Black Mountains

The Black Mountains are short and very high. The crest runs about fifteen miles through Yancey County, North Carolina, in the shape of a J, from Celo Knob south of Burnsville around to Balsam Gap, and for more than half that length it stays above 6,000 feet. Mount Mitchell, at 6,684 feet, is the highest ground in eastern North America. By the state’s count, six of the ten highest summits in the East stand on this one ridge. The name is the fir: the dark spruce-fir forest on the summits read as black from the valleys, and the Cherokee name for the range, as the gazetteer records it, means dark, or night.

The range is a divide three ways. The South Toe takes the east slopes north toward the Nolichucky, the Cane River takes the west, and at the southern tip the Eastern Continental Divide crosses the crest, so that a few streams on the southeast side run to the Atlantic by way of the Catawba. By the weather service’s normals, rain on the summit averages 81 inches a year, and in 2018 the station recorded nearly 140, a state record. The record low is 34 below zero, set on January 21, 1985, also the state’s.

Above 5,500 feet the Blacks carry one of the six remaining spruce-fir forests in North Carolina. The Fraser fir on the summit is the only tree that survives there in numbers, and it has had a bad century. The balsam woolly adelgid was found at Mitchell in 1957; by 1966, more than eighty percent of the mature fir in the fir stands was dead, and in the 1980s the dying forest became the center of the acid rain argument when researchers measured cloud water on the summit at pH 2.2 and the lowest calcium-to-aluminum ratios ever reported in eastern spruce-fir. The fir has come back in patches since, dense and young and not yet old enough to be attacked again. The spruce-fir moss spider was first described from Mount Mitchell and is believed to be gone from it. In May 2023, by the Fish and Wildlife Service’s account, thirty-eight people planted 327 red spruce along the old railroad grade at Camp Alice.

The mountain is named for the man who died measuring it. Elisha Mitchell, a professor at Chapel Hill, climbed into the Blacks in 1835 with a barometer and over the next decade put the high point at 6,708 feet, above Mount Washington. In 1855 his former student Thomas Clingman claimed Mitchell had measured the wrong peak. Mitchell returned in June 1857 to settle it, set out alone for Big Tom Wilson’s cabin on the Cane, fell at a waterfall in a storm, and drowned. Wilson, the guide who tracked and found him, has a summit on the ridge named for him. Mitchell was reburied on the top in 1858.

The rest of the mountain’s story is the usual one, compressed. A logging railroad that climbed, by its historian’s count, nine switchbacks reached within half a mile of the summit in 1914 and took the spruce off the upper slopes by 1921; the governor, Locke Craig, had already pushed through the act that made the summit a state park, on March 3, 1915, while the sawmill was still running below it. The railbed became a one-lane toll road in 1922, up in the morning and down in the afternoon, a dollar a head. The Parkway arrived in 1939. Down the South Toe at Celo, a land trust founded in 1937 still holds its roughly 1,200 acres in common. Southwest across the Cane valley the Great Craggy Mountains carry the same kyanite gneiss and, at Craggy Gardens, the heath balds of Catawba rhododendron that nobody has yet explained.