenetrable fortress of green, an extravagance of trees covering nearly every square inch of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Clingmans Dome observation tower bestows a rare above-the-treetop look at the Smokies. Most of Houk the time we earthbound beings must crane our necks up rather than down into the trees. This top-down perspective gives rise to questions: What goes on in the uppermost layers of this forest? Does anything live up there? What creatures big or small live in what’s called the forest canopy? And what is the canopy anyway?
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PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL LEA
Creatures great and small living in the uppermost layers of the Great Smoky Mountains
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PHOTOGRAPH BY KENNY SNELL
The word “canopy” describes the collective umbrella of trees that arches over the ground in the forest. Some think of it as only the upper story, the highest treetops. To others, it’s everything from where the lowest branches begin, all the way to the tops of the trees—and all the foliage, twigs, branches, plants, animals, even the spaces of air in between. It turns out the canopy is an astoundingly rich, diverse place—some estimates say the earth’s forest canopies hold half of all species in nature. Yet nobody really knows what that number is because canopy study is a relatively new field. Around the 1970s, scientists began working in tropical forests and the tall trees of the Northwest. They gained access with rafts let down from dirigibles; ropes and climbing equipment; and eventually towers, ziplines, overhead cranes, and suspended walkways. Now, in the Great Smoky Mountains, satellites, lasers, and aircraft are being used to measure the height and growth of trees in the canopy. Webcams, time-lapse photography, and remote sensing add more data about sheer biomass and seasonal changes. Mapping and measuring the canopy can help give a better understanding of its complex, three-dimensional structure. But the best way to find out what lives up there is to get up in it. Only a few people have actually scaled the lofty heights of the leaf-bound canopy of the Great Smokies forest. Research began about 15 years ago, when the park was launching the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory (ATBI for short), a program with the ambitious goal of documenting every living thing within its boundaries. Biologist Harold Keller and students from the University of Central Missouri in Warrensburg arrived in the summer of 2000, bringing their curiosity, courage, and climbing ropes on the first comprehensive survey and inventory of tree canopy biota in the park. Keller chose the Great Smokies for the study because the park has more than 130 species of trees, and some of the oldest and largest trees in the eastern United States. The focus of the team was to find out what mosses, liverworts, lichens, ferns, fungi—and myxomycetes—live in the treetops. Myxomycetes are better known as slime molds. Harold Keller, now professor emeritus, still signs his emails “Dr. Myxos” for his specialty. And it is a specialty, because slime molds undeniably are one of the planet’s more fascinating (some might say sci-fi weird) life forms. Neither plant nor animal, they are in a kingdom all their own, the Protista. From spores, they produce bacteria-eating cells that congregate to form a blob called a plasmodium, appearing in heavy metal pink, yellow, and orange. The plasmodium oozes along on rocks, downed logs, and living tree bark, much like an amoeba, engulfing food as it goes. When mature, slime
PHOTOGRAPH BY JIM MURRAY
The best way to find out what lives up in the canopy is to get up in it. Only a few people have actually scaled the lofty heights of the leaf-bound canopy of the Great Smokies forest.
Top: Melissa Skrabal collects samples of the newly discovered myxomycete species Diachea arboricola from a white oak tree. The harness and climbing rope enable the climber to use both hands to remove bark samples with a heavy-bladed knife and fill a collection bag. Bottom: A mature stalked sporangium of the newly discovered myxomycete species Diachea arboricola, developed in moist chamber cultures.
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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HAROLD W. KELLER PHOTOGRAPH BY COURTNEY KILGORE PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF HAROLD W. KELLER
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molds sprout small knobs on stalks that are called fruiting bodies. To prepare, the students practiced climbing trees and tying bombproof friction hitch knots. They traveled more than 700 miles to Cades Cove in the Smokies, where they started the “adventure phase” of the research. That meant splitting into crews—those who would stay on the ground as spotters, and those who were brave enough to hoist themselves 90 to 100 feet up into trees—about equal to a 10-story building—using a double rope-climbing technique. They had to be on guard for hazards during their aerial explorations—things like bees, bears, snakes, and lightning strikes. It was risky, physical work. A climber could take two to three hours to shinny up a single tree, scraping off samples of bark every 10 feet, up to almost the tops of various species—red maples, white ash, tuliptree, and white oaks among them. In all, the students went up into some 500 individual living trees over eight seasons in the park. Sydney Everhart, one of Keller’s former students, was working on her master’s degree on slime molds, and climbing high into the trees to find those “really intriguing creatures.” To decide which trees to climb, she looked for ones with “good limb architecture.” Once she was roped up into a branch, she admitted “there were tense moments for me” especially when she wasn’t in direct contact with the tree itself. About 20 feet up, she’d started thinking “this is a long way” from the ground. But the slime molds called and up she went. That experience eventually led Everhart to her present position on the faculty at the University of Nebraska. Evenings back in their quarters, the students separated out the mosses, liverworts, lichens, and slime molds. Once back in the lab at college, they rehydrated the samples and managed to identify 55 new records of slime molds in the canopy, including a myxomycete entirely new to science. Student Melissa Skrabal first spotted Diachea arboricola by its tracks and iridescent spores as she climbed a white oak tree. Harold Keller immediately recalls the time and place—July 4 in Whiteoak Sink—one of the most exciting days of the entire project to him, a discovery that exemplified the “serendipity of science.” He and colleagues contributed another “first” during their work, this one a fern. Polypodium appalachianum is
Top: Samples of the newly discovered Polypodium appalachianum collected from the tree canopy in the Great Smoky Mountains. Middle: Harold Keller, aka “Dr. Myxos,” in his laboratory at the University of Central Missouri. Dr. Keller led a team of students from the university in the first comprehensive survey and inventory of tree canopy biota in the Smokies. Bottom: Moist bark cultures collected from the Smokies, ready to be studied with dissecting microscopes in a work station lab at the University of Central Missouri.
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The canopy is chockful of microhabitats, worlds within worlds that foster all kinds of things, including neat microscopic invertebrates.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF ATBI/GSMNP
Some land snails head up into the trees too. One species commonly known as the rock cap fern because rocks are its of mountain tigersnail, with a gorgeous spiral shell of confavored habitat. But one of the Missouri students was the trasting stripes, was seen 70 feet up in a tree. first to document this fern rooted in a pocket of “canopy soil” 130 feet up in a giant old tuliptree. x The canopy is chockful of such microhabitats, worlds within worlds that foster all kinds of things, including neat From charismatic microfauna to megafauna—from water microscopic invertebrates. Among them are the tardigrades, bears to black bears—the forest canopy harbors so much. or water bears, animals less than a millimeter long, with Black bears, the iconic big mammals of Great Smokies, cigar-shaped bodies mounted on four stubby legs. Some are spend a lot of time in trees. Park wildlife biologist Bill Stiver armored with an exoskeleton like tiny armadillos. Tardigrade points to several ways they’re adapted to an arboreal exismeans “slow stepper,” a name given because the organism tence. Bears, even newborn cubs, have impressive curved meanders about in the film of water on mosses, liverworts, claws for climbing; they use those claws with extreme effiand lichens, munching on ciency as they scurry up detritus and things smaller a tree. How high can than it is. In the forest a bear go in a tree? “As canopy, water bears have to high as they want to,” survive an environment subreplies Stiver, “to the ject to freezing or drying tippy top.” And as any Smokies backpacker out. They accomplish that knows or quickly learns, by entering a state of susyou have to hoist your pended animation. Some have been known to stay food bag on a cable between trees, and high inactive for a hundred years, enough to be out of a then resurrect when condibear’s reach. Bears always tions improve. Slime molds and other canopy organseem to be hungry, and isms are also capable of this they get essential food adaptation. from trees throughThe tardigrades, or water bears, are less than a millimeter long. Some are Insects and other arthro- armored with an exoskeleton like tiny armadillos. out the year—leaves pods live in the treetops, at and buds in early spring; least for parts of their lives, and probably account for most fruits in summer; and acorns, hickory nuts, and beechnuts of the canopy’s biodiversity. Mites, springtails, and spiders in fall. They’ll knock down branches to reach a tasty bunch are abundant in the arboreal world, and so are true insects— of ripe black cherries, or impatiently rip away oak branches the early hairstreak butterfly and great purple hairstreak to get at acorns in their fall feeding frenzy. During winter, to name two, along with a bevy of beetles, bees, flies, and Smokies bears choose hollows in large, old trees for dens, ants. Stick insects and katydids are true canopy specialists sometimes 20 to 80 feet aboveground, and females give that spend their adult lives eating leaves of deciduous trees. birth to cubs in these dry, secure cradles. Trees also serve as Then there are the annual “dogday” cicadas that fly about resting places—it’s not unusual to see a black bear dozing in the treetops, sometimes sucking a little juice from the on a branch during a daily siesta. trees. They have a “divided allegiance between ground and Squirrels—gray and red—nest in the canopy and find canopy,” notes entomologist Chris Carlton. In the nymph food there, including acorns and nuts and buds and fruits, or immature stage they stay underground for years (some as especially from oaks, black gum, and beech. They build long as 17 years), sucking precious fluid from roots. They nests of leaves and twigs in the crotch of a tree or in a cavity. emerge from the soil in the hot summer days of July and Gray squirrels are especially agile tree dwellers; red squirrels, August, climb up and shed their exoskeletons, then fly back or “mountain boomers,” often elicit their noisy calls out on a up into the trees. In late summer, the raspy sound echoing branch. in the woods is adult male cicadas trying to attract females. Those squirrels are active in daytime, while a relative— Once they’ve mated, the females deposit eggs on small scars the flying squirrel—is a creature of the night. Both norththey saw into twigs, the nymphs hatch and drop to the ern and southern flying squirrels are found in the park. The ground, and the cycle begins anew. northern flying squirrel, at the south end of its range in the
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PHOTOGRAPHS THIS PAGE BY BILL LEA; FACING PAGE, TOP: HAROLD W. KELLER; BOTTOM: VERNON LIX
Smokies, is an endangered species. In winter they huddle in hollow cavities in yellow birch or beech, but in summer they also make nests of sticks, called dreys, in conifers. The southern flying squirrel is more common and lives mostly at lower elevations. Both are supremely equipped to navigate the canopy. Flying squirrels don’t actually fly, but glide by means of folds of skin that extend from wrist to ankle. The membrane forms a furry cape that acts like a wing when stretched out; the tail works like a rudder for controlling their aerial maneuvers. Flying squirrels may best be seen by full moon on a summer night, gliding maybe 30 feet or more from treetop to mid-trunk. They can also leap from tree to tree or run along a branch. Their favored food is also acorns and nuts, which they store in the cavities and forks of trees, along with buds, blossoms, and berries. During their movements, flying squirrels must beware of tree-climbing snakes, various mammals, and birds of prey. Bats are mammals that do in fact fly, and they also inhabit the canopy. In the park, red bats flit through the foliage foraging for insects. In the park, the less common Indiana bat selects the “pop” bark of dead pines, mostly white pines, contrasting with their use of oaks in the Midwest. They’ve been known to move from tree to tree, and when an old tree falls they will find another; so standing dead snags are most valuable to them. Little brown bats and northern long-eared bats also use snags. They locate their maternity colonies under tree bark—one slab of bark might shelter 80 to 100 bats. Naturally birds are the most obvious tree dwellers, so many it’s hard to list them all—whether flying over, nesting in, or finding food in the canopy. Broad-winged hawks are the quintessential hawks soaring close to the treetops, in summer searching for unwary squirrels and in early fall rocketing past on southbound migrations. Owls, heard more than seen, are there too. In a dim cove, even in daytime, you may hear the riveting call of a barred owl: who cooked for you, who cooked for you all? Northern saw-whet owls are most likely heard in the deepest spruce-fir forest on clear, moonlit summer nights. For them, the canopy provides roosting and nesting places. Among smaller songbirds, scarlet tanagers and vireos come to mind as denizens of the mature forest, along with the flycatchers, including the Eastern wood-peewee, which perches on dead branches to feed, preen, and sing. Different birds tend to partition the canopy—scarlet tanagers and red-eyed vireos, for example, put nests 20 to 30 feet up in a tree, while Eastern wood-pewees and yellow-throated vireos prefer the top suite. A bewildering array of warblers—cerulean, blackburnian, and several others—feed in the treetops. Those and other birds that migrate into the Smokies in the spring from the tropics depend on the solid green swatch of forest for a big part of their existence. With so many habitats and so much moisture, the Great Smoky Mountains support an astounding roster of amphibians. But almost all the salamanders, turtles, frogs and toads are terrestrial. Cope’s gray treefrog is one exception. This
Mammals, from large ones like bears to small red squirrels, rely on the forest canopy for shelter and as a food source. Facing page: The lush forest canopy in the Smokies, from above the tree line and beneath the canopy.
small to medium-sized frog, the only true treefrog in the mountains, has been found only on the Tennessee side of the park, mostly below 2,000 feet in elevation. The graygreen spots on its back appear much like the splotchy lichens that grow on tree bark, permitting perfect camouflage in its native habitat. Enlarged pads on the tips of the toes help these skillful climbers gain traction even on vertical surfaces. During breeding season, beginning around early April, the males send up a chorus of fluty trills from the trees as they move to ponds to meet up with females. Other than these mating trysts, Cope’s gray treefrogs spend the rest of the year in the trees. Kenneth Dodd, who’s studied amphibians in the park for many years, declared that a walk in Cades Cove during late spring or early summer “with the new flowers in bloom and Cope’s Gray Treefrogs trilling and resonating from the surrounding treetops, is one of the many little pleasures” of studying these creatures.
