Nantahala Mountains

The Nantahala Mountains fill the far southwestern corner of North Carolina between two rivers. The Nantahala runs along their western foot and the Little Tennessee along their eastern one, and the range carries the Appalachian Trail from Bly Gap on the Georgia line north over Standing Indian and Wayah Bald to the Nantahala Gorge, where the river runs through its gorge of slate and the Trail drops to Wesser. Standing Indian, at 5,499 feet, is the high point of both the range and the Southern Nantahala Wilderness, which straddles the state line in Macon and Clay counties on one side and Rabun and Towns on the other.

The name is older than the state. The Cherokee called the river something close to Nan-toh-ee-yah-heh-lih, which Powell’s gazetteer glosses as “sun in the middle.” The gazetteer explains it by Cherokee runners who crossed the range at midday, and the popular telling has the gorge too deep and narrow for sun except at noon. The dark banded slate the gorge is cut through was named the Nantahala slate by Arthur Keith in 1907, and the gorge runs along it. (The atlas’s narrower definition of the range, between the two rivers and no farther south than the state line, is its own; the gazetteer runs the Nantahalas fifty miles to Tallulah Falls, Georgia.)

The Cherokee Middle Towns stood along the Little Tennessee at the range’s eastern foot. Nikwasi, under Franklin, held a treaty council in 1727 and was burned by Rutherford’s militia on September 10, 1776; its mound returned to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in 2026. Cowee, downstream, came back to the tribe in 2007. William Bartram climbed into these mountains in the 1770s, wrote of standing on the top of the “Jore mountain,” and turned back, and his route has never been fixed.

The valley’s modern history turns on water. In 1929 Alcoa chartered Nantahala Power and Light to dam the river for aluminum, stopped in 1931, resumed in 1940, and by May 1941 had a thousand men on three shifts driving a tunnel through the mountain. The lake filled in 1942 over the stage stop of Aquone and, by a local family’s reckoning, more than a thousand moved graves. The river’s flow has run through a five-and-a-half-mile penstock to the powerhouse ever since, and the natural channel below the dam runs dry except when Duke Energy releases water. The valley that lit Alcoa’s furnaces had no electricity of its own until the late 1940s. When the releases come, the eight miles from the powerhouse to Wesser become a whitewater run worked by ten or a dozen outfitters, and the Nantahala Outdoor Center, opened in 1972, has sent its paddlers to the Olympics.

Wayah Bald, the wolf’s bald in Cherokee, has carried a lookout since 1927. The present stone tower was begun by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1935, retired in 1945, capped in 1947, rebuilt in 1983, burned in