Bays Mountain

Bays Mountain is one of the long sandstone ridges that run south of the Holston from near Knoxville to Kingsport, the belt the federal ecologists call the Southern Sandstone Ridges. It is best known at its northeast end, where it meets Holston River Mountain around a high basin above Kingsport, and where the city has kept that basin as a park for more than fifty years.

The basin was the city’s water first. Kingsport built a reservoir there in 1917 as its main supply, outgrew it, and switched to water from the South Fork of the Holston in 1944. The 44-acre lake is still there. The park opened in 1971, and in 1973 the state designated it a state natural area. The counts of its size run from 3,000 to 3,750 acres depending on the source, with about 25 miles of trail and views off the tops of both ridges.

What the state set out to protect is a forest still in one piece. Pine and oak hold the ridges and the drier upper slopes. Lower down the woods turn moist, with sugar maple, tulip poplar and white oak, and hemlock and white pine in sheltered places. Here and there grow plants more at home in the Blue Ridge than in the valley: striped maple, yellow birch, and both rosebay and Catawba rhododendron. A pack of gray wolves has lived in an enclosure at the park since 1992.