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Top: The forest terrain as seen from the tree canopy. Below: Atop Clingmans Dome, dead Fraser fir trees attacked by Balsam wooly adelgids.
x In the Smokies, the canopy includes not only the grandest oldest trees, but also second- and third- growth forest that has come in since logging days and park establishment. Adding to the complexity are several forest types—from the highest elevation spruce-fir, to beech and birch, drier pineoak, and the classic cove hardwoods, the tallest and most developed canopy in these mountains. Paul Super gets to watch what goes on in the treetops more closely than most. As science coordinator at the Appalachian Highlands Science Learning Center on Purchase Knob on the North Carolina side of the park, he sees the verdant vegetation of the deciduous forest canopy for six months of the year. Yet that’s not the first image that comes to his mind. To Super “the exciting thing about the canopy is that it’s where the sun reaches the ground.” He’s thinking of the canopy during the other half of the year, when the leaves have fallen and light shines on the forest floor. Come springtime that light lets the vernal wildflowers bloom, a floral show unequaled almost anywhere in the country. But,
once the trees fully leaf out again, sunlight shimmers in the top branches but struggles to break through the thick foliage to reach the ground. Then only shade-loving flowers can bloom. In autumn, the leaves and other “stuff” from the canopy drop to the ground. So the forest is a big recycling machine, a cycle that’s profoundly significant to the canopy ecosystem and all it harbors. The canopy doesn’t exist in isolation. Water and nutrients from the soil are drawn up into the treetops to nourish growth and photosynthesis. The trees themselves are competing to see which can grow the tallest to reach precious sunlight. The canopy is also the “cell membrane,” says Super, where forest meets sky, the point where trees absorb all that the atmosphere brings—rainfall, fog, dew, sunlight, gasses—essential elements like nitrogen and carbon dioxide but also pollution such as acid rain, ozone, and greenhouse gasses. The canopy is a buffer, but its capacity is not unlimited. In talk about the canopy, Smokies scientists often speak about “disturbance”—both natural and foreign. Natural disturbance comes in the form of wind, even very strong winds like tornados that quickly uproot whole swaths of trees. There’s also the natural decay and death of individual trees that sends them crashing to the ground. Such disturbances create “light gaps,” openings where new seedlings and young trees sprout as the canopy continues to go through dynamic changes. Then there are the exotic foreigners, especially insects like woolly adelgids that have wreaked havoc among the park’s grand eastern hemlocks and Fraser firs. The demise of most of the Fraser firs is startling from the Clingmans Dome tower. With their passing, one of two dominant evergreens is greatly diminished, leaving a gap in the high-elevation canopy. What will take the place of the firs? What about the slime molds, mosses, lichens, and insects that lived on and in them? Where will the northern flying squirrels glide, and northern saw-whet owls hide? So many questions, so much more still to learn about life in the forest canopy. Student Melissa Skrabal, who discovered that new slime mold, described her feelings when she climbed into the trees: “A flood of roller coaster emotions bubbled up each time I swayed to and fro at unbelievable heights in the treetops of the old growth forests of the Smoky Mountains. I had gone where nobody has ever gone before.” In the biological frontier of the forest canopy, untold discoveries remain to be made by new pioneers. v Thanks to Dr. Harold Keller and Sydney Everhart for generous and enthusiastic assistance on this article. Thanks also to Rebecca Nichols, Janet Rock, and Tom Remaley at the park’s Twin Creeks Science and Education Center; to Paul Super, and to Todd Witcher at Discover Life in America, for suggestions and patient responses to many questions. University of Tennessee graduate Rose Houk is the author of Smoky Mountain Elk: Return of the Native and Storied Stitches: Quilts & Coverlets of the Smokies. In addition, she has written over 40 other books on national parks and public lands. Her last piece for Smokies Life was on American chestnut trees.
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DEADLY One of the most violent and deadly storms ever to strike Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) arrived on July 5, 2012, as visitor numbers peaked, campgrounds were filled to capacity, and thousands of vehicles coursed along park roads. Ultimately, the storm ravaged the park’s extreme western region, causing fatalities and becoming a breaking story in the national news. With radios knocked out of service, limited phone coverage, and main roads choked off by fallen trees, the park service and its partnering agencies got creative in mobilizing a response. VIDEO FRAME BY LITTLERENDEZVOUS
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DERECHO Y BY DAVID BRILL July 5, 2012, arrived as most mid-summer days do in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with the predawn cool giving way to steadily rising heat and humidity. Through the morning hours and into the early afternoon, the summer sun occasionally peeked out from behind a benign overcast, seemingly ideal weather conditions for spending a day in the mountains—provided park visitors didn’t mind the crowds. “The week of the July 4 holiday is typically one of the busiest weeks of the year in the park, if not the busiest,” says Clayton Jordan, GSMNP chief ranger. Many visitors who had occupied sites in park campgrounds or rented cabins in Gatlinburg or Townsend in advance of the holiday planned to stay on through the weekend. The Cades Cove Campground, the park’s largest with 159 sites, was booked full, as were the campgrounds at Abrams Creek, Elkmont, and Smokemont. A steady influx
of cars filled the parking lot in front of the Cades Cove ranger station, and scores of other vehicles inched along the 11-mile Loop Road past preserved historic cabins and open meadows dotted with grazing deer. WORRISOME WEATHER The week had begun with a heat wave, with temperatures soaring to a record 105 degrees in Knoxville on Sunday, July 1, and had hit 79 degrees at LeConte Lodge for three days in a row. By July 4, temperatures had begun to moderate. The high in Cades Cove topped out at 87 degrees, and the high there the next day wouldn’t make it out of the 70s. By early afternoon on July 5, meteorologist Mary Black’s colleagues at the National Weather Service (NWS) office in Morristown, Tennessee, were positioned at their computers, busily tracking the radar images of a system that had begun
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the night before as a collection of pop-up thunderstorms between the Ohio River Valley and the Great Lakes region. Though harmless enough individually, the storms had begun to organize and converge into a single squall line, a phenomenon known in meteorologist parlance as a mesoscale convection system. Over the course of the day, the system had grown in size, gained intensity, and picked up speed as it moved, stretching more than 250 miles west to east, from Ohio into Virginia. While most storms track with the prevailing winds from the west, this one lumbered south, and the western section of GSMNP lay right in its path. Just after 2:30 p.m., the storm edged south toward I-81 in southern Virginia. Within an hour, it arrived in Bristol and crossed into Tennessee. As it did, the Morristown NWS office fielded the first of the 79 weather-related incident
GRAPHIC VIA NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE
The deadly storm moved southwestward out of Pennsylvania, a very unusual direction for any weather system other than a hurricane. Derecho lines move at 50 mph or faster and in odd directions, making them nearly impossible to forecast more than a few hours (or few minutes) in advance.
reports it would receive over the next four hours, covering a geographic range of 40 Tennessee counties. 1 According to Black, at 3:20 p.m., the NWS’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, issued a severe thunderstorm watch for GSMNP and surrounding area. The initial watch, which extended from 7:20 to 11 p.m., seemed routine enough for the balmy South, a region that receives dozens of such alerts over the course of a typical summer. While a severe thunderstorm watch, which advises that conditions are such that a storm might develop, is perhaps easy enough to shrug off, the more strident warning leaves little doubt; barring some unexpected and anomalous deliverance, the storm will arrive. Just over two and a half hours later, at 5:59 p.m., the NWS would escalate the severe thunderstorm watch to a warning for GSMNP, giving staff only moments to respond before the storm entered the park. The storm had hit Union County at about 5:30, blasted through Knoxville a few minutes later, and soon ripped the roof off a commercial building in Sevierville as it tore south. Just after 6 p.m., the storm reached Maryville. At the time, Blount County Fire Chief Doug McClanahan was enjoying an evening meal with his family at TC’s Grill, a burger joint on Old Niles Ferry Road. Within a few minutes McClanahan’s pager would begin beeping, conveying the first of several emergency calls originating from inside the national park. Two of McClanahan’s firefighters, cousins Mike and Drew McClurg, had spent a lazy afternoon at Mike’s home in the Top of the World community near the Foothills Parkway. The cousins had heard the severe weather warnings broadcast over radio and decided to head preemptively to Blount County Fire Station #8, situated on the swath of land between the Foothills Parkway and GSMNP. Shortly after 6 p.m., the storm descended on GSMNP and began to uproot trees, turn fractured limbs into projectiles, and unleash persistent, straight-line winds gusting to at least 70 miles per hour (MPH)—just 4 MPH shy of hurricane force. Ranger Jeff Filosa had completed his shift at Cades Cove and was heading toward Townsend on his way home. Filosa got as far as Townsend before wind gusts threatened to overturn his vehicle. By then, the storm had acquired a new meteorological descriptor and one that, mercifully, weather forecasters rarely have to use in describing the atmospheric disturbances that strike East Tennessee. The savage storm was 1 The time stamps that chart the storm’s approach and arrival in Great Smoky Mountains National Park differ by as much as a half hour among sources—including those of Great Smoky Mountains National Park dispatch, NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, and the local news media that covered the event. The National Climatic Data Center’s chronology reflects the time damage/incident reports were received, and those would necessarily lag behind the actual incident itself. Thus, time reference in this article should be interpreted as approximations.
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GRAPHIC VIA ACCUWEATHER.COM
THE PERFECTLY DREADFUL STORM According to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the parent organization of the National Weather Service, the weather phenomenon known as a derecho (pronounced deh-RAY-cho) got its name from Gustavus Hinrichs, a professor of physics at the University of Iowa in the late 19th century. Hinrichs and his colleagues no doubt knew a thing or two about wind; the university is located smack dab in the middle of so-called Tornado Alley. Hinrichs chose the term derecho, the Spanish word for “straight” or “direct,” to characterize the persistent straight-line winds that accompany these storms, and to distinguish them from the cyclonic winds that accompany tornadoes. Hinrichs first used the term in a scholarly paper he published in 1888 in the American Meteorological Journal. A derecho’s intense winds result when rain-cooled air, denser than the surrounding warmer air of the storm front, creates a powerful downdraft, or downburst, that merges with and draws strength from existing strong, unidirectional winds on the earth’s surface. The falling cooler air forces warmer, lighter air upward along the storm’s leading edge, or
gust front, spawning new thunderstorms which subsequently produce more rain-cooled air and feed a cycle known as “forward propagation” or “downstream replication.” The storm’s gust front is often characterized by a black, ominous shelf cloud, and many who witnessed the approach of the derecho that hit Great Smoky Mountains National Park on July 5, 2012, reported seeing just such a formation. In the case of a derecho, an intensifying effect occurs as irregularly arranged downburst clusters advance ahead of the storm front. The line of storms that forms the front typically extends 250 miles or more. These downburst clusters, which measure about 60 miles from edge to edge, in turn create smaller, six-milewide downbursts that further create smaller-still microbursts, extremely powerful storm cells with intense, damaging winds that affect circumscribed areas usually less than a mile wide. Such microbursts accounted for the isolated zones of extreme damage that resulted from the July 2012 derecho that struck sections of Little River and Laurel Creek roads, Cades Cove, and the Abrams Creek Campground in the park.
According to meteorologist Mary Black with the National Weather Service’s Morristown office, derechos’ intense straight-line winds push the center of the storm line forward, a phenomenon known as a bow echo, which imparts the shape of an inverted letter C to the advancing storm system. Heavy rainfall also often accompanies derechos. Consider, for instance, that in the half hour after the derecho hit GSMNP, Cades Cove received 1.83 inches of rain. While predicting whether a line of thunderstorms will form into a derecho is notoriously difficult, says Black, tracking the storms once they’ve formed “is more straightforward because they are relatively long-lived and display distinct characteristics.” One passage on NOAA’s web pages on derechos proves particularly prescient in describing the outcome that awaited GSMNP as the July 2012 storm approached: “Because derechos are most common in the warm season, those involved in outdoor activities are most at risk. Campers or hikers in forested areas are vulnerable to being injured or killed by falling trees... Occupants of cars and trucks also are vulnerable to being hit by falling trees….” —David Brill
For information on derechos, visit: http://www.spc.noaa.gov/misc/AbtDerechos/derechofacts.htm Smokies Life
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Like an advancing army led by a brilliant commander, the storm first cut off communications, then paralyzed all transportation systems.
a derecho (pronounced deh-RAY-cho). The term may, for some, be difficult to pronounce or remember, but it describes an event that those involved would never forget. (For information on derecho formation and effects, see “The Perfectly Dreadful Storm” on page 25.) COUNTDOWN TO CHAOS In the minutes before the storm struck, at the Abrams Creek Campground, Chicagoans Alex Rudle and his fiancée Jenna Malone (they’re now married) dozed in their tent at site number 9, adjacent to the gated Cooper Road Trail that leads a quarter mile to one of the park’s more prized swimming holes on Abrams Creek. Rachel Burkhart, 41, of Carryton, Tennessee, and a female friend shared the swimming hole with a family of five from Louisiana, including a 7-year-old girl, her parents, and grandparents. Carole Cooper, from Knoxville, was staying with friends at a cabin near GSMNP and decided to drive them to Abrams Creek Campground, one of her favorite destinations in the park. In the coming hours, Cooper, and more importantly, her SUV, would play a critical—and lifesaving—role in the wake of the storm. As the ranking park officer, Clayton Jordan remained in the headquarters building at Sugarlands directing NPS rescue operations until an interagency command center could be established. Meanwhile, dispatcher Randy Kelly manned the communications center, or, as he terms it, the park’s “cerebral cortex,” in the headquarters complex. Soon enough, the neural pathways of Kelly’s cortex would spark to life. Over the next eight hours, he and his colleagues would field and dispatch nearly 300 calls, in some cases several per minute, from those stricken by the storm and those trying to rescue them. But as Kelly would soon discover, the storm would ultimately rob him and headquarters of a vital communications link.
