Great Balsam Mountains

The Great Balsam Mountains are the crest the Blue Ridge Parkway was built to follow. For some twenty miles southwest of Asheville, across Haywood, Jackson, and Transylvania counties, the road rides the ridge from Mount Pisgah past Devil’s Courthouse to Balsam Gap, and at milepost 431.4, on the shoulder of Richland Balsam, it reaches 6,053 feet, its highest point anywhere. The summit above the overlook is 6,410 feet by the modern figure, with the Jackson–Haywood line running over it. By the survey figures, nine of the range’s peaks top 6,000 feet. The name is the old mountain name for the red spruce and Fraser fir that take the summits, the he-balsam and the she-balsam, and from the overlook the Park Service says the forest resembles a Canadian wilderness, which is the plain truth of a boreal remnant stranded here by the end of the ice.

The most photographed summits on the crest are not natural. Black Balsam Knob, Tennent Mountain, and Sam Knob stand open and grassy above the Parkway because Champion and its successors cut the spruce from these slopes between 1906 and 1926, and then, on the eve of Thanksgiving 1925, a fire ran for three weeks through the slash and the felled timber, some 25,000 acres from the Little East Fork to Sam Knob, and burned the organic soil down to the mineral. A second fire in 1942 did it again. A retired district ranger’s word for the ground afterward was sterilized. What grows on it a century later is blueberry, blackberry, laurel, and the first spruce, and the moss-covered stumps at Graveyard Fields that gave the valley its name. The Parkway’s signature view is a burned clearcut that the Forest Service now manages as scenery, and it is the best place in the range to see what the mountains are made of.

Below the burned ground on the north slope of the Pisgah Ledge lies the Shining Rock Wilderness, 18,000 acres and change, an original component of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and, by the federal count, the largest wilderness in North Carolina. Its name is a vein of white quartz, visible for miles, that the Geological Survey measured at 1,750 feet long, up to sixty feet thick, and better than 99.8 percent silica. Cold Mountain, at 6,030 feet, is its high point by the Forest Service’s figure, though the Geological Survey gives Grassy Cove Top ten feet more. The private who deserted from the 25th North Carolina in 1864 and walked home to it has no recorded death and two candidate graves, neither marked. Across NC 215 the Middle Prong Wilderness holds the headwaters of the West Fork of the Pigeon and, by the guidebook, native brook trout.

The Cherokee attached more story to this crest than to any other range in the territory. Judaculla, the slant-eyed giant, farmed Tanasee Bald, judged from the Devil’s Courthouse, saw his face in Looking Glass Rock, and left his children’s tracks at Shining Rock; a dozen named places over 800 square miles belong to the cycle, and a soapstone boulder on Caney Fork carved over some twelve hundred years sits at the bottom of it. The settlers who named the Courthouse took the giant for a devil.

The modern forest here began as a rich man’s estate. George Vanderbilt bought the Pisgah slopes in the 1890s, hired Gifford Pinchot and then Carl Schenck to manage them, and Schenck’s Biltmore Forest School taught at the Pink Beds from 1898 to 1913. After Vanderbilt’s death his widow sold 86,700 acres to the government at five dollars an acre on condition it keep the name, and in October 1916 Pisgah became the first national forest made from purchased land in the East. The paper mill at Canton that cut these mountains for a century closed in 2023.