pfly

I’ve been working on the collection of my music I have online. For too long I’ve had a semi-random assortment of poorly organized mp3s here. Some time ago I began to work on improving it but left off with much to do. Now I’m trying to finish, or at least get much further along. One problem is that there is no obvious link to my music from my website’s main page (this page you are looking at). So I am posting this now in part to Let It Be Known, and in part to provide links. Since I have begun extremely slow about blogging I expect this post to remain here at the top of the page for a long time.

I have organized my music into ten main categories, or to use the old fashioned term, albums. Four are actual albums I made and released on audio CD (the oldest was on cassette tape). So these have a set number of tracks in a specific order and will never change. Four more are collections of music grouped by time period (1980s, early 1990s, late 1990s, 2000s). Of the last two collections one is of the synthed-up classical music things I’ve done, the other is a set of music that doesn’t fit anywhere else, mostly sketches and annoying things I keep for nostalgic reasons.

The four “actual albums” are Duckapus, Disconnect, /dev/null, and Perplexions.

The “time period” sets are Brainforest, which is my most recent music, made after moving to Seattle in 2001; Ow My Eye!, which is music from the late 1990s when I lived in New York City and used digital audio recording tools on a Macintosh computer; Flowers Fall Weeds Spring Up, which is music from the early 1990s when I lived in Denver and New York City and made music on a Windows computer with MIDI only, recording the results to cassette tape; and HS2UB, which is music from my High School and College years in the late 1980s.

The synthed-up, often mangled classical music pieces are collected in the set Bach Bach Bagaaw. They are mainly pieces by J.S. Bach, but some are Beethoven, Bartok, and Rachmaninoff. The final set of things that don’t fit anywhere else is called Misc Cinders.

I plan to keep these category “album” names. In the past I frequently renamed sets of music. “Ow My Eye!” was originally a specific audio CD I made for some forgotten reason. It seemed the right name for the late 1990s music. Other names I’ve used for some of this music include “Liquid’s Cold Weight”, “Short Circuit”, “Aeute”, and “Nihil”, among others. The early 1990s music set was harder to name. In the past I’ve used names like “Phloxx” for some of it, but that name comes from a specific tape I made, and I can’t quite bring myself to use it for the larger time period. So just last night I decided once and for all to call it “Flowers Fall Weeds Spring Up”, for various reasons. The phrase comes from a Zen text, Dogen’s “Genjokoan”, which I first learned about in the early 1990s. The stuff from my High School and College years is probably not worth listening to, mostly. But some people might get a laugh out of some of it, and I want to keep it around for myself. In the past I had a plethora of “album” names, mostly from the cassette tapes that the music ended up on. Names like “NEW TAPE”, “Triple Moon”, and “Galoob”. Stuck for a name for the whole shebang I just made up “HS2UB”, which just means “high school” to “UB”, the college I went to.

So please explore these links and musics! I’m right now in the process of adding and improving the archive. Within a few weeks I’ll probably be done for now. I’m trying to make sure all the mp3s have good ID tags, using these “album” names. I’m also working on writing descriptions of each piece of music, although there are too many for me to write about all of them. Anyway, that is all, please to check it out.

(Or start at the beginning, Part 1)

Sunday, May 22, 2005

My last post ended with a hike along Roundtop Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Afterwards I returned to Townsend for a while.

In the evening, of this my last day in the Smoky Mountains, I took a pleasant stroll on Middle Prong trail. There was nowhere I had to be and nothing I had to do. The trail went on for many more miles than I was going to hike. I had no goal to reach. So I strolled slowly, half-heartedly looking for salamanders, until dusk approached and I was done strolling into the forest. Then I strolled out of the forest, back to the trailhead, returned to my hotel and slept. In the morning I checked out of the hotel, got in my car, and left the Smokies behind.

I took some pictures of Middle Prong:

And by the way, streams, as a generic term for flowing water courses, go by many names in America. Large streams are usually called rivers. Small streams are most commonly called creeks, but there are many other terms used such as brook, branch, run, fork, and yes, prong. Some of these terms have interesting geographic patterns of usage. For example, “creek” is a common term in most of the United States except New England, where “brook” is more often used.

(Click on these maps for larger versions)

The same is true of the generic word used for small bodies of water, commonly called “ponds” in New England and “lakes” in most of the rest of the country. The pattern is not quite as stark as with creek-brook, but still shows a strong New England bias toward pond:

There are also interesting regional patterns in the use of the words fork, branch, and run for naming streams. “Prong”, on the other hand, may have some regional pattern, but it is hard to tell since there are so few streams called prong:

Finally, here’s a map to round out this topic, showing the regional pattern of streams named Branch and Run:

The placename information used in these maps comes from the USGS GNIS database (Geographic Names Information System). The USGS agency includes the US Board on Geographic Names (BGN), which attempts to standardize the names of places, resolve differences in spelling, and generally tries to provide an “official” guide to the names of places.

Sometimes the BGN gives names to places that had no official name, and sometimes they change names, usually because the original name is seen as derogatory (such as common placenames like Nigger Creek and Squaw Valley). Placename changes are initiated by citizen request, but only a few make it through the process and become official (part of the GNIS database).

While the government cannot force people to use a particular placename or spelling, the maps made by the USGS are widely used as an accurate reference base. There were attempts in force placename standardization in the past. For example, towns named -borough and -burgh were renamed -boro and -burg. While many towns went along with this, the “greatest burgh of them all”, Pittsburgh, refused, resulting in a prolonged and fairly silly battle lasting for years and causing much confusion. Today, Pittsburgh still has its final -h, and the USGS no longer tries to standardize placenames other than recording an official name and spelling (as well as alternate names and spellings) to use on their maps. And a good thing too. There is a difference between -burg and -burgh. The first is of German origin while the second is Scottish, a bit of historical information and heritage we might want to keep.