The derecho would knock out power to the radio repeater mounted atop Look Rock observation tower. When the repeater is working properly it picks up and amplifies radio signals, allowing GSMNP personnel in the western end of the park to communicate with colleagues via their portable radios, regardless of their location. While short-distance line-of-sight communications would still be possible in the storm’s wake, the communications link between Kelly and Jordan at headquarters and the rangers in the field would be all but severed. Instead of the typically crisp, clear radio communiqués, Kelly would receive only garbled fragments. “After the storm struck and the repeater went down, we really struggled with radio communications, which is part of the drama the incident generated,” says Jordan. “The need for communications was critical, but we were getting only spotty, fragmented reports from the western end of the park, where most of the storm damage had occurred.” The early fragmented reports indicated that Cades Cove and Abrams Creek Campground had sustained extensive damage. But to the east of the Townsend “Wye”2, along Little River Road, other storm-related dramas were playing out. Scott and Ashley Hacker of Franklin, Tennessee, had parked their car along Little River Road west of Metcalf Bottoms and were teaching their 12-year-old son Noah to fly fish. Noah had just waded into the river and made his first cast when the storm hit. The Hackers quickly abandoned the fishing lesson, scrambled up the riverbank, and ran to their car. The family had managed to drive less than 100 yards when a tree fell on the vehicle, and one of its branches crashed through the sunroof. Noah, in the back seat, managed to duck in the nick of time. The branch tore his T-shirt, 2 The Townsend Wye refers to the T-junction where State Route 73 enters the park and splits east on Little River Road toward the Metcalf Bottoms Picnic Area and west on Laurel Creek Road toward Cades Cove.
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but he was otherwise unharmed. Nearby, a rock slide struck another car, pinning the occupants inside. They were trapped but otherwise unhurt. A short ways down Little River Road, about two miles east of the Wye, motorcyclist Ralph Frazier wasn’t so fortunate. Before the storm arrived, Frazier, 50, from Buford, Georgia, and his passenger had been exploring US 321/73 through Townsend on their Harley Davidson motorcycle, accompanied by another couple—friends from back home— also on motorcycle. The couples had been riding together before deciding to return to their RV at a campsite in Wears Valley. Here, the couples split up. Frazier’s friends opted for the more direct route, following US 321 to Wears Valley, while Frazier and his passenger chose the longer, more scenic route through the park along Little River Road to Metcalf Bottoms and, from there, along Wear Gap Road back to their campsite. It would prove to be a fateful decision. According to Frazier’s passenger, rain had begun to fall so heavily that it was difficult to see the road. Frazier slowed to a crawl before deciding to head back toward Townsend. He never got the chance. As he executed the turn, branches began to fall on the road. A splintered section of tree about four inches in diameter hurtled through the air and struck Frazier directly on the head, shattering his helmet and fracturing his skull. He never regained consciousness. Miraculously, his passenger, though momentarily trapped under the toppled motorcycle, sustained only minor injuries. Frazier officially became the storm’s first fatality, but another victim would join him soon enough.
THE ROAR OF JETS When the storm struck, Alex Rudle and Jenna Malone had been in their tent in the Abrams Creek Campground. “In the snap of a finger, it went from a sunny, warm, and peaceful environment to almost complete darkness and a loud roar of what sounded like multiple jet planes flying directly over our heads,” Rudle says. “Suddenly, the wind was gusting, trees were falling, and the rain was blowing sideways.” Those in the campground describe wind-borne tents rolling around like tumbleweeds. As the first gusts cut through the campground, a quarter mile down the Cooper Road Trail at the swimming hole, the family of five from Louisiana, along with Burkhart and her friend, at first instinctively scrambled out of the creek and up the bank to seek shelter. They soon surmised, though, that the treelined bank posed a greater risk than the creek itself, a treefree zone measuring about 25 feet from shore to shore. All waded back into the water. It was a rational decision, no doubt, but it was the wrong one. Seconds later, a 60-foot oak on the opposite bank, nearly two feet in diameter at chest height, popped its roots and crashed down on top of them, spanning the entire width of the creek. The 7-year-old girl, rendered unconscious by the impact, was pinned underwater near the shore. The child’s grandfather, the least injured of the seven, quickly set to work trying to free the entrapped child. By the time he managed to pull her from the water and carry her to the stream bank, she had stopped breathing. The child’s mother had sustained multiple fractures of both arms, but
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF KNOXVILLE NEWS SENTINEL
Rescue workers gather at a makeshift command post at the Burgermaster Drive-In in Townsend. Crews arrived to assist park visitors trapped in the Cades Cove area.
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Reports on the incident offer conflicting accounts of who revived the child. Carole Cooper and Jenna Malone, who were on the scene immediately after the accident, and the official GSMNP incident summary suggest it was the mother, while several newspaper accounts indicate it was a bystander. Privacy laws forbid the national park from providing names and contact information for storm victims who survived their injuries, so Smokies Life was unable to contact them directly unless they were identified in published or posted media accounts. The names of those who died in the storm are public record. 3
“She was wheezing and breathing hard,” he said. “You could see where the tree had struck her upper torso; the area was black and blue.” He talked to her and did his best to comfort her. “I asked her questions, I introduced myself, and at first there was some eye contact, and she was aware,” he recalls, “but as time progressed, she became more and more distant and detached.” 4 Rudle soon noticed a “far-off gaze” in the woman’s eyes as her breathing became less and less regular. Trained in CPR, Rudle began to perform the procedure on Burkhart but soon realized that she had died. Back in the campground, Jenna and the grandmother carried the injured child to the bath house, the only hard-walled structure that wasn’t locked up at the time. “It was cold and rainPark Rangers ing, so we looked for a Clayton place to take the little Jordan, Helen McNutt (above) girl to shelter her from and Kent the weather,” Malone Looney (left). recalls. “The child was Fortunately, shivering, so we laid her all three are veteran, highlyon the floor and covered trained rangers her with towels to keep with years of her warm.” experience in handling Meanwhile, three emergencies in angels were about to the Smokies. arrive on the scene at Abrams Creek campground, two in the form of Blount County firefighters. The other in the form of a middle-aged woman driving a Chevy Tahoe. PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID LUTTRELL
despite her injuries, she managed to rescue breathe into the child and revive her.3 The girl, who had sustained a fractured pelvis and broken arm, was now breathing and alert. The child’s father, who had taken the full impact of the tree while standing in the middle of the creek, was pinned and unable to move. Immediately in the storm’s wake, Rudle and Malone emerged from their tent and saw a woman running up the trail toward the campground, screaming for help and carrying the injured child in her arms. Malone surmises that the woman was the child’s grandmother. As Malone helped the woman carry the child into the campground, Rudle sped down the trail toward the swimming hole. When he arrived, he confronted a grim scene. The man still in the water was in exquisite pain, “moaning and groaning,” according to Rudle, which prevented the man from being touched or moved. Medics would later determine that his injuries were severe and extensive: a punctured lung, nine broken ribs, and two fractured vertebrae in his back. His wife, from the shoreline, talked and sang to him in an effort to distract him from his suffering. Rudle noted that the water lapped the man’s chin and feared that if the rain persisted and the creek continued to rise, he would surely drown in place. Unable to assist the man pinned in the river, Rudle turned his attention to Burkhart, who lay on the bank. At the time, she was being comforted by two other women.
“SHELTER IN PLACE!” The storm’s arrival at Cades Cove had been just as abrupt and brutal. Just after 6 p.m., Ranger Kent Looney, inside the Cades Cove ranger station, heard dispatcher Randy Kelly relay the severe thunderstorm warning he had received from the National Weather Service. Within minutes, Jeff Filosa advanced the warning from the realm of conjecture to that of hard reality. From inside his wind-battered cruiser in The Knoxville News Sentinel recorded an extensive video interview with Rudle and Malone the day after the storm: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=c9JnFuAs-Zo. Smokies Life also interviewed the couple in researching this story.
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Townsend, with trees toppling and branches flying all around him, Filosa keyed his radio and issued the system wide alert that the storm had arrived in Townsend, a mere seven miles from Cades Cove. The storm, traveling at roughly 70 MPH, would close that distance in just over five minutes. In the moments that followed, Looney ran out of the ranger station and confronted a scene of glaringly incongruous elements. Peering beyond the ridge to the north, Looney glimpsed an enormous black cloud mass that hugged the mountainside as it poured downslope and sped directly toward him. Meanwhile, the parking lot in front of the ranger station was filled with hundreds of carefree park visitors. “Many of them were licking ice cream cones they had just purchased at the camp store,” Looney recalls. All were seemingly unaware that a violent storm, borne by 70-MPH winds, was bearing down on them. Without a moment to reflect or plan, Looney took action, screaming at the tops of his lungs, “Everyone shelter in place! There’s a bad storm coming! Get in your cars!” The more fortunate visitors had time to scatter to their vehicles, while others sought shelter in the ranger station and restrooms. Yet others were stranded out in the weather. Within minutes, the wind roared as trees toppled and branches and leaves ripped through the campground. The blast of wind momentarily pinned Looney against the sidewall of the ranger station. “I didn’t wait to see if the people heeded my warning,” says Looney. “I was in crisis mode and was determined to do everything I could to respond.” His first thoughts turned to the line of Park Service patrol cars parked along the tree-lined drive leading to the ranger residence. Looney realized that if falling trees flattened the vehicles, he and his associates would be immobilized and unable to reach injured visitors. He had time enough to move only one car, that of Ranger Jamie Sanders. It turned out to be a wise choice; immediately after Looney moved the car, a tree crashed down in the nowvacant parking slot. Ranger Helen McNutt had ended her shift at the Cove and was preparing to head home when she heard the weather warning from Kelly at headquarters and the follow-on call from Filosa in Townsend. She immediately hopped into a patrol car and headed into the campground to advise visitors to take shelter. She was in the C loop of the campground when the first blast hit.
“I did a quick pass through of the campground,” says McNutt. As she drove, she kept one eye on the road and the other on the chaos of falling limbs. “I remember looking up as I drove to see what might be coming down,” she says. After quickly scanning the campground loops and seeing no one injured or trapped under debris, she drove to where the campground entrance joined the end of the Loop Road. “By then, we had received reports that Laurel Creek Road was blocked by fallen trees, which meant there was no way out,” she says. “So at the intersection, I tried to stop traffic from trying to exit the park.” She was able to stop some cars, but others had already streamed by. As she waved vehicles to a stop, she encountered the first of several injuries that resulted—some directly, some indirectly—from the storm. A car pulled up with a shattered windshield. Inside, on the passenger side, sat a 50-year-old man. When the tree had struck the windshield, it sent shards of glass into his eyes. According to McNutt, the brunt of the storm was over in five minutes. Then a torrential rain began to fall. As it did, the casualty list began to mount. “All these reports of injuries came in at about the same time,” says McNutt. An older woman experiencing chest pains suggestive of a heart attack arrived at the ranger station. A call came in of a man pinned under a large tree at the Methodist Church, about two and a half miles away along the Loop Road. The man had suffered a serious back injury. Shortly after, another report came in that a woman, 32 weeks pregnant, had begun to experience contractions. Later, NcNutt would respond to a report of domestic assault. Apparently, in the heat of an argument, fueled in part by the temporary entrapment occasioned by the storm, one of her campground guests had placed his hands around his wife’s throat and choked her as he lifted her off the ground. The rules of triage demanded that McNutt attend to the injured first, including the assault victim. Park law enforcement officials would deal with the abuser later. With roads blocked, McNutt knew he wasn’t going anywhere. Even the concessioners who operated the camp store soon lent their assistance. “The storm had knocked the power out, so after it got dark, a few of them stood with flashlights at the entrances to the restrooms, helping campers enter and exit,” says McNutt. McNutt, who like all GSMNP park rangers is a trained emergency medical technician (EMT), accessed the medical
Looney ran out of the ranger station and confronted a scene of glaringly incongruous elements: an enormous black cloud mass that hugged the mountainside as it poured downslope.
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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF KNOXVILLE NEWS SENTINEL
Downed tree limbs at the Townsend entrance to the national park, near where motorcyclist Ralph Frazier was killed.
kit stored at the ranger station and administered the basic first aid necessary to stabilize her patients.5 While she attended to those stricken at the campground, Ranger Marc Eckert, a park medic, drove to the Methodist Church to assist the man pinned under a tree. Eckert managed to free the injured man and place him on a backboard. At the time, neither McNutt nor Eckert could know that the more substantial help the victims needed was yet hours away. The victims at the Abrams Creek Campground were, likewise, condemned to wait. A GREAT GIFT IN A LARGE PACKAGE Back at Abrams Creek, shortly after Alex Rudle had abandoned attempts to revive the now deceased Burkhart, he recalls seeing the first emergency responder arrive at the scene of the tree fall on the creek. Rudle’s description of the man “as a really huge firefighter” almost certainly identifies him as Mike McClurg of the Blount County Fire Department. By his own description, McClurg stands 6-foot-5-inches tall and weighs 300 pounds—“closer to 350 pounds if you count my bunker gear.” Just after the storm warning had been issued, Mike and his cousin Drew made their way to Blount County Fire Station #8, knowing that the distress calls would soon follow. They were at the station when the department’s radio crackled to life with the first of multiple calls that went out about the injured parties at the Abrams Creek Campground. All GSMNP ranger stations and cruisers are equipped with first-aid supplies. 5
Trained in rapid response, the two men quickly donned their protective bunker gear and climbed aboard a fire engine, which, unfortunately, was not equipped with the one tool they needed most: a chainsaw. As they made their way from Maryville toward Abrams Creek, they began to encounter trees and limbs in the road; Mike managed to drive right over some of them as they coursed along Happy Valley Road and approached the entrance to the campground. There they confronted an insurmountable jumble of toppled trees blocking their path. Their motorized transit ended there; if they were going to reach the victims, they’d have to make their way on foot. “At the campground entrance there were hundreds, if not thousands, of trees on the ground, and all the power lines were hanging down,” says Mike. When they abandoned the fire engine, with its powerful onboard radio, Mike realized that they’d also be walking away from their only means of communicating with the outside world. Before they left the truck, they notified Blount County dispatch of the dire need for crews equipped with chainsaws. From there, the cousins started walking—or rather climbing over and ducking under hundreds of trees that separated them from the injured parties in the campground. Mike led, as Drew kept an eye on the drooping power lines which, for all the cousins knew, were still carrying live current. “We probably had to cover less than a mile, but it felt like three,” Mike recalls. “In the heat of the moment, it was difficult to gauge distance, but it felt like an eternity; we just never seemed to get any closer.” After more than a half hour of what Mike describes as
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PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY NPS
PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL LEA
Storm-toppled trees along Laurel Creek Road between Townsend and Cades Cove. Storm damage is still apparent today at many places on the park’s west end. Ranger Steve Kloster (below) became the park’s incident commander in charge of coordinating emergency responses.
“pretty rough going,” he and Drew reached the campground at about 7 p.m. and were directed down the trail to the swimming hole. Mike and Drew’s boss, Blount County Fire Chief Doug McClanahan, arrived shortly behind them and assumed the role of incident commander at the campground. Within an hour, the Blount County highway department would arrive with a backhoe and crew of chainsaw operators. In the meantime, several residents of the nearby Happy Valley community had shown up with their own chainsaws and were doing their part to help. NO WAY OUT (OR IN) Back at Cades Cove, Kent Looney realized that if visitors in the Cove couldn’t make it out, that also meant that Rural Metro ambulances couldn’t make it in, so he grabbed a chainsaw, a tank of gas, and safety gear and jumped in his cruiser. He planned to cut his way east on Laurel Creek Road toward Townsend, surmising correctly that crews in
Townsend were doing likewise to close the gap that lay between. As Looney exited the campground he pulled into the then vacant on-coming traffic lane on Laurel Creek Road and passed dozens of cars, their egress blocked, until he reached the first tangle of blowdowns. As he started to saw his way through, he soon discovered that he had help. More than a dozen burley men—many of them shirtless—had exited their idled vehicles and were trailing behind him, removing the sawn limbs as he cut. “I felt like a pied piper,” says Looney, who recalls that a couple of the volunteers who worked for a commercial tree service were a bit critical of his technique and insisted that he relinquish his saw to them. “No,” he told them bluntly. “That’s just not going to happen.” Meanwhile, teams and equipment from the Townsend police and volunteer fire departments, Blount County highway and police departments, and Rural Metro Ambulance Service had assembled at a make-shift incident command post at the Burgermaster restaurant in Townsend. At the Wye, backhoes and teams of chainsaw operators soon divided into two forces, one heading east toward Metcalf Bottoms, the other moving west on Laurel Creek Road toward Looney and the Cove, clearing the roads as they moved. At the time, Tennessee District Ranger Steve Kloster was en route to Townsend and would soon assume the role of incident commander. While at home and off the clock, Kloster had been watching the news, which included coverage of the breaking storm. Then his phone started ringing with calls from park headquarters. Kloster quickly dressed in his Park Service uniform and headed for Sugarlands. Once there, he grabbed a chainsaw, got behind the wheel of his cruiser, and headed toward Townsend along Little River Road. By then, word
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Blount County Fire Chief Doug McClanahan and firefighter Mike McClurg. Because of the hundreds (or thousands) of trees blocking the road to Abrams Creek Campground, Mike and his cousin Drew had to abandon their heavy duty fire truck and proceed through the tangle on foot.
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID LUTTRELL
the Blount County Highway Department and learn what they knew about those injured in the park and the mounting efforts to rescue them. According to Kloster, it was a familiar and comfortable interagency working relationship. “Incidents like this one require us to partner with agencies outside the National Park Service, and we have a long-term working relationship with the crews from Townsend and Blount County,” says Kloster. “We know and respect each other, we’ve trained together, and that relationship makes a huge difference in responding to incidents like this.” But even absent an established working relationship, all of the agencies that massed at the incident command post in Townsend would, as Jordan puts it, “be trained to read from the same sheet of music” in mounting an orderly and unified response. That sheet of music takes the form of the Incident Command System (ICS), an established paradigm for coordinating the collaborative emergency response efforts of federal, state, and local agencies. ICS clearly establishes a chain of command, assigns specific functions and tasks, and relies on a universal and well-understood system of communication codes and terminology. The National Park Service has predicated its emergency responses on the ICS system since the mid-1980s. As Kloster supervised efforts to reach and rescue those injured in Cades Cove, events unfolding at the Abrams Creek Campground were proving even more desperate.
had reached him of a possible motorcycle fatality between the Sinks and Metcalf Bottoms. “At that point, things had really started to snowball,” says Kloster. “Besides the incident with the motorcycle, we knew we had multiple injuries at Abrams Creek Campground and Cades Cove, but these people were cut off by fallen trees. We couldn’t get in, and they couldn’t get out. Never mind the fact that our radio system was down.” En route to Townsend along Little River Road, Kloster had driven past Metcalf Bottoms and cut through several large limbs sprawled across the road, but with the volume of downed trees, he quickly realized it was a lost cause for one man with a chainsaw. Jordan had dispatched a backhoe and chainsaw crew from Sugarlands, but they had yet to arrive. “I knew that if I had tried to cut through all those trees, it would have taken me all night,” says Kloster. Instead, he reversed course, cut through Metcalf Bottoms, and reached Townsend via Wears Valley Road. He arrived at the Burgermaster restaurant just after 7 p.m. When he arrived, before he assumed command of incident response, his first order of business was to talk with Townsend Fire Chief Don Stallions, Blount County Rural Metro general manager Ron Parker, and a representative of
“ONSTAR, WE HAVE A PROBLEM” In the campground bath house, Jenna and the grandmother struggled to keep the injured 7-year-old child warm and alert. As they tended to the child, Carole Cooper, in her Chevy Tahoe, arrived to offer assistance. With Cooper’s appearance on the scene, the game was about to change. According to Malone, Cooper pulled her Tahoe up to the bath house, Malone and the grandmother lay the shivering girl down in the back of the SUV, and Cooper turned on the heat. Cooper then drove to the clearing in front of the ranger station. With a critically injured child in her car and more injured parties in the creek, she felt the rising
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frustration—shared by many who were involved in the incident—of being cut off and isolated, with no means to call for help. Park radios weren’t working, and Abrams is a notorious dead zone for cell phones. Desperate and bereft of other options, Cooper reached up and, on a whim, pressed the emergency button on her OnStar console, fully expecting that the GM road assistance service would be as useless as her cell phone. “Lo and behold,” says Cooper, “the emergency advisor came on.”6 The voice of deliverance that issued through the OnStar speaker was that of Bryan Anta, a trained emergency medical dispatcher. For the next three hours, OnStar would serve as a vital, life-saving nexus, linking Jordan and Kelly at GSMNP headquarters, along with Blount County emergency responders, to those stranded and injured in the Abrams Creek campground. Blount County Fire Chief McClanahan used the service to contact Rob Webb, then a supervisor with Rural Metro, and request a fleet of ambulances. McClanahan went one step further and attempted to call in a helicopter to evacuate the injured, but with weather conditions still unsettled, UT Medical Center’s Lifestar crew determined that it was unsafe to fly. By that point, McClanahan knew that the golden hour— the time period following a traumatic injury when medical intervention is most likely to save a life—was rapidly lapsing. “I was concerned that if we didn’t quickly treat and evacuate the injured, we might have more fatalities on our hands,” he says. “For a time, OnStar and the Tahoe were the command center for this incident,” says Ron Parker, then general manager of Blount County Rural Metro Ambulance Service.7 Both Webb and Parker now work for Priority Ambulance Service in Blount County.
Cooper describes the incident in an on-line interview captured by CTIA Wireless Association and posted on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=z468JpT7ptU 7 Parker, McClanahan, Kloster, and Cooper appear in a documentary film produced by General Motors, the parent company of OnStar, that recounts the events of the evening of July 5, 2012. The video was intended for an internal GM audience and not released to the public, though GM provided Smokies Life with access to the video.
MOTORCYCLE MEDIC Upon his arrival at the Abrams Creek campground, firefighter Mike McClurg had headed down to the swimming hole. Drew, who realized that the cousins lacked a motorized vehicle for transporting the injured, set out to acquire one. According to Mike, a red pickup truck with a camper top had caught Drew’s attention, and after informing the vehicle’s owner that he was commandeering the truck in the name of the Blount County Fire Department, the owner graciously surrendered the keys. The cousins now had a make-shift ambulance, but a locked gate blocked the path from the campground down to the swimming hole on Abrams Creek. Drew summarily resolved that issue as well, snipping off the lock with a pair of bolt cutters. As he did, a regulation-obsessed camper advised him that doing so violated Park Service rules. Drew took little notice as he swung open the gate and drove the truck down the Cooper Road Trail to the swimming hole to join his cousin. Once at the swimming hole, Mike had initially moved to help the man pinned in the middle of the creek. “All I could see of him was a nose, mouth, and hair,” says Mike. Mike also noticed that the man’s left ear had been all but severed from the side of his head. As Mike entered the river, the man protested. “He was screaming with pain,” Mike recalls, “but he insisted that I go help the woman on the shore.” Mike complied and performed CPR on the now-deceased Burkhart for 20 minutes before returning his attention to the man in the water. By that time, Jim Patty, a captain with the Blount County Fire Department, had arrived and he and the two cousins
PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID LUTTRELL
6
In the isolated location with no electricity or cell phone service, Carole Cooper, on a whim, hit the OnStar button in her Chevy Tahoe and was connected to an emergency dispatcher. Suddenly, everything had changed.
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CONFIRMING THE DEAD, worked to extricate the man. Freeing the severely injured TENDING THE LIVING man from the tree was one thing; transporting him to shore When the storm hit, Ranger Chuck Hester had been through water that was five feet deep was another. patrolling his district in the extreme eastern section of As Mike and Drew began lifting limbs off the victim, GSMNP, about as far from the site of the destruction as one Patty found an inflated child’s inner tube that would answer could get and still be inside the park. The distance would be nicely as a flotation device. Patty was able to place the inner made all that much greater by the tangles of trees and branches tube under the man’s back and rear, and within 20 minutes that blocked the roads and impeded his efforts to reach his they floated him to shore. assigned destination, the Abrams Creek Campground. By that time a backboard had materialized, though Mike By the time Hester arrived, just after dark, Rural Metro is not sure where it came from, and they placed the man on paramedics were treating the injured, and the evacuation was the board and carried him to the commandeered truck. underway. His first order of business involved attending to As the McClurg cousins transported their patient to the the deceased Burkhart. He interranger station, the Blount County viewed witnesses, documented road crews, with the help of the circumstances surrounding private citizens equipped with her death, and positively conchainsaws, had managed to cut a firmed her identity. GSMNP swath through the trees just wide would bear the difficult responenough for a motorcycle to pass. sibility of contacting her next That narrow ingress provided all of kin. Likewise, the park would the access that the first-on-thealso soon contact Ralph Frazier’s scene Rural Metro paramedic, family and convey to them news later identified as Steve Mayes, of his tragic death. needed to reach the victims. He Next, Hester turned his arrived on scene just after 9 p.m. attention to the living, and, and immediately attended to as he did, a second communithe injured who had since been cations miracle was about to brought up from the creek. occur. Shaken but uninjured Just past dark, at 9:44 campers, many of whose tents p.m., with weather conditions had been destroyed by the improving, the Lifestar helicopstorm, began to gather at the ter set down at an emergency ranger station. Hester knew landing zone created at the that news of the storm had intersection of U.S. 129 and already begun to flash on TV Happy Valley Road. Within screens across the country, minutes, the injured child and including the mention of fatalher father were en route to UT ities (national broadcast media, Medical Center. The child’s including CNN, would cover injured mother would make the the story), and he knew that journey via ambulance. concerned loved ones back Just over an hour later, medihome eagerly awaited news. cal care began to arrive at Cades With radio repeaters out, no Cove. The concerted efforts —park visitor Alex Rudle cell phone coverage, and power of Kent Looney working from lines down, Hester, like Carole the west and the Townsend and Cooper a few hours earlier, sucBlount County crews working cumbed to welling frustration. At the time, he may as well from the east had cleared a single lane along Laurel Creek Road. have been operating in the technological realm of the 19th At 10:46 p.m., GSMNP dispatch received the message that the century, as far as communications were concerned. And in caravan of Rural Metro ambulances was halfway to the Cove. this case, the 19th century answered the call. The ambulances arrived at the ranger station just over 10 minAs he walked past the ranger station, he peered in utes later. Shortly after, one of them reached Eckert attending through the window and saw a landline telephone. Granted, to the man with the injured back at the Methodist Church. the device has evolved considerably since Alexander With the arrival of the ambulances at Abrams Creek and Graham Bell was awarded his patent in 1876, but the system Cades Cove, GSMNP staff could begin to relax a bit after that turns speech into electrical pulses carried by copper hours of full-on crisis management, but they weren’t in the wires hasn’t changed all that much. clear just yet.
“In the snap of a finger, it went from a sunny, warm, and peaceful environment to almost complete darkness and a loud roar of what sounded like multiple jet planes flying directly over our heads. Suddenly, the wind was gusting, trees were falling, and the rain was blowing sideways.”
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Hester entered the office, snatched the receiver off the hook, and placed it against his ear, certain it was an exercise in futility. Then…he heard the dial tone. “I was not, in any way, expecting to hear that sound,” he says. “I was dumbfounded. No power, no radio, but I had a dial tone!” His first call went out to Jordan and Kelly at headquarters to confirm Burkhart’s death and apprise them of the situation at the campground. Next, he invited the campers, one by one, to make short calls home, to let their families know they were okay. Later, Hester opened up the ranger station, which also serves as a residence and has three bedrooms, and told the campers that anyone who wished to could stay the night. Rudle and Malone took him up on his offer and occupied one of the bedrooms. After the initial calls had gone through, Hester also offered campers the luxury of longer calls, on the Park Service’s dime. “I invited them to take all the time they needed on the phone, but not to call China or Japan,” Hester says. “There’s no telling what that phone bill ran.” THE CALM AFTER THE STORM By 1 a.m., now July 6, back in the Cades Cove Campground, the fleet of Rural Metro ambulances had transported out the last of the injured, and the park staff reversed the flow on Laurel Creek Road, still down to only one lane, allowing campers and sightseers to leave. As the hundreds of cars streamed east, McNutt, Eckert, and Looney made their way to campground loop C, site 74. They had some unfinished business to attend to. There, they slipped the handcuffs on a 58-year-old man and charged him with assault for attempting to strangle his
wife. The man pled guilty and would pay a fine. At the time, his injured wife was receiving treatment at Blount Memorial Hospital. With the man’s arrest, the park’s emergency response shifted to sweeping the park’s backcountry trails and campsites. Surprisingly there were no injuries there. The storm no doubt knocked the park staff back on its heels, but the disruption was notably short lived. By Saturday—less than two days after the derecho struck—park roads were clear and open, and, despite the two tragic fatalities, all the others who had been harmed by the storm would eventually recover from their injuries, at least the physical ones. The derecho of July 5, 2012, for all its force and destruction, ultimately had little impact on the park east of Elkmont, and even the profound damage it caused to the park’s western end would resolve soon enough, in part from the restorative powers of the natural world, in part from the toil of men and women equipped with mechanized tools. It’s true that national parks and other wild areas are ever vulnerable to Mother Nature’s fury and, further, that natural disasters are beyond anyone’s control. But our capacity to respond to them is not. In mobilizing the life-saving response to the July 2012 storm, Jordan and his crew of rangers, along with all the others who took part—professional partners and private citizens alike—demonstrated clearly that the worst of times can, and often do, inspire the best of human endeavors. v David Brill is the author of the Appalachian Trail saga As Far as the Eye Can See. This article is an excerpt from the upcoming book Into the Mist: Tales of Death and Disaster, Mishaps and Misdeeds, Misfortune and Mayhem in GSMNP to be published by Great Smoky Mountains Association in 2016.
GARY WILSON FOR NPS
Thanks to the hard work of Park Service and contracted clean up crews, roads that looked permanently impassable Thursday night were reopened within 48 hours. It was, afterall, the peak of summer vacation season in America’s most-visited national park.
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W I Y K
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A A
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A Voice for the Smokies (and humankind)
Excerpted from No Place for the Weary Kind: Women of the Great Smoky Mountains by Courtney Lix
With the rounded blue silhouettes of the Great Smoky Mountains in the distance, Wilma Dykeman grew up in a house on the outskirts of Asheville, North Carolina. The 1920s were a time of industrial growth for Asheville, but the Dykeman home was surrounded by native forest, complemented by flower and vegetable gardens, which both of her parents cultivated. The gentle murmur of Beaverdam Creek often drifted in through the house’s open windows, making a strong impression on baby Wilma, whose first words were said to be “waddy coming down” to describe the creek water. All photographs courtesy of Jim Stokely, III except where indicated. Smokies Life
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Long after she’d established herself as an accomplished author, Wilma Dykeman wrote a tongue-in-cheek essay about how, by raising her in a happy, secure home instead of introducing her to tension and dysfunction, her parents didn’t prepare her very well for her career as a writer. Her childhood memories centered around moments like watching her mother Bonnie skim fresh cream from pans of milk, mixing it with wild strawberries for a refreshing summer dessert. The family would spend winter evenings together
Her parents were thoughtful, generous, and kind. They raised Wilma, their only child, to be a self-confident, well-adjusted young woman. But her childhood wasn’t entirely without sadness or worry. The Great Depression shook their financial stability, and in 1934, Willard, who was nearly forty years older than Bonnie, died of a heart attack when Wilma was fourteen. Bonnie never remarried; she and Wilma were devoted to and supportive of each other for their entire lives. “My mother denied me an unhappy, selfish
After graduating from Northwestern University at age 20, Wilma planned to move to Manhattan and take a teaching job at a girl’s finishing school.
The Dykeman family home in Lynn Cove, on the outskirts of Asheville, NC. Their 12 acres included a section of Beaverdam Creek. In 1999 she wrote of the place in the Cosmos Journal, “Nothing I look upon has been planted. All lives and thrives here by natural design…Nearby are scattered gray, moss-encrusted boulders on which I once played and imagined distant adventures.”
in the living room, a crackling fire warming the hearth while Bonnie read aloud to Wilma and her father, Willard. Or Wilma would linger in Willard’s tidy woodworking shop that adjoined the garage, watching him turn a block of black walnut into a graceful piece of furniture. He built Wilma a swing when she was five, suspending it from the stout limb of a maple tree in the yard: “its seat was cut and shaped by hand, and below it was the grass and leaves, and directly above, the thick green maple leaves… I have never known, before or since, a simple object which brought more real pleasure than that swing,” she wrote.
home… She denied me quarrels and invective and discord and self-pity. She made me go out and find these for myself, if I had need of them—or wanted to be a fashionable writer,” Wilma later wrote. Although she was poking fun at the claim that writers somehow needed to be unhappy and insecure to fuel their genius, Wilma did find abundant challenging emotional material to work with in the misunderstood and complicated psyche of her native Appalachian Mountains, if not in her family. With her finely crafted sense of both history and artistry, and her ability to write fiction and nonfiction with equal mastery, Wilma embraced the challenge
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of writing honestly and fairly about her homeland—rising to become one of the region’s most accomplished and celebrated authors. In the most personal details of life—her own, and others’—she found universal meaning. And in Appalachia, she found echoes of the entire world. Her career spanned more than fifty years and included almost twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, and hundreds of newspaper columns and magazine articles. She taught college courses and gave countless lectures that centered on the history and
tember, she was briefly back at home in Asheville with her mother before heading north to begin this new phase of her life. Had she not unexpectedly fallen in love that summer, Southern Appalachia might have lost one of its most insightful storytellers. But on a pleasant August morning as she was cutting flowers in the backyard garden, a friend and “a stranger” arrived. Mabel Wolfe, sister to literary icon Thomas, had matchmaking in mind as she introduced Wilma to James R. Stokely, Jr. James was a thoughtful, philosophical
Wilma and her future husband James Stokely. Their matchmaker was Mabel Wolfe, sister of literary star and Asheville native Thomas Wolfe. According to Wilma, she and James were both interested “in words and in woods.”
culture of the Tennessee and North Carolina mountains. She built on the legacy of earlier writers like Olive Tilford Dargan, but set her own writing apart by the depth of her historical understanding of the region. All of that was still to come in the summer of 1940, when Wilma was a 20-year-old newly minted graduate from Northwestern University in Illinois. She had accepted a teaching position at Finch, the prestigious girls’ finishing school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and was planning to leave the North Carolina mountains she’d grown up in, possibly forever. Until the school year started in Sep-
young man who had befriended Thomas Wolfe in New York City years earlier, and subsequently became one of Mabel’s acquaintances, since they lived so close to each other in the Southern mountains. James and Wilma began falling in love that very morning. Wilma later wrote, “We discovered that we were both interested in words and in woods, in theater and in thought, in being very social on some occasions and very much alone on other occasions. We were passionately fond of travel, and equally happy in staying at home… Many of the things that made us perplexing to other people made us seem clear and
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Wilma was an only child, so her parents sent her to Girl Scout camp to be with other kids. This photo was taken at Camp Elliot near Old Fort, NC.
right to each other.” On one of their first dates, James took her to the Newfound Gap Overlook along the state lines of Tennessee and North Carolina to be part of the crowd listening to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicate the new Great Smoky Mountains National Park on September 2, 1940. The next month, on October 8th, they were married in the same garden in which they’d met. With the goal of “getting to know our native land,” Wilma and James embarked on a ten-week honeymoon drive across America. The giddiness of their whirlwind romance began to deepen into a close partnership that would grow stronger over decades of marriage. James was not only supportive of Wilma’s writing career, but integral to it. He himself was a poet, and although he never earned a living from his writing, he had respectful friendships with several giants of American poetry: Robinson Jeffers, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost. Frost, during one of James and Wilma’s visits to his Vermont farm, told them about good friends of his, both successful writers, who had divorced because of incompatibili-
ties with their careers. “The separation of these two people had wounded Frost,” Wilma wrote, “because he cherished both of them and he believed they belonged together. His shrewd, friendly eyes watched us closely. My husband and I were touched by his concern for our personal relationship.” Robert Frost wasn’t the only person who worried that Wilma’s career might cause strife in their marriage—acquaintances often murmured at the fact that she chose to write under her maiden name, a highly unusual choice in the 1950s. Instead of driving them apart, Wilma’s writing seems to have brought her and James closer together, deepening their collaboration and support of each other. James helped with research, read her drafts, asked questions, and when necessary, opened doors that weren’t accessible to most women in the mid 20th century. His father had been a founder of a successful canning company, and although James had only a minor interest in the business, it provided him with both a modest income and the respect of businessmen and political leaders throughout the South. Upon returning from their honeymoon, Wilma and
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Wilma’s father, Willard. He died of a heart attack when Wilma was 14.
Wilma’s mother, Bonnie. Wilma dedicated her first and most famous novel, The Tall Woman, to her mother.
James bought a hundred acre apple orchard—partly inspired by Robert Frost. They began building a stone cottage in Tennessee, then purchased a second orchard in North Carolina. Wilma also began to establish her literary reputation with short stories, largely published in the Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, and American Magazine. Even with her promising career, she and James agreed that they wanted a family. In 1949, their first son, Dykeman, was born. Two years later, they had a second son, James Stokely III. But the writing, children, and farming turned out to be a little too much of an undertaking at the same time. Of the three, the farming was the least dear. So in 1953, they sold their orchards and moved into James’s family home in Newport, Tennessee— just across the mountain range from Asheville. The house sat on the crest of a hill, on four acres of lawn, gardens, and trees, which sloped down to the Pigeon River at the foot of the bluff. The French Broad River on the outskirts of Newport, which the Pigeon River flows into not far from the Stokely home, was the subject of Wilma’s first book-length literary success. Unsolicited, she pitched the idea of a book about the river to the New York publisher Rinehart & Company, which had issued a series of books on the “Rivers of America.” This series, although nonfiction, was authored largely by novelists and literary figures so as to be more appealing than most historical writing of the time. It was a revolutionary idea—in perfect keeping with Wilma’s style of narrative nonfiction. Although Rinehart initially rejected her proposal, ex-
plaining they only published books on “important rivers,” the rejection letter left the door for resubmittal open just enough: “‘If [the book] is interestingly enough written,’” Wilma later recalled in an interview in Southern Living, “they said, ‘we would publish the story of a river no bigger than a man‘s hand.’” Undaunted and convinced that the French Broad deserved a place among the “Rivers of America”, Wilma researched and wrote several chapters for their consideration. She was promptly offered a contract and her first book, The French Broad, was published in 1955 as the 49th book in the series. The French Broad was particularly notable for its controversial chapter on the effects of pollution and the ecological destruction of the river—published seven years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Wilma’s editor had tried to remove it and she resisted. “I hesitated, then replied that I had to have this chapter but I would try to make it interesting,” she recalled at an awards ceremony in 2001. “I would call it ‘Who killed the French Broad?’ Perhaps people would think it was a murder mystery. (Of course, it was murder but not a mystery.) At publication, that chapter received more response, from Raleigh to California, than any other part of the book.” Poet Carl Sandburg wrote her after finishing his copy, “Your blood and brain absorbed that tributary so completely in feel and imagination that the book would not have been misnamed, Hey feller, how does it feel to be a river?…I said a couple of times, Jesus, she can write!” Her boys, Dykeman and James, were six and four when
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Wilma, Wake, and James at their small stone cottage in Newport, TN. James had a small business interest in his family’s giant “Stokely” canning and farm empire that got its start in Newport, but his true passion was poetry.
The French Broad was published to excellent reviews—but conscious of the central role her mother had played in her own life, Wilma made sure her writing didn’t overshadow her family. She wrote about being a mother too—in her fiction, and in numerous essays. She was a “Southern Woman” and she thoroughly enjoyed it, celebrating her ability to wear flamboyant hats and high heels, and to bake pies whenever she desired. Her humor often shines through when mentioning raising two boys—did other families suffer from various afflictions like “nightly hydrophobia”, she once asked in an essay: “children who have spent half an afternoon reveling in a pool of thousands of gallons of water are all at once repelled at the thought of a small tub of the stuff—coupled with a bar of soap. They resist all encounters with water that is not filled with ice cubes, fish, or other people.” As the boys grew up and attended grammar school,
Wilma wrote while she had the house to herself. When they got home in the evening, she shifted her focus to them, although her eye for detail and sense of a good story was always with her. She watched them run across the lawn catching fireflies, struggled to get them into church clothes, called them in from playing baseball in rainstorms. Mothers everywhere must have empathized with her when she wrote of dropping them off at camp: “Suddenly, before she can say here’s-the-poison-ivy-lotion or don’t-forget-to-brush-yourteeth, the mother of the camper beholds a transfiguration… suddenly he is a total stranger… He turns his shoulder, as indifferent and casual as a sturdy little boy’s shoulder can be and pretends that the woman in the shirtwaist dress behind him is some unknown wanderer who hitchhiked a ride in the family car…” Few women in the 1950s and ‘60s had the support from their husbands to both embrace a full family life and pursue
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Family time at the Dykeman-Stokely household in Newport, TN. Their children are James Stokely III, left, and Dykeman, right.
a career, and Wilma and James were quite the odd couple in rural, conservative Newport, Tennessee. Wilma’s second book, Neither Black Nor White, was coauthored with James and was a bold statement about their commitment to social justice. The book was catalyzed by the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling against separate but equal schools. Newspaper and magazine reporters traveled through the South to record reactions to the ruling but, Wilma observed, “They all talked to the same people; they all came with their own stereotype and they went back and they wrote about it. We didn’t recognize this South; it was just their South...” So she and James spent a year and a half researching and writing a more realistic book of interviews and oral history about Southern racial attitudes after Brown v. Board of Education. Sometimes the research required overnight trips, which weren’t safe for the boys. During those times, Wilma’s mother Bonnie watched her grandsons while Wilma and
James drove across the winding roads of thirteen Southern states and conducted over five hundred interviews. “We let the South speak for itself; it had a multitude of voices,” Wilma told interviewer Richard Marius in 1989. “It was a strangely wonderful time,” she remembered, “There was an openness about everybody. They thought if you went to talk with them that you agreed with them… What we wanted to know was what they believed in. And we wanted to listen.” Wilma had received a Guggenheim fellowship which helped cover some of their expenses as they worked on the project. They attended KKK gatherings and NAACP meetings, talked to ordinary people they met at gas stations, and made appointments to see politicians and leaders in cities and small towns. Read decades later, the book is startlingly raw—the sights, sounds, and smells of a familiar South, but the interviews sit uneasily:
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You watch a Klan meeting on a still summer night or under a chilly autumn wind, as it is directed from the bed of a battered truck backed up into a sedge field on the city’s outskirts… the faithful few hear the ill-organized, defiant, familiar messages of impotent anger. In a small town in middle Mississippi a stranger informed us: “We got one of the highest gasoline taxes of any state in the country, and most of it’s being used by the Governor to equalize the [Negro’s] schools… it’s something the government can’t force on the people. Oughtn’t to do it, can’t do it.” One North Carolinian sighs as he talks with you about some of the facts of Negro migration from the South. “‘Oh, the Negroes are leaving by the wholesale,’ some people tell you and they’re glad. They’ve never noticed that it’s the boy with the engineering degree who’s leaving, and it’s his idiot brother who’s staying.” James’s presence at interviews—a man—also helped Wilma gain access to places and people who wouldn’t have taken her seriously as a woman, even if she did have an impressive writing career. Wilma’s presence opened different doors—she was able to talk with women who had never discussed their feelings on civil rights with anyone other than their families. Neither Black Nor White was published in 1957 by Rinehart & Company, the same publisher that had given Wilma her
CREATIVE COMMONS IMAGE OBTAINED THROUGH WIKIMEDIA
CREATIVE COMMONS IMAGE OBTAINED THROUGH WIKIMEDIA
The iconic American poet Robert Frost was a close friend to James and Wilma. His farm in Vermont may have inspired the Dykeman-Stokelys to purchase land and apple orchards in east Tennessee and western North Carolina. Frost worried that the couple’s marriage would be troubled by their twin literary ambitions.
Thomas Wolfe, author of You Can’t Go Home Again and Look Homeward Angel, was born and raised in Asheville and was also a friend to Wilma and James. Wolfe died of tuberculosis at age 37.
first book contract for The French Broad. The book won the Sidney Hillman Award in 1957 for being “the best book of the year on world peace, race relations, or civil liberties.” This created more opportunities for Wilma and James, enabling them to write about 20 articles in the late 1950s and early 1960s for The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Progressive, and civil-rights focused magazines. Particularly in their role as stringers for The New York Times Magazine, they were often trailed by a sheriff’s deputy out of concern for their safety. Asheville minister John Nelson recalled asking Wilma once, “Were you afraid?” She answered, “No. There are things you have to do. They must be done, even when it is uncomfortable to do so.” In complement to their travel, Wilma and James delighted in returning home, settling in to familiar and comfortable surroundings with their boys once more. Great Smoky Mountains National Park was slowly returning to wilderness as trees grew up through old fields and home sites, and the Park Service expanded the network of hiking trails. The rivers and streams of the mountains were especially resonant for Wilma. She, James, and their sons often hiked and explored the national park, favoring the secluded trails of the Cosby and Big Creek sections. Given her affinity for creeks and rivers, Wilma was particularly enthusiastic about Cosby Creek, “one of the swiftest, most picturesque streams in the park. It provides natural wading ponds and breathtaking
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CREATIVE COMMONS IMAGE OBTAINED THROUGH WIKIMEDIA
Poet and biographer Carl Sandburg lived part of the year near Asheville (just south of Hendersonville, NC). He was highly complimentary of the work of both Wilma and James.
Wilma with Alex Haley, author of Roots and The Autobiography of Malcom X: as told to Alex Haley. Haley lived much of his life in Tennessee.
swimming pools along several stretches,” she wrote in an article for The New York Times. LeConte Lodge was another favorite family destination—they made sure to never hike up and down the same trail, often choosing the winding 8 mile Boulevard Trail to reach the lodge, and the steeper, more direct 5 mile Alum Cave Trail for their descent. For a writer so in touch with the cultural and natural history of the region, Wilma was remarkably never pigeon-holed as a travel writer. She composed a handful of articles encouraging people to visit the new national park in Eastern America, which touch on themes she explores in her books—a fascination with water and sensitivity to the native culture of the mountains. In her short article for The New York Times, “Secluded Smokies,” she praises Little River, which flows beside the winding road that leads from park headquarters toward Townsend. “Little River rises at an altitude of 6,000 feet in the mountains; by the time it has reached this valley, it is pure and cold and forms dozens of pools large enough for swimming,” she wrote. “Large boulders also provide ideal spots for sunbathing. This road, then, is not for making time but for taking time. Every curve along the way reveals an inviting picnic area, swimming pool, or a spot to try one’s luck for trout.” In another article for The New York Times, “A Stage for Nature in the Smokies” she mentions a restored tub mill along the Junglebrook Trail, “passers-by not only can see this man-made structure
in action but also can acquire a very real sense of the atmosphere of pioneer times, that until just quite recently, existed in some of the more remote hollows.” And always, whether after day trips into the Smokies, overnight camping trips, or long excursions through Europe, she returned faithfully to her desk and typewriter and kept writing. During the early ‘60s, writing while her sons were at grammar school, she completed her first novel, an epic tale of post-Civil War Appalachia. She dedicated The Tall Woman to her mother, Bonnie Cole. Wilma wove themes from her nonfiction—reverence for water, societal prejudice, the importance of education—into the life of The Tall Woman’s heroine, Lydia Moore. In the book, after the Civil War ends, tensions, mistrust, and ill will linger in a previously tight-knit Appalachian community. The novel follows Lydia’s struggles to heal both her husband, a Union soldier emotionally wounded during the war, and her community, still divided by sympathies with the North and South; and her efforts to establish a school in the mountains so their children can have a better future. Importantly, it presented stereotypes of Appalachia—lack of education, rural poverty—in the context of universal struggles and ambitions. As Wilma later explained, she felt her novels allowed her to “probe to the quick of life. They stir us to laughter, rage, pity, horror, renewed awareness of the human condition—and they put us into closer touch with
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At first Rinehart & Company rejected Wilma’s proposal to write a book on the French Broad River for their Rivers of America series. But Wilma persisted and eventually published a distinguished work that included a controversial chapter on the impacts of pollution on the watershed. It was published in 1955, seven years before Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.
Wilma and James visited 13 states and conducted over 500 interviews for their book on the South after desegregation. Neither Black nor White won the Sidney Hillman Award for “the best book of the year on world peace, race relations, or civil liberties.”
“reality” than tons of statistics, reams of “facts.”’ The Tall Woman struck a chord with readers all over America; published by Holt-Rinehart-Winston in 1962, it has sold over 200,000 copies. 1962 was also the year Wilma began work as a columnist for the Knoxville News-Sentinel, sometimes writing up to three columns a week for “The Simple Life.” These numerous short pieces explore how the local, personal, and familial echoed greater questions of literature and life and philosophy. Her speaking and lecturing career also began to develop into a robust traveling schedule. She gave fifty to seventy-five talks a year, which she prepared for meticulously. She had majored in speech at Northwestern, and once harbored dreams of being a star on Broadway, so she had little trepidation of appearing before crowds. She was particularly beloved because of her sense of humor. “I believe that a sense of humor is necessary for any successful life,” she once explained, “Humor provides perspective. Humor diminishes our ego while it nourishes our shared humanity. Humor allows us to be serious about the significant aspects of our life without being grim about the trivia…” In addition to her intelligence, insights, and
humor, she began to be known for her penchant for flamboyant hats—broad brims and bright ribbons—which she started wearing early in her speaking career and quickly became “a Dykeman trademark.” Following the success of her fictional debut, her second novel, The Far Family was published in 1966. It takes place a generation after The Tall Woman, following the life of Ivy Thurston Cortland, the granddaughter of The Tall Woman’s protagonist Lydia Moore. The novel draws its conflict from the murder of an African-American, which is pinned on Clay Thurston, one of Ivy’s brothers. Race, social justice, and stewardship of the land are resonant themes, as is the internal conflict about “being from Appalachia.” Through her characters, Wilma explored how the deeply negative stereotyping of the region impacted pride and value in what the region’s settlers accomplished in making a living from a harsh but beautiful land. She also worked with James on two biographies about civil rights advocates in the southern Appalachians. They published Seeds of Southern Change: The Life of Will Alexander in 1962 and Prophet of Plenty: The First Ninety Years of W. D. Weatherford in 1966. Later she wrote a biography of Edna Rankin
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The Tall Woman was Wilma’s first novel and a huge success. It has sold over 200,000 copies and is still in print today. It touches on subjects such as stewardship of the land and social justice in Appalachia.
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Return the Innocent Earth, a novel, was published in 1973. Its plot pits the desire for corporate profits against environmental concerns and the preservation of community.
Wilma’s short history of Tennessee was published as part of the national bicentennial in 1976. Five years later she was appointed by Governor Lamar Alexander to be the official Tennessee State Historian.
McKinnon, a pioneer in family planning from 1930s to 1960s. Too Many People, Too Little Love was published in 1975. Although Wilma admitted being resistant to beginning nearly every biography she worked on, she later explained to Appalachian State Professor Sandra Ballard, “these were people who made me think ‘if I don’t write about their lives they probably won’t have a biography, at least not now.’ Each one of them really did have such a special contribution, and I guess my sense of mission has always been strong.” Her book-length works largely focused on Appalachia and the American South, but her newspaper columns for the Knoxville News Sentinel reveal a woman whose interests and involvements ranged broadly, impossible to categorize except that they were created by a bright and curious mind. Her “biography in brief,” she once wrote, is a quote from William Hazlitt, an English critic: “I would like to spend the whole of my life in traveling…if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.” In the 1950s through the 1970s, Wilma and James traveled through Canada, ranged across Europe—Greece, in particular, resonated with Wilma—and Wilma was part of a special delegation to China in 1976. They viewed traveling
to foreign places as a way “to know more about this world and this adventure called life…When we know more about the corner of the world where we live, we know more about the green and fragile planet which is home to all humans. Our own little spark of curiosity is a part of the immense mystery which surrounds all life. To know! To seek to know! How dull and dead we are when we relinquish that right, that rapture in our lives.” As they traveled, sometimes accompanied by their sons and Wilma’s mother Bonnie, they often noted similarities to the Smokies in the world’s distant places. The craftspeople of Italy, Spain, and Scandinavia reminded them of weavers and woodworkers in the Appalachians; the Black Forest in Germany evoked reminiscences of George Vanderbilt’s estate outside of Asheville, where German understanding of forestry was first applied to American lands; in the relationship of Bergen to the rest of Norway, they recognized the East Tennesseans’ predilection for distinguishing themselves as separate—East—from the rest of the state. “What do an afternoon on the bluff [by her Tennessee house] and an evening at the Salzburg [Austria] festival have in common?” Wilma wrote. “My appreciation of them.”
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The National Park Service contracted with Wilma and her son James Stokely, III to write this history of the Great Smoky Mountains from the Cherokee to today. It was first published in 1976, then reissued in 1984 as At Home in the Smokies in honor of the national park’s 50th anniversary. It is now published by Great Smoky Mountains Association as Mountain Home. Many agree it is the perfect concise history of the area.
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Wilma and her husband traveled widely, visiting Scandinavia, Germany, Italy, Spain, and China. This photo, Wilma’s favorite, shows her on her honeymoon in 1940 marveling at the rocky coast of California at Carmel.
Her third novel, Return the Innocent Earth, published in 1973, was her least successful, but it was her favorite. It had “everything I care about…racial issues, powerful women, the ways people make choices,” she explained in her interview with Sandra Ballard. She fictionalized a small family canning company in the Appalachians, effectively emulating the origins of James’s family business. Concerned about her ability to write convincingly about corporate dynamics, she asked to attend company meetings and interview company officers. The novel examines the relationship between motivation for corporate profits, environmental responsibility, and local community; its plot tension comes from a worker dying from exposure to an incompletely vetted new chemical. Her sense of the Southern Appalachians, from a cultural, historical, and ecological perspective, figured prominently in nearly all of her books. She embraced this, although often took issue with critics or reviewers who saw her as a “regional writer.” She explained once to an interviewer, “I think the most frustrating thing that can happen to an author is to have regionalism equated with provincialism. . . When really you are an American writer writing from place. Most great writing, I feel, has a sense of place. I hope this would make it more universal rather than limited.” She had firmly established her reputation as a writer of
both fiction and nonfiction by 1974, when several Tennessee congressmen asked her to write a short history of Tennessee. They were confident she was the best native writer to produce the blend of history and literature they wanted for the book, which would be published in 1976 as part of the national bicentennial celebration. Wilma admitted that she contemplated turning the project down, but “was afraid someone else would not write it with the knowledge and love for it that I have.” In deference to the task she’d undertaken, she humbly explained in the preface that the reader should take the book to be a portrait of the state, not a definitive history. “Definitive history,” she wrote, “must be inclusive. The page limitations determined that this book should be exclusive. The challenge and frustration of the task became one of choices. Through such choices, Tennessee became a personal interpretation. ” In the late 1970s, Wilma also made the “mistake” of pointing out to the head of the University of Tennessee’s English Department, Dr. John Fisher, that despite UT’s prominence as the largest university in the region, it didn’t offer a single course in Appalachian Studies. “Now, I don’t think it’s regionalism,” she said to an interviewer, “to know the place where you are. The arts have always, historically, had a great sense of place.” Dr. Fisher agreed with her that
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Wilma with the Dalai Lama. Both are known for their kindness and sense of humor.
it was a gap in the department’s offerings—and asked if she would teach it. She demurred at first, saying she didn’t have a Ph.D. “Then the next thing I said was I would do it until he found somebody else.” She taught the course for over twenty years. In addition to her enthusiasm for the region’s history, she was ever-encouraging of anyone who mentioned wanting to be a writer to her. Sally Buckner relates in her anthology Our Words, Our Ways that: “Ms. Dykeman urges students to learn to listen and look at the world with keen eyes and ears, then apply themselves diligently. She also draws a keen distinction between aptitude and attitude. ‘The talent comes from developing the aptitude,’ she has said. ‘The writer comes from developing the attitude.’” Wilma and James were also frequent lecturers at Berea College in Kentucky and the other regional universities. Wilma was the first woman to join Berea’s Board of Trustees, in 1969, and she served for thirty years. On a June day in 1977, when James was 63, shortly after returning home from lecturing at Berea, he died of a heart attack in their garden. Wilma was deeply affected, for they had managed—despite many people’s doubts—to be each other’s partner in every sense of the word for nearly forty years. She wrote about her grief, quoting Dante’s Inferno—I
woke to find myself in a dark wood/ where the right road was wholly lost and gone. “Down, down into ourselves we go,” she wrote, “like a lost wanderer knowing no path through the woods, finding no light to illuminate the lonely way. We discover a self and a suffering whose existence is stranger than far countries or lost rivers… A week ago, [James] left on one of the few journeys we have not taken together. But he is not wholly away—and I am not wholly here. We are still together.” Her mother, Bonnie, was still alive; her sons had both graduated from Yale University, and they all supported each other in their grief. Wilma kept writing her frequent newspaper columns, and traveling, although she never completed and published another book of fiction. She turned her attention to new projects, often collaborating with her sons. She co-wrote Highland Homeland, a history and portrait of the Great Smoky Mountains, with her son James Stokely III. James was the executive director of the Appalachian Experience section of the Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge and asked her to consult on the project. Their work over the next four years resulted in meticulously researched and written teaching materials honoring the history of the region, as well as a book, An Encyclopedia of East Tennessee. Wilma also cowrote Appalachian Mountains with her son Dykeman Stokely. In 1981, Governor Lamar Alexander named Wilma the
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Wilma’s writing always had a strong sense of place, and that place was inevitably the southern Appalachian Mountains.
state historian of Tennessee. Although the role was initially a four-year term, she held the honorary position until 2002. Her attitude toward history, combined with her writing ability, enabled her to make it come alive like few other writers could do. This unusual sense of what history could be began to form when she was a little girl and met her great-grandfather at a family reunion: “He had served in the Civil War; through him I realized that history was people—and that it did not die but lived on in the consequences flowing from each event, every encounter...” This rare ability to tell good stories woven from the history of the Southern Appalachians was one of the main distinguishing attributes of her fiction. In 1994, Governor Ned Ray McWherter gave her the Pride of Tennessee award because, as he explained, “she has managed to capture and truthfully portray the people, places, and events that make East Tennessee and Appalachia
a unique place in world culture.” When she died from complications from hip surgery on December 22, 2006, Wilma was laid to rest in a simple wooden coffin with a spray of native plants—hemlock, laurel, and rhododendron—placed on top of it. She was buried in the cemetery of the Beaverdam Baptist Church in Asheville, the namesake of the creek that flowed past her childhood home. Her headstone has two phrases on it: “Precious above Rubies,” a line from her first novel The Tall Woman, and the words “writer, speaker, educator, environmentalist.” Wilma once explained that her writing technique involved gathering “words, bits of speech, turns of phrase. My laboratory is without walls: It is anywhere I and other people happen to be passing or gathering. The various ways in which we use words reveal more than we might suspect: Our region, our race, our social affiliations and economic
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At a book signing for the hardback release of The Far Family, published in 1966. It is a sequel to The Tall Woman.
status, our personality, the immediate past that has shaped us and the future we shall be helping to shape.� The words Wilma chose, in her countless lectures, articles, and eighteen published books, were expressions of her constant search for commonality and understanding among things that were often considered different and foreign—whether it was the stereotyped hillbillies of the southern Appalachians or peasants in inland China. The future she worked tirelessly to shape was one of greater sensitivity to nature, racial justice, and open-mindedness. v Excerpted from the upcoming book No Place for the Weary Kind: Women of the Great Smoky Moutains by Courtney Lix to be published by Great Smoky Mountains Association in 2016. A native of Gatlinburg, TN, Courtney now lives in the Washington, D.C. area where she works as an editor.
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in winter. Bears are in their winter dens, most birds have migrated south, and for the early settlers in Cades Cove, it was often a lean time. With little food available from the woods, they had to rely on what they’d cultivated in their gardens and the pork they’d preserved with salt and smoke. Around 1818, when John Oliver and his family moved into the Cove, they survived the winter only through the generosity of Cherokee Indians, who shared dried pumpkin and other foods with them. Christmas celebrations were nearly nonexistent in this atmosphere of austerity. Church services were
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often canceled for the season because it was too difficult to travel, so families prayed at home. It was a day of quiet reflection—if anything was given, it was “good deeds and good thoughts” not treats and presents. While folks in Cades Cove generally celebrated Christmas on December 25th, in some pockets of the mountains, old timers grew up observing “Old Christmas” on January 6th, the date of Jesus’s birth according to the Julian (old style) calendar. As the Cove grew and flourished—with more families, more churches and schools, and more connections to places outside the mountains—hints of our
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PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL LEA
The John Oliver cabin on the Cades Cove Loop Road is one of the oldest historic homes in the park. It was built in the 1820s by John and Lucretia Oliver and remained in the family up until park establishment in the 1930s. The large stone chimney is held together with mortar made from mud and other materials.
Christmas w as a joyous time. For many years after we moved to the lower end of the Cove, I recall the Christmas Eve serenades.
modern Christmas celebrations began to appear. Judge William W. Oliver (great-great-grandson of the original settler John Oliver,) whose childhood spanned the 1910s and ‘20s recalls the serenades and other fond Christmas memories briefly in his memoir, Cades Cove: A Personal History: “Christmas was a joyous time. For many years after we moved to the lower end of the Cove, I recall the Christmas Eve serenades. A group of men and boys went to each house in the neighborhood, and would run around the house several times ringing cow bells, shooting shotguns and firecrackers and blowing horns. They were then treated with apples or candy... A couple of weeks before Christmas, my mother would make a list and send me to the store, and instructed me to hide all those Christmas treats in the loft of the old barn.... Christmas Eve, after all the other children had gone to bed, Santa Claus filled the stockings with the goodies from Uncle Russ’s store. They were all up before daylight the next morning to see what Santa had brought.”
Other families had boxes with abundant candy and treats around for these “serenaders” as well. After the ruckus had quieted down, the visitors would often be invited in for a Christmas treat, usually candy or nuts. On Christmas day, anyone could be entitled to a treat if he or she was the first to shout, “Christmas give!” or sometimes “Christmas gift!” when greeting a neighbor or family member. Throughout most of the year, R.D. and Mary Jane Burchfield’s store on Forge Creek Road in the bustling Cades Cove community stocked practical inventory: farm equipment, flour and coffee, bolts of cloth. But as Christmas time approached in December, the counters of the modest woodframe store—operated in the 1920s and early ‘30s—were adorned with fancy candies and exotic, colorful fruits like bananas and oranges. Most of the children who grew up in Cades Cove received these tropical fruits and sweets as presents, with fond memories of discovering the joys of a simple orange on Christmas morning. As Santa became a common fixture in American
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Author Courtney Lix grew up in the Great Smoky Mountains and is the granddaughter of Henry Lix, a long-time ranger in the division of interpretation. Her writing awards include the Ferris Prize for Journalism from Princeton University, and the Gregory T. Pope Prize for Science Writing.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL LEA
Top: The first Cades Cove Missionary Baptist Church was a log building constructed in 1832 near the present structure. The small congregation’s second “meeting house” was built in 1894, also in the same “Hyatt Hill” vicinity. The church we see today was constructed in 1915 and the congregation remained active through 1944. For many of its latter years, a Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp was situated nearby and park visitors streamed by on Sundays in their automobiles. Bottom: Winter’s dustings of snow and frost make the small valley that is Cades Cove even more breathtakingly beautiful.
PHOTOGRAPH BY BILL LEA
Christmas mythology throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, his legend reached the mountain children too, largely through the influence of public schools. William Oliver attended the New Consolidated School, which opened in 1916. The school term ran from July 1 to Christmas, giving everyone an opportunity to celebrate the end of the term with a big Christmas party. “Yes, there was always a program at school, and a tree,” Inez Adams, a Cades Cove native says. The schools played a large role in bringing Christmas celebrations to the mountains—Oliver recalled in his memoir that the end-of-year festivities included decorating a school Christmas tree and a visit from Santa Claus. One year, William Oliver received a book of stories called Santa Claus at Sea, for best behavior in school. Christmas trees slowly became a common part of Smoky Mountain celebrations as well. With such lovely white pine, red cedar, and eastern hemlock trees in the woods around their homes, how could families resist? Fathers, sons, and sometimes the entire family would venture out into the cold to find “the perfect tree.” Traditionally, the trees were decorated with strings of popcorn and dried cranberries. Most cabins didn’t have electricity, so of course there were no electric lights. Inez Adams, whose family retained a special lease on their land in Cades Cove after the park was established, also remembers her grandmother making the most beautiful wreaths out of ground pine and holly berries, “just things she could get in the woods, and it was so beautiful.” Even with trees, treats, hymns and prayers, Larry Sparks and Ruth Davis, whose families had extended leases similar to Inez’s, both remember that Christmas was by and large just another day. The mountain farms required constant attention, and in the cold of winter, Christmas was no exception. Cows had to be milked and fed. Hogs and horses had to be fed. Hens had to be looked after and eggs had to be collected before they froze and burst. Boys often laid traplines for muskrats and other critters in winter; those had to be checked. “We didn’t have much Christmas in Cades Cove,” Inez Adams says with a laugh. But after the chores were done, families would gather together, making the journey across the Cove for a good Christmas meal. Pork tenderloin was often the main dish. Alongside would be fruits and vegetables that had been “put up” from the summer and fall harvest: sulfured apples, dried green beans (leather britches), stack cake, egg pie, and rich, creamy buttermilk. On Christmas day, after enjoying a few sticks of special Christmas candy and perhaps playing a game or two of checkers, as Larry Sparks remembers, the kids would go to bed. Ruth Davis recalls that it was often so cold, and the bed was so heavy with her mother’s handmade quilts, that it was hard to turn over once you got in bed. “You made a warm place and didn’t move,” she remembered. Then morning would come and then, as now, Christmas would be 364 days away. v
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The CCC Although the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) did not generally employ artists,* there were, regardless, CCC laborers who possessed a variety of talents. The “boy” mentioned in the letter to Superintendent Eakin was one W. Alan Youngblood. He was so bursting with pride over the bridges, roads, and trails that he and his fellow enrollees had created in the Greenbrier area, that he spent his leisure hours making sketches of them. Youngblood’s 1934 portfolio of original illustrations has been carefully preserved in the park archives for over 80 years. Likewise, the hand-hewn infrastructure created by Camp David C. Chapman has largely endured and is still serving hundreds of visitors every day. Between 1933 and 1942, as many as 4,000 CCC enrollees were stationed in the Smokies at any given time. All were single, unemployed men between the ages of 18 and 25. Their pay was $30 per month ($25 of which was sent home to dependents). *The depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed hundreds of artists.
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Thanks to these business members and our other advertisers for helping support the educational, historical, and scientific programs of Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
LODGING Auntie Belhams Mountains of Experience. 1024 Charlottes Court Pigeon Forge, TN 37863-6100 Phone: 800.436.6618 Email: john@auntiebelhams.com Web: www.auntiebelhams.com GSMA members receive a 10% discount on lodging, except holidays, October dates and special events. Cabins For You We are family owned, professionally managed, and we aim to please. 436 East Parkway Gatlinburg, TN 37738 Phone: 800.684.7865 Email: info@cabinsforyou.com Web: www.cabinsforyou.com Clarion Inn in Pigeon Forge Clarion Inn, Pigeon Forge, is arguably the finest and most luxurious hotel in the area. 124 Waldens Main Street Pigeon Forge, TN 37863 Phone: 865.868.5300 Email: jon@clarionpf.com Web: www.pigeonforgeclarion.com GSMA members receive 10% off current room rate. Special events, holidays, and October dates excluded. Eden Crest Vacation Rentals Escape to paradise. 652 Wears Valley Road Pigeon Forge, TN 37863 Phone: 866.254.0249 Email: marketing@edencrest.net Web: www.edencrest.net Golfview Vacation Rentals Welcome to the heart of Pigeon Forge in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains. 718 Golfview Boulevard Pigeon Forge, TN 37863 Phone: 888.705.7368 Email: Reservations@golfviewvacationrentals.com Web: www.golfviewvacationrentals.com GSMA members receive a 15% discount on lodging, excluding holidays.
Hampton Inn in Pigeon Forge Located in the heart of Pigeon Forge. 2497 Teaster Lane Pigeon Forge, TN 37863 Phone: 865.365.1588 Email: Charles.wilson@hilton.com Web: www.pigeonforge.hamptoninn.com GSMA members receive a 10% discount. Holidays, special events, and October dates are excluded.
Riverside Tower After all, IT is your vacation. 3455 Parkway Pigeon Forge, TN 37863 Phone: 800.453-5540 Email: mapjuvinall@aol.com Web: www.riversidehotels.com GSMA members receive a 10% discount. Holidays, special events and October dates excluded.
Holiday Inn Hotel and Convention Center Welcome Home. 3230 Parkway Pigeon Forge, TN 37868 Phone: 800.782.3119 Email: kembre@cooperhotels.com Web: www.4lodging.com
Timber Tops Luxury Cabin Rentals ...More than a Cabin. 1440 Upper Middle Creek Road, Suite 204 Sevierville, TN 37876 Phone: 877.549.6775 Email: Hcaldwell@timbertops.net Web: www.yourcabin.com
Maples Ridge Cabin Rentals Your Place to Stay in the Smokies. 1804 Wears Valley Road Sevierville, TN 37862 Phone: 800.752.9052 Email: maplesridge@comcast.com Web: www.maplesridge.com
Wilderness at the Smokies Rustic mountain-modern charm with world-class amenities. 1424 Old Knoxville Highway Sevierville, TN 37876 Phone: 877.325.9453 Email: eliston@wildernessatthesmokies.com Web: www.wildernessatthesmokies.com
Mountain Laurel Chalets Your Family is Our Company. 440 Ski Mountain Road Gatlinburg, TN 37738 Phone: 800.315.4965 Email: kay@mtnlaurelchalets.com Web: www.mtnlaurelchalets.com GSMA members receive a 10% discount. Parkside Cabin Rentals Break away from the vacation routine with a cabin rental in Gatlinburg. 122 Parkway Gatlinburg, TN 37738 Phone: 866.808.7525 Email: reservations@parksidecabinrentals.com Web: www.parksidecabinrentals.com GSMA members receive 10% discount on lodging.
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SHOPPING Buie Pottery Buie began throwing pottery at age 17 and has been having fun “slinging mud” ever since. 1360 East Parkway, Suite 1 Gatlinburg, TN 37738 Phone: 865.436.3504 Email: buiepottery@yahoo.com Web: www.buiepottery.com GSMA members receive 10% off purchases; online receive 10% discount by typing “GSMA” in the promotion/discount box. Mast General Store Not just a Store, a Destination. Hwy 194 Valla Crucis, NC 28691 Phone: 866.367.6278 Email: deb@mastgeneralstore.com Web: www.mastgeneralstore.com GSMA members receive 15% off one regularly priced Item. Some exclusions apply.
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Smoky Mountain Knife Works If it cuts, we carry it! 2320 Winnfield Dunn Parkway (Hwy 66) Sevierville, TN 37876 Phone: 800.327.5871 Email: tpipes@smkw.com Web: www.smkw.com Misty Mountain Soap Company We make all our products with lots of love and quality natural ingredients because we care what goes on your skin and into this world. 849 Glades Road, Suite 2C6 Gatlinburg, TN 37738 Phone: 865.430.8084 Email: cindy@mistymountainsoap.com Web: www.mistymountainsoap.com GSMA members receive a 10% discount on products.
SERVICE S Citizens Bank of Blount County It’s So Easy to Bank With US. Maryville, TN 37802-9730 Phone: 865.977.5900 Email: llenear@cbbcbank.com Web: www.cbbcbank.com Home Federal Bank of Tennessee You’ll know you’re home! 515 Market St. Knoxville, TN 37902 Phone: 865.546.0910 Email: online.banking@homefederaltn.com Web: www.homefederalbanktn.com Richardson Turner Construction Co. Our retention of customers, reputation for quality and the ability to understand and meet our clients’ needs says it all….. 10425 Cogdill Road, Suite 100 Knoxville, TN 37932 Phone 865.966.8999 Email: rturner@rtcc.net Web: www.rtcc.net
FOOD AND DRINK Granny’s Kitchen Great Southern home cooking your whole family will enjoy. 1098 Painttown Road (US 19) Cherokee, NC 28719 Phone: 828.497.5010 Email: eat@GrannysKitchenCherokee.com Web: www.GrannysKitchenCherokee.com
Heinzelmannchen Brewery Your Gnome Town Brewery— Purity, Freshness, Tradition. 545 Mill Street Sylva, NC 28779 Phone: 828.631.4466 Email: gnome@yourgnometownbrewery.com Web: www.yourgnometownbrewery.com GSMA members receive 10% off merchandise, excluding alcohol. The Old Mill There’s nothing like The Old Mill Square in Pigeon Forge, an authentic and historic dining and shopping destination. 175 Old Mill Avenue (Traffic Light #7) Pigeon Forge, TN 37863 Phone: 865.428.0771 Email: lauriefaulkner@old-mill.com Web: www.oldmillsquare.com Sugarlands Distilling Company Stories in every jar! 805 Parkway Gatlinburg, TN 37738 Phone: 865.325.1355 Email: Christin@sugarlandsdistilling.com Web: www.sugarlandsdistilling.com GSMA members receive a 10% discount on apparel. The Peddler and Park Grill Restaurants 820 River Road (Peddler) 1110 Parkway (Park Grill) Gatlinburg, TN 37738 Phone: 865.436.5794 Email: sue@peddlerparkgrill.com Web: www.peddlerparkgrill.com
VACATION PLANNING SERVICE S Smoky Mountain Tour Connection, Inc. Your one-stop shop for vacation packages. P.O. Box 914 Pigeon Forge, TN 37868 Phone: 800.782.1061 Email: lora@traveltn.com Web: www.traveltn.com
CAMPGROUNDS Pigeon Forge/Gatlinburg KOA Campground For Campers Who Go First Class. 3122 Veterans Blvd Pigeon Forge, TN 37863 Phone: 800.562.7703 Email: pigeonforge@koa.com Web: www.pigeonforgekoa.com GSMA members receive a 10% discount on your stay.
GUIDED TOURS A Walk in the Woods It started with a through-hike of the Smokies and turned into the proverbial labor of love… 4413 Scenic Drive East Gatlinburg, TN 37738 Phone: 865.436.8283 Email: erik@awalkinthewoods.com Web: www.awalkinthewoods.com GSMA members receive 10% off services. Big Creek Expeditions Big Creek Expeditions specializes in offering large groups the opportunity to enjoy the beauty of the Great Smoky Mountains on a professionally guided whitewater rafting adventure. 3541 Hartford Road Hartford, TN 37753 Phone: 877.642. RAFT (7238) Email: jfelderman@bigcreekexpeditions.com Web: www.bigcreekexpeditions.com GSMA members receive a 25% discount. Smokies Life
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Scenic Helicopter Tours Helicopter Adventures in the Smokies. 113 Helicopter Boulevard Sevierville, TN 37876 Phone: 865.453.0041 Email: dan@scenichelicoptertours.com Web: www.flyscenic.com GSMA members receive a 15% discount on your tours.
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SLcover vol9#2.indd 2
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vo l ume 9 #2
The old frontier, that put the hard fibre in the American spirit and the long muscles on the American back, lives and will live in these untamed mountains to give to the future generations a sense of the land from which their forefathers hewed their homes.
SMOK IES LIFE MA GA ZINE
—President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his dedication speech for Great Smoky Mountains National Park
E.E. Exline photograph of George Laymon, who lived in the Gum Stand area near Gatlinburg.
401014
$6.95
USA GSMA
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