All this is to say that while the stream in the Smokies I strolled along might most accurately be called “Middle Prong of the Little River”, its official USGS GNIS name is just “Middle Prong”. And that it the name that appears on every map and publication I’ve seen — Middle Prong. Other than the word “prong”, it has to be one of the most blandly descriptive names around. Even if it was called the Middle Prong of the Little River — there must be hundreds of “Little Rivers” in the United States, many of which have branches with names like North, Middle, and South Fork, Branch, or Prong.

Actually, according to the map above, while there are many forks and branches, there are very few prongs. It is the word “prong” that gives Middle Prong its character.

While on the topic, here are a few more maps showing regional patterns in placenames.

A small valley is often called a “hollow” in the east (and, oddly, Utah), but a “gulch” in the west:

What is called a “gap” in the east is more often called a “pass” in the west, a “notch” in New England, and a “saddle” in parts of Idaho.

Finally, the plateau west of the Appalachian Mountains is called Cumberland in the south and Allegheny in the north, with the Allegheny River and the Cumberland River flowing through the respective areas. The general north-south distribution of Cumberland and Allegheny (with variant spellings) as placenames is shown on the following map. Also shown are placenames using the word “Custer”, just because I was curious about it.

As recently as the 19th century there was no general agreement on the name of the eastern mountain range as a whole. The two rival names were Appalachians and Alleghenies. John Norton, in his 1810 journal repeatedly calls the mountains of Tennessee and Georgia the Alleghenies. In 1861 Arnold Henry Guyot published a geological study on the mountain range and was apparently unsure which name to use. His map, made earlier, used the name Allegheny. But the full study was published under the title “On the Appalachian Mountain System”. That set the name among geologists and scientists, and, eventually, in popular usage as well. The name Allegheny became limited mainly to places in the north. You can see two prominent bands of placenames using the word Allegheny on this map. The northern band lies along the Allegheny River, while the southern band lies along the steep mountains known as the Allegheny Front.

Placenames that use the word Cumberland are more widely dispersed across the country, although there is a strong concentration in Tennessee and southern Kentucky, where the Cumberland River flows through the Cumberland Plateau.

I think the relatively limited regional use of Allegheny, compared to Cumberland, is due to the origin of the names. Cumberland, as a name, comes from England. In 1745 the Duke of Cumberland, son of King George II, effectively ended the Jacobite Rising at the Battle of Culloden in Scotland. Many Highland Scots were among the Jacobites, and Culloden was a major defeat for Highland Scottish power in general. The clan system was broken, and it even became illegal to wear the kilt and tartan. The Duke of Cumberland’s popularity in England suffered as news of post-Culloden atrocities spread, but in the American colonies, Cumberland became a major hero. Within a few years, there were Cumberland Counties created in Virginia, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.

In 1750, Dr. Thomas Walker of Virginia explored west of the Appalachians. He was a loyal admirer of King George II and the Duke of Cumberland. On April 17, 1750, he wrote in his journal: “Still rain, I went down the creek a-hunting, and found that it went into a river about a mile below our camp. This, which is Flat Creek and some other join’d, I called Cumberland River.” Later, Walker named the main mountain pass to the region Cumberland Gap. Soon there were the Cumberland Mountains, more Cumberland Counties, and towns named Cumberland. Eventually, most people forgot about Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. Probably most Americans did not think about the English County called Cumberland either. The name had become American. As George R. Stewart puts it, “thus Billy the Butcher [the duke], not much of a hero at best, spread himself over a whole region, including a river much greater than the Thames.”

The name “Allegheny”, in contrast, is of Indian origin, and no one is even sure what it means. George R. Stewart, in “Names on the Land”, writes that Allegheny “seems most likely to have meant ‘fine river’ in the language of the Delawares, but they later told a story of a mythical tribe called the Allegewi who had lived on that river”. While Indian placenames are found all over the United States, few are as widespread as the name Cumberland. Allegheny is one of the more common ones.

This map also shows placenames with the word “Custer” in them, simply because I was curious to see whether the name was strongly regionalized to the northern Great Plains, which turned out to be mostly true. “Custer” clusters include the Black Hills and the region near the Little Big Horn.

Anyway, back to the travelogue!

Whither?

I’d spent two days in the Smokies, three camping at Big Lost Creek near Hiwassee River, and one in between, centered on Tellico River. This was exactly the region I had driven across the country to see, and I had greatly enjoyed the last several days.

Up to this point, I had fluctuated between feeling excited about my progress toward the Appalachians on one hand, and on the other, wondering what I was doing driving across the country for some ill-defined set of reasons. I wasn’t sure, sometimes, what the point was and whether I should continue. Just where was I going? What was I hoping to find? More than once I had wanted to turn around and go home. But I kept on because I had not reached my goal, whatever it was. If nothing else, my goal was “the Appalachian Mountains”, and I would not be satisfied until I had at least reached them.

Now, after Big Lost Creek, Tellico River, and, most of all, Great Smoky Mountains, I felt that I had reached my goal — or at least a goal worth reaching — and could, if I wanted, go home satisfied.

I wasn’t about to make a bee-line for home. I still had plenty of time and much to see, But from this point on, I felt like I was journeying toward home, rather than away, even if my route was circuitous.

There in Townsend, however, the immediate question facing me was, whither?

There were many options, in every direction of the compass. There were friends I could visit — in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and in Atlanta. I wanted to explore the mountains northward as far as Shenandoah Valley, and beyond. There were places in the Cumberland Plateau I was curious about, from West Virginia through Kentucky to Tennessee. I wanted to see Mammoth Cave and Bowling Green, the Cumberland Gap and Sequatchie Valley. I wanted to see the town of Fly, Tennessee, where my ancestors lived long ago and distant relatives still. I wanted to see the Natchez Trace, or its route anyway. I wanted to see the place where “Flytown” used to be in western Tennessee. And there was more, but it was impossible to see all the things I wanted to see.

Since I was now “homeward bound”, the first group of options I dropped where all those that took me farther from home. Unfortunately this included seeing friends in Chapel Hill and Atlanta. Both places were at least a full day’s drive, in the wrong direction, from Townsend. Already I was feeling some dread about the long, long drive home. I couldn’t bear the idea of making the drive any longer than it already was.

The second winnowing of options was the result of deciding that, of all the places I wanted to see there were two that I could not skip — the Cumberland Gap and the town of Fly. Why was I so keen on seeing the Cumberland Gap? Because it had played a key role in the formation of this road trip plan in the first place. When I was first conceiving of the trip I had been reading about the history of the Appalachians and the migrations of people through the region. The Cumberland Gap stands large in this history, but when I thought about it, I realized I didn’t quite know where it was. I knew the general region, but not the exact location. In looking for the gap on maps, I was surprised to discover it right at the point where Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee meet. Somehow that struck me as both surprising and obvious. In any case, the Cumberland Gap was the most famous route across the Appalachians. It had been an Indian path before Daniel Boone’s famous road-making expedition. An old map (1771) I have a print of says of it: “The Gap where the War Path goes through the Ouasioto [Appalachian] Mountains is the only way passable with Horses from Ohio 3 or 400 miles southward.” I had to see the place.

So, with Cumberland Gap and Fly as givens, and without an unlimited amount of time, the northern Appalachians fell away. I would not be seeing Shenandoah Valley.

A plan began to take form. From Townsend, I would go to the Cumberland Gap — but not directly. I could still explore some of the Appalachian Mountains proper. The northeasternmost part of Tennessee, which a book I had called “The First Frontier”, contained many places I was curious about. The region was close and, most of all, while not exactly on my way home was at least not taking me farther from home. So I would go into northeastern Tennessee, skirting the edge of the metropolitan area of Johnson City - Bristol - Kingsport. I’d stop at Sycamore Shoals, an ancient meeting place where several important treaties were made between Euro-Americans and American Indians, then I’d explore the Watauga River area a little, another important early frontier. I’d heard interesting ecological things about Shady Valley and its surrounding mountains, so I’d head there after Watauga. Then, while I would not be able to go to Shenandoah Valley, I’d at least clip the southwestern tip of Virginia. I could follow, more or less, the route of the earlier settlers exploring the Appalachian foothills into the valley and ridge region of the Great Valley of the Appalachians, and westward through gap after gap to the famous Cumberland Gap.

After that, my plan grew vague. West of the Cumberland Gap lay the Cumberland Plateau, a region distinct from the Appalachian Mountains. There were quite a few Cumberland Plateau places in both Kentucky and Tennessee I wanted to see. All I knew was that somehow I had to make my way to the town of Fly, Tennessee, which lies a bit south of Nashville. By what route, exactly, I would get from the Cumberland Gap to Fly, Tennessee, was unclear. But in any case, I had a plan.

When I drove out of Townsend and away from the Great Smokies, I drove northeast toward the “First Frontier”.

(Or start at the beginning, Part 1)

Saturday, May 21, 2005

My last post left off with skinks and the difference between log cabins and log homes. After my visit to the old homestead described in the last post, I thought I was about done with the Roaring Fork Road. But as I drove down the winding road out of the mountains towards Gatlinburg I saw the Place of a Thousand Drips, and had to stop. I wasn’t the only one — there were many cars parked and many people milling about the area. Some of the people I had seen back at the homestead. I ended up chatting for a while with a nice couple.

I had plenty of time to chat. I had filled up my digital camera’s memory card. Wanting to take more photos, and not being in any hurry, I took the time to download the photos from the camera to my computer. It took a long time, in part because the camera kept powering down before the photos were finished transfering (I had yet to realize there was an “auto power down” feature in the camera that caused it to turn itself off after two minutes, which was not enough time to download a filled memory card).

When it was finally done and I had an empty camera again, I went to examine this oddly-named Place of a Thousand Drips up close.

Place of a Thousand Drips

It looked as if a large section of the hillside had crumbled, collapsing into a crazy jumble of rocks and boulders. Water was flowing down in great profusion, and great confusion. It was hard to tell if there was a stream at the top that was being scattered by the rocks into countless channels, cascades, and waterfalls, or whether there were natural springs among the rocks, with water flowing out of the ground. Maybe some of both, I thought.

The scene was too large for me to capture in a photo. Plus the lighting was fairly dim, so I needed to use makeshift tripods (like a railing) to hold the camera steady.

And here’s a nice photo from joyjiang’s Flickr photostream:

And this webpage has three photos of the Place of a Thousand Drips from a time when there was less gushing water and more dripping.

Apparently the Place of a Thousand Drips flows with waterfalls when the weather has been wet, as it had been when I was there (the day before I had seen the Tellico River flooding and raging). During dry weather, the waterfalls can turn into trickles or dry up altogether. So maybe the name comes from the appearance of the place when it is more dripping than falling.

After soaking up the cool misty air around the Thousand Drips, I returned to the car and steeled myself up for the drive through Gatlinburg and back to my hotel in Townsend.

Gatlinburg

Not being from the southeast and never having visited the Great Smokies before, the name Gatlinburg meant nothing to me. My understanding now is that people who live relatively close to the Great Smokies — Tennesseans in particular? — probably know what Gatlinburg is like, and may have vacationed there at some point.

I first heard of Gatlinburg in Bill Bryson’s book A Walk in the Woods. Bryson’s description is negative to the point of absurdity. I can’t help but quote a few passages:

“[Gatlinburg] specializes in providing all those things that the park does not — principally, slurpy food, motels, gift shops, and sidewalks on which to waddle and dawdle — nearly all of it strewn along a single, astoundingly ugly main street. For years it has prospered on the confident understanding that when Americans load up their cars and drive enormous distances to a setting of rare natural splendor what most of them want when they get there is to play a little miniature golf and eat dribbly food. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most popular national park in America, but Gatlinburg — this is so unbelievable — is more popular than the park.”

And, quoting from another book of Bryson’s, called The Lost Continent, here’s a description of Gatlinburg’s main street:

“Walking in an unhurried fashion up and down the street were more crowds of overweight tourists in boisterous clothes, with cameras bouncing on their bellies, consuming ice-creams, cotton candy, and corn dogs, sometimes simultaneously.”

In A Walk in the Woods Bryson says that while the town is just as “tacky and horrible” as ever, most of the buildings he remembered from a visit eight years earlier had been “torn down and replaced with something new — principally, mini-malls and shopping courts, which stretched back from the main street and offered a whole new galaxy of shopping and eating opportunities.” Then he lists some of the attractions “as they were in 1987″, like “the Elvis Presley Hall of Fame, National Bible Museum, Stars Over Gatlinburg Wax Museum, Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum,” and many others. Of the fifteen “diversions” of 1987 he lists, only three were still there when he returned in 1996. But, he notes, “they had of course been replaced by other things — a Mysterious Mansion, Hillbilly Golf, a Mation Master ride — and these in turn will no doubt be gone in another nine years, for that is the way of America.”

I should stop quoting here, but I can’t help but do one more, this one from The Lost Continent(1987):

“At the foot of the mountain, the park ended and suddenly all was squalor again. I was once more struck by this strange compartmentalization that goes on in America — a belief that no commercial activities must be allowed inside the park, but permitting unrestrained development outside, even though the landscape there may be just as outstanding. America has never quite grasped that you can live in a place without making it ugly, that beauty doesn’t have to be confined behind fences, as if a national park were a sort of zoo for nature. The ugliness intensified to fever pitch as I rolled into Gatlinburg, a community that had evidently dedicated itself to the endless quest of trying to redefine the lower limits of bad taste. It is the world capital of that. It made Cherokee look decorous. There is not much more to it than a single milelong main street, but it was packed from end to end with the most dazzling profusion of tourist clutter - the Elvis Presley Hall of Fame, […] the National Bible Museum, Hillbilly Village, Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, the American Historical Wax Museum, Gatlinburg Space Needle, something called Paradise Island, something else called World of Illusions, […] Guinness Book of Records Exhibition Center and, not least, the Irlene Mandrell Hall of Stars Museum and Shopping Mall. In between this galaxy of entertainments were scores of parking lots and noisy, crowded restaurants, junk-food stalls, ice cream parlors and gift shops of the sort that sell “wanted” posters with YOUR NAME HERE and baseball caps with droll embellishments, like a coil of realistic-looking plastic turd on the brim.

Anyway, my point is, after these tales Gatlinburg, I had little desire to go there. I’ve never liked such places. I grew up near Niagara Falls, another natural wonder with wax museums clustered as close as possible. To be fair, I should mention that after describing Gatlinburg’s tacky ugliness in A Walk in the Woods Bryson admits to loving the place anyway, loving it for its tacky ugliness. Personally, when I was there, I felt no such love.

I wished I could have avoided the place altogether. However, after driving the Roaring Fork loop, I could not avoid it. Gatlinburg was between me and my hotel.

Gatlinburg is situated at the junction of three main roads, which meet in the center of town. From that central intersection, one road heads east, another north, and the third southwest. I’d like to say that two of these roads are a single road that passes through the town, with a second road ending at a T-junction in the center of town. It looks like that on a map. But as I’ve mentioned before, roads in Tennessee are named and numbered for maximum confusion. Pardon me while I take the time to illustrate this remarkable phenomenon again.

The road that leaves Gatlinburg to the east is numbered both highway 73 and 321. The road going north is highway 441, 321, and 73. The road going southwest is highway 441 and 71. Based on those numbers, part of the east road leaves to the north, while another part leaves to the southwest. Since Tennessee roads inevitably have several route numbers attached to them, and these route numbers fly off in different directions at every intersection, it’s hard to say whether a road goes straight through a town or whether it makes a turn. Some route numbers may go through, and some may turn. It is a terrible case of pavemental multiple personality disorder, I reckon.

After much examination of several maps, I think highway 321 enters Gatlinburg from the east, then goes north to Pigeon Forge, then southwest to Wear Valley and Townsend. The same is apparently true of highway 71. Coincidentally, 321 and 71 use the same physical roadbed. However, highway 71 seems to enter Gatlinburg from the southwest. After reaching Gatlinburg, 71 apparently goes underground for a while, emerging in the north near Sevierville. The highway between Gatlinburg and Sevierville, where 71 is missing, is called highway 73, until 73 peels off to the west and 71 can reassert itself. This same road, highway 71 and/or 73, is also called highway 441, which goes all the way to Sevierville, where it junctions with highway 411. For people scanning maps quickly, 441 and 411 look very similar. And it must be easy to confuse 71 and 73 when trying to remember which way to go.

One of my maps introduces further confusion by suggesting that highway 71 is the northbound lanes of highway 441, and highway 73 is 441’s southbound lanes. Make it stop! There are only three roads from Gatlinburg, there should not be so many numbers.

I will say no more on this topic — for now. I didn’t care what numbers the roads had, I just wanted to get back to Townsend and my hotel, and Gatlinburg was in the way. The Roaring Fork loop road begins on the outskirts of Gatlinburg nearer Townsend, so I only had to run a few faux trolley buses off the road to get to Roaring Fork. The loop ends, however, on the opposite side of Gatlinburg, and there was was no way around.

There is, in fact, a Gatlinburg bypass road, but it is on the west and north sides. I was on the east. Other than running the gauntlet of the main road through town, I could have taken a way WAY roundabout route. Way way way roundabout. So I prepared to drive into the monster. How long could it take to drive through what is in truth, despite producing fifty million waffles per day, a rather small town?

It took about an hour to get through town. Distance: about a mile.

I could have walked faster — three or four times faster. There seemed to be some kind of festival event going on. At least there were hordes of pedestrians moving like rivers through the streets, with the appearance of having some greater purpose guiding their direction of flow. Perhaps there was going to be, or just had been, a parade. Maybe a whale had escaped from the Aquarium and loose in the Wax Museum, and everyone in town was eager to go see. Many it was free waffle day at Putt-Putt. I have no idea. I never saw the attraction, if there even was one. There may not have been. Maybe Gatlinburg, on a sunny evening, is always like this. That idea is what scares me the most. I’m going to assume it was an escaped whale on the rampage, and everyone was fleeing, albeit at a stroll (whales rampage slowly).

It was touch-and-go for a while, but I did manage to stay sane while driving through Gatlinburg at one mile per hour. I listened to an audiobook, and later some music. I surrendered to being stuck in Gatlinburg, letting it take however long it would take, without wishing for death more than once or twice.

By the time I neared the western edge of town — freedom — I was getting tired of sitting in the car. I yearned to stretch out on a bed. I made it out of Gatlinburg, but the traffic was jammed up to the Little River Road and the Sugarland visitor center. It seemed that most of the traffic was headed up toward Newfound Gap and the North Carolina border. I was not going that way, and turned instead onto the Little River Road, where the traffic was moving at a totally reasonable speed (which on the twisty Little River Road is not exactly fast, but is significantly faster than one mile per hour). After negotiating the road’s many twists and turns I made it to good old Tuckaleechee Cove, Townsend, and my hotel room, with its bed.

By the time I got back to Townsend, the day was growing old. Food options were limited. I think I got something at a Subway, across the street from the hotel. Then I spent hours on the bed, surrounded by maps, guide books, and gear, excogitating a strategic and cunningly audacious agenda for the next day. Then I went to bed.

Roundtop

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Before beginning my trip I spent a lot of time researching campgrounds and trails that lay along my route. The State of Tennessee, I found, had designated about 60-70 sites as “Natural Areas”. Many of them sounded intriguing — small areas containing rare features of flora, fauna, landscape, and the like, with little to no public access. Some had trails, some did not. Some were closed to the public, some were open with minimal development. Many were in remote places that would be difficult to get to.

I wrote down and printed out information on lots of them.

According to the website of Tennessee’s Division of Natural Areas the Natural Area Program was established in 1971. The mission, in a sentence, is described on their website: “The Natural Areas Program seeks to include adequate representation of all natural communities that make up Tennessee’s natural landscape, and provide long term protection for Tennessee’s rare, threatened and endangered plant and animal life.”

The general idea seems to be the preservation of specific ecosystems, providing “reference areas” for ecologists studying the way Tennessee’s “natural ecological processes function.” These places are not parks (although some are within established parks). Some have recreational opportunities, like a trail, but from the descriptions on the Division of Natural Areas website, recreation seems to be
a side-effect — an undesired one at that, even if not officially prohibited. These areas are really about research and preservation. That sounded cool to me. Naturally, I wanted to check some out. For recreational purposes, of course.

When I packed my car for the trip, I stuck the printouts about the Natural Areas somewhere under a pile of maps and books, in the bottom of some bag. So, after my first day in the Smokies, I dragged all my bags into the hotel room, scattered them over the bed, and proceeded to create a prodigious amount of clutter in record time.

After a while I found the information I was looking for: Natural Areas near the Smokies, and anywhere else I thought I might end up. As it turned out, I had already been to one, albeit only in passing: Ozone Falls. In my future lurked two more — Roundtop and Savage Gulf.

Roundtop was very close to Townsend. I decided to check it out the next day. Savage Gulf I visited a few days later. That Tale of Woe will be described in a later post.

Roundtop is a mountain on the northern boundary of Great Smoky Mountain National Park, just south of Wear Valley. The park boundary goes right over the top of the mountain. Its southern side is in the park; its northern side is not. From Townsend it is an easy drive to Roundtop. And best of all, it doesn’t require going anywhere near Gatlinburg.

My map showed a “Roundtop Trail” running just within the national park, from Wear Gap Road all the way to the edge of Townsend’s Tuckaleechee Cove, a distance of 7.5 miles. The trail continues on, in both directions, along a large stretch of the northern boundary of the park. But the part I hiked was just a relatively short section of the Roundtop Trail.

Wear Gap Road begins in Wear Cove, the third big cove on the northern side of the Smokies (Cades Cove, Tuckaleechee Cove, and Wear Cove). The road goes south, passing over the mountains and out of the cove at Wear Cove Gap. Then it descends to the Little River gorge, connecting with Little River Road at Metcalf Bottoms in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Rather than drive the lovely but exceedingly serpentine Little River Road, I took the direct road from Townsend to Wear Cove and its village named, unintuitively, Wear Valley. From there I turned south on Wear Gap Road and in no time went over the top and saw the trailhead.

Actually there were two trailheads, one on each side of the road. The long trail along the park’s northern edge crosses the road here. West of the road, it is called Roundtop Trail; east, Little Brier Gap Trail.

I parked and gathered my things (water, snack, camera, park trail map, Natural Area printout map, and, in the hope of wandering off-trail, a GPS). Soon I was heading up Roundtop Mountain.

The Roundtop Natural Area, which was what had gotten me to consider this hike in the first place, is 237 acres on the north side of Roundtop, just beyond the national park boundary. I had the crazy idea that I might be able to hike along the trail for a while and then bushwhack my way up and over the ridge to the Natural Area.

As it turned out, the vegetation was very dense, and the slopes very steep. It would have been very difficult to go off-trail at all, even though the webpage about it suggests you can.

In any case, it turned out to be a lovely and very peaceful trail, quite different from the Grotto Falls trail. That trail wound through cool and shady forests on the north-facing slopes of Mount Le Conte, with plenty of moss, and not so many flowers. Roundtop’s forests, on south-facing slopes, were sunny, bright, a bit dry, and fairly hot. And there were wildflowers.

The mountain-laurel was the most abundant. Before this trip I had rarely seen mountain-laurel. I had read about it. Early European explorers of the Appalachians habitually griped to their journals about impenetrable thickets of mountain-laurel. Somewhere I had heard that mountain-laurel was essentially the same plant as rhododendron. But that isn’t true. They are related, both classed in the Ericaceae family. But mountain-laurel is a species of genus Kalmia, while rhododendrons are all species of genus Rhododendron.

The mountain-laurel flowers didn’t look like rhododendron flowers, as I half-expected them to. But they were beautiful, and there were so many!

I also saw some wild orchids, with large colorful flowers. That was a treat. I failed to take a photo that was in focus. I think the orchids were of the “Pink Lady Slipper” variety. The size of the flowers surprised me. I took several photos, but was thwarted by an over-eager auto-focus on the camera’s part.

I had no particular goal. Bushwhacking the “Natural Area” wasn’t happening. So I just hiked until I was done. The trail was pleasant. Sometimes it was like a hallway of green leaves and masses of wildflowers, lit warmly with dappled sunlight. Sometimes it turned into a shady cove where some tiny brook tumbled down a rocky chute, under the gaze of tall and solemn trees. Sometimes it ascended steeply to a steep ridge where trees were few, the ground dusty and covered with wildflowers nodding in the heat of the direct sun.

I kept on for a while, always wondering what views the next high ridge would provide. At some point the trail began to descend. Then it began to descend more steeply. Looking forward to hiking back downhill, the descending trail was disheartening and I eventually turned back. The day was growing hotter, and the trail was hugging the south and west slopes, drier and exposed to the bright sun.

I spent several hours hiking the Roundtop Trail, on a beautiful sunny day, in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most popular national park in the country, and I saw a total of two other people — and they were together. The forest solitude was relaxing, an antidote to Gatlinburg. I wondered how many people were in Cades Cove right then. I was happy to be on little-known Roundtop instead.

I saw two more people back at the trailhead. I was arranging some things in my car before driving off and two hikers came down the trail from the other direction — the Little Brier Gap Trail. They were looking even hotter and sweatier than me. Their car was parked near mine and we chatted while packing up hiking stuff, getting a drink, putting on cleaner clothes, and so on. They raved about the trail. They’d hiked Little Brier Gap to the Little Greenbrier Trail. They excitedly told me about the things they had seen, especially the wildflowers. One of them dug out a field guide and looked up some flowers, and showed me some pictures of plants I’d never heard of.

Then I drove back to the hotel, which took all of ten minutes. With no traffic.

Before the hike, I had put my wet camping gear outside on my hotel room’s tiny balcony, to air dry. But the balcony was very shady. By the time I got back from Roundtop, the stuff was still damp. So I hauled it all to the parking lot where I draped things over my car or just lay them out on the pavement. The sun was bright, the air hot. Soon, it was all dry, and I finally repacked the tent properly. Then I repacked the car.

Then dinner was acquired, and still there was enough day left for a final foray into the Smokies. Next post: Middle Prong.

(Or start at the beginning, Part 1)

Saturday, May 21, 2005

My last post left off with a hike to Grotto Falls and back, in Great Smoky National Park, along Roaring Fork Road.

Skinks

After the Grotto Falls hike I returned to my car and continued on the lovely Roaring Fork “Motor Nature Trail” Road. I have a hard time calling it the “Motor Nature Trail”. A trail for cars? Is it about nature, or motors? I’ll just call it Roaring Fork “Road”.

As before, the narrow road wound through beautiful forests, over hills and into dales. The sun was shining through the trees. The steeper slopes cast deepening shadows as the afternoon wore on. Wonderful.

Before long I came to an old homestead site. There was parking and a few people were milling around. It looked like a place worth stopping to see, so I did.

It was a former homestead, from the days before the national park was created. A solidly built log cabin and several outbuildings stood in an acre or two of grassy land, cleared of trees. Nearby ran Roaring Fork, although it wasn’t exactly roaring, and I’d have called it a creek (my next post will include a map showing where in the USA streams are named Fork, where they are named Prong, Creek, and so on).

It was the Bales Homestead, former home of Ephraim and Minerva Bales and their nine children. Interpretive signs described the buildings: A two room dog-trot cabin, a corn crib, pig pen, and a small barn. There was also a spring-water well with some masonry work around it.

I wandered around the area, enjoying the sun, examining the buildings, and saying hello to the other people. There were ten or twenty people. Some walked around quickly and left quickly. Others dawdled, like me, especially around the main house. Some of them I would see again at my next stop, the “place of a thousand drips”.

The main house had a foundation of stones, and three steps led up to the dogtrot breezeway. I was standing by the steps, checking out the joints of the house’s logs, when I noticed a couple critters on the steps. I thought they were salamanders. I knew the Smokies had a large number of salamanders, and I had been hoping to see some. In my eagerness, I jumped to the conclusion that the two things on the steps were salamanders. I stared at them for a while. A woman walked up to look at the house. We said hello, then I pointed at the steps and said, “Salamanders!” She looked unimpressed and replied, in a wonderful, slow southern accent, “Whar I come frum, we call ‘em leezards.”

It turns out she was right. I learned later that they were not salamanders at all, but skinks, a kind of lizard. I took out my camera, ready to take a bunch of photos of my “salamanders”. But after just two, the camera said its memory was full. I’d taken too many photos on the Grotto Falls trail! So I quickly browsed through the photos in the camera and erased some of the blurry and bad ones. But by the time I finished, the “salamanders” were running off, and I only managed a couple more photos. They crawled up the side of the log house, and into the cracks between the logs.

Since I had identified these animals in the wrong class altogether (Class Amphibia instead of Class Reptilia), there’s little hope for me to identify the correct species of skink now that I know they are skinks. But the Park Service’s Smoky Mountain Park website says there are nine species of lizards found in the park, so maybe a species ID is possible. Of the nine they list, only five are skinks. They are the coal skink, five-lined skink, southeastern five-lined skink, broadhead skink, and ground skink. One of the skinks in my photo clearly has five lines, which might narrow it down to two.

A quick bit of research reveals the southeastern five-lined skink (Eumeces inexpectatus) as a likely candidate. And the males develop red “jowls” during the mating season, making me think I’ve taken a picture of a bit of skink courtship. But a bit more research shows that they could just as easily be regular five-lined skinks (Eumeces fasciatus), or even broadhead skinks (Eumeces laticeps), and I don’t have it in me to look into it any further.

Log Cabins

Although people today usually call any old log house a “log cabin”, historically there was a distinction between a log cabin and a log house. Log cabins were small and simple, built quickly and impermanently, roughly made with round logs (not hewn square), simple notching, and poor chinking. They were often built to provide initial shelter, with a more substantial log house was built later. Log houses were better constructed, typically with hewn logs (squared sides), stronger notching (dovetails, for example), and often with multiple rooms and perhaps a second story.

Most surviving “log cabins” are more accurately called log houses, but the terms have blurred together in this day and age, when traditional log houses are no longer built. Modern log houses, often called “timber houses”, are built very differently than the old pioneer log house.

Old style log houses tended to be built in a few basic patterns. A single room (a “crib” or “pen”) was the basic unit. In a “double-pen” house, or “saddlebag”, there were two rooms, sharing a wall. A “dogtrot” plan had two pens as well, with an open-air passageway between them, the whole under a single roof. The Bales house I visited was dogtrot type.

There were other common plans, and many additional features that could be added, like a sleeping loft, a second story, an outside lean-to, plaster or paneled interior walls, clapboard over the outside walls, a wood plank floor, a porch, and so on.

One of the enduring controversies about the creation of Great Smoky Mountain National Park involves the people who used to live there, who were pressured to leave, whose family homesteads were taken over by the federal government, and the Park Service’s preservation of some buildings and removal of others. The community of farms and buildings in Cades Cove is the most famous example of the park’s preservation of a human-made landscape. The Park Service even keeps cattle there and mows the fields to maintain the farmland look. There was a smaller cluster of homesteads along Roaring Fork, down towards what is now Gatlinburg. The Park Service has preserved some of these places.

As with the national forests, the national parks in the western part of the country were easier to create. For many of them, the federal governmnt already owned the land and few if any people lived there. And those people who did live within park boundaries in the west had not lived there very long, compared to the communities of Appalachia, which often had centuries of history behind them. An exception to this is the Indians, who in many cases did live within the boundaries of national parks in the west. Some still do.

I had mixed feelings about seeing the Bales homestead. It was very interesting to see, but I wondered what the family thought about having to move, and what the family today thinks about their old homestead, preserved and poked around by hundreds of tourists every day.

It was a different feeling than I had when visiting the Wolf House in Arkansas. That too was a preserved log house, but it had not been taken away from a family in order to make a park. It had been slowly abandoned and had fallen into half-ruin before being restored.

In any case, I am grateful to the people who made sacrifices, willingly or not, during the creation of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. It is a wonderful place.

In my next post, I hope to visit “Place of a Thousand Drips” and finish the Roaring Fork Road loop, get stuck in a Gatlinburg traffic jam, and get back to my hotel in Townsend.

Appalachia Trip: next part | previous part | Part 1

Saturday, May 21, 2005

(Or start at the beginning, Part 1)

My last post left off with me getting a hotel room in Townsend, Tuckaleechee Cove, and getting a map of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Since I had checked into the hotel in the early afternoon, there was plenty of time left in the day for a first foray into the Smokies.

Roaring Fork

After strategically examining my map, I decided to check out a small road that loops through the mountains, with several trailheads along the way, including a 2.4 mile (roundtrip) trail to Grotto Falls, which sounded good. The road, unfortunately, begins in Gatlinburg, as Cherokee Orchard Road. After a few miles, the road becomes narrow, one-way, and too small for RV and trailers. From that point on, the road is called Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail — a name with at least two oxymorons in it.

To get there from Townsend, I drove east out of Tuckaleechee Cove and into the national park, then east on the Little River Road to the Sugarlands Visitor Center, thence to nearby Gatlinburg.

The Little River Road, which follows, believe it or not, the Little River, was astoundingly twisty and scenic. I was not prepared for its beauty. Immediately upon entering the national park the forests became thicker and lusher. The difference between the forests just inside and just outside the park boundary was remarkable. The Little River fell down countless cascades and rapids, splashing around massive boulders, under the tall trees of the forest, which grew right up to the riverside, excepting, of course, where the road had been built.

Along the way I saw many inviting places to stop. There were small parking areas at intervals with signs telling of “quiet forest walks”. These were appealing, especially since the road had a fair amount of traffic on it. Due to the twistiness, driving speeds were slow, but it was still difficult to enjoy the views before they were past. I wanted to stop several times, but kept telling myself it made more sense to get to the Roaring Fork Road, which promised equal beauty with far fewer people and cars. All of the places to stop along the Little River Road had cars parked at them. There were people along the river banks wherever one could park. I bit the bullet and drove on, confident I would enjoy myself much more in an area with fewer people.

Actually, I did stop briefly at a few of the more strikingly scenic spots along the way. I promised in the last post that there would be photos in this post, and here are the first two — a picture of the forest over the Little River Road, taken through the windshield, and a photo of the river, taken at one of my quick stops. As usual, click on the pictures to view them on Flickr.

I stopped at the Sugarland Visitors Center and browsed briefly, but it was little more than a crowded gift shop. I thought about spreading my wet camping gear out on the sunny lawn and having a quick lunch, but the place was a bit too crowded for my taste. So I drove on toward Gatlinburg, which proved to be just as horrible as I had heard. I was glad when I reached my turn, and I tried to not mind when I got stuck behind a bus made up to look like a trolley, and called a trolley, stopping at “trollery stops” while scores of zombie-faced tourists got on and off.

Soon after my faux-trolley encounter, the road forked. One way led into the parking lot of a resort hotel, where a bunch of cars were jammed up trying to get in, or out, or just trying to be in the way. The other way led to Cherokee Orchard Road, across the national park boundary, and into the deep mountain forests. All the traffic was tied up with the hotel, while Cherokee Orchard Road had no cars on it at all. People are weird.

Cherokee Orchard Road is a regular two-lane road, but after a couple miles it ends at a little roundabout. There, the little one-lane Roaring Fork Road begins, upon which I eagerly embarked. As I had hoped, there was almost no traffic. The posted speed limit was something like 20 miles per hour, but I felt free to go 10 or less, and stop whenever I felt like it to look around, or take a picture:

Occassionally another vehicle came up behind me, but there were plenty of small pull-offs where I could stop to let people go by. At one such pull-off I parked, took out my camp stove, made a can of soup, and afterwards, a cup of coffee. While doing these things, I let the still-damp tent and tarps lie spread out on the car’s warm hood and roof, where they dried out a bit more. I also hiked up the road a bit to examine some strange looking plants I had seen from the car windows.

I’m still not sure what the strange looking plants were, but I think some kind of groundcone, or something similar?

Continuing on, I drove by a few trailheads. There are several interesting looking trails that start from the Roaring Fork Road. I had chosen Grotto Falls as my destination because it was only 2.4 miles roundtrip, which I figured was good for a first afternoon hike. Some other trailheads I passed included Rainbow Falls Trail, which leads to Rainbow Falls, Mount Le Conte, and beyond (as does the Grotto Falls Trail, if you keep on after the falls), Baskins Creek Trail, which leads to Baskin Creek Falls, and Grapeyard Ridge Trail. I was tempted to hike to Rainbow Falls instead of Grotto Falls, but my information rated it as a fairly strenuous hike, and I was more in the mood for a pleasant stroll.

Grotto Falls Trail

The trail to Grotto Falls might more correctly be called the Trillium Gap Trail. Grotto Falls is just one of the landmarks along the way. However, I suspect most people just hike to Grotto Falls and back. I saw quite a few people on the trail and I don’t think any of them went beyond the waterfall.

My Grotto Falls hike was one of the high points of the whole Appalachia trip. The trail was perfect for the kind of strolling hike I wanted. The forest was gorgeous. It seemed just like the kind of Appalachian hardwood cove forest I had read about as being so rich in biodiversity. Some sources claim that the trail passes through old-growth forest, but others say that virtually all of what is now Great Smoky Mountains National Park was logged and that the few acres of remaining old-growth are in isolated, hard to reach areas. But there were quite a few large trees along my trail. Maybe some were old-growth, I don’t really know. In any case, it was the oldest feeling forest I found anywhere on my trip. And not just the trees, but something more.

I took plenty of photos, but mostly failed to capture the feeling of the place. Maybe it was the mood I was in, but it seemed like a magical forest. The afternoon sun lit up the trees in some coves with a glowing warmth, while other coves were mysterious, full of shadows and cool air. A photograph can’t capture the ever-changing mood of the place, the range of microclimates, the smells.

Still, I tried:

It was easier to photograph the waterfalls and cascades. The trail crossed several creeks, tributaries of Roaring Fork. Here’s one of the creeks tumbling down toward the trail:

Soon the trail was making its way up Roaring Fork and before I knew it, there was Grotto Falls, which the trail actually passes behind. A number of people were hanging out, enjoying the place.

After loitering for a while in the vicinity of the waterfall, I strolled a bit farther up the trail, but turned back after a short distance. When I got back to Grotto Falls, most of the people had left, which was nice. I stood for a while under the falls, going from one side to the other. Then I started back downhill. The walk down was as pleasant as the walk up.

While hiking, I kept an eye out for salamanders. Reading about the southern Appalachians as a global hotspot for salamanders had been one of the many inspirations for my trip, and I hoped to see some.

I didn’t. But I did see plenty of another kind of animal with globally outstanding biodiversity in the southern Appalachians — snails. I know, you’re thinking snails are nothing to get excited about, and I admit I was less than excited. But seeing so many snails of so many different types was one of the first-hand experiences I had in seeing the biodiversity of Appalachia. Let me tell you — there are a lot of different kinds of snails in the Smokies. Most of the snails I saw were very small and creeping up and down trees.

I had seen, long before this trip, in the book “Terrestrial Ecoregions of North America”, a couple of maps showing North America’s “snail richness” and “snail endemism”, by ecoregion. Of the many maps in the book these stood out for so starkly highlighting the Appalachians. Most of the continent’s ecoregions were shown on the maps with pale colors, indicating few if any snail species and endemism. But the Appalachian ecoregions were colored bright red, standing out clearly as a major snail hotspot. The actual numbers, cited in tables elsewhere in the book, are, for the Appalachian Blue Ridge ecoregion (which includes the Great Smoky Mountains), 264 snail species, of which 122 are endemic; and for the Appalachian Mixed Mesophytic ecoregion, 248 snail species, of which 98 are endemic. Typical numbers for most ecoregions are in the range of 0-30 snail species and 0-10 endemics (If you don’t know, “endemic” means a species is found only in that ecoregion and no other place on the planet). In other words, Appalachia is snail heaven.

Ecoregions were ranked, in this book, by overall species richness using several methods of measuring biodiversity, and by endemism and endemism-richness ratio. The two main Appalachian ecoregions ranked second and third in all the species richness measuring methods — after the top ranked Southeastern Mixed Forests ecoregion — the Piedmont foothills just east of the Appalachians (as the book puts it, the Piedmont forests “are famous as the center of gastropod diversity for North America and perhaps the world”). The Appalachians ranked first and second on the endemism-richness ratio, which the book used as an overall measure of biodiversity. And here I’m not just talking snails, but all flora and fauna. In other words, there’s biodiversity in them Appalachians.

In a companion book called “Freshwater Ecoregions of North America” the streams and lakes of southern Appalachia stand out for high levels of biodiversity — especially the Tennessee-Cumberland freshwater ecoregion. Of this freshwater ecoregion, which covers almost all of Tennessee and parts of neighboring states, as well as the Great Smoky Mountains, the book says: “The watersheds of the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers … contain the highest level of freshwater diversity in North America and is possibly the most diverse temperate freshwater ecoregion in the world.”

But back to snails. I saw some.

Appalachia Trip: next part | previous part | Part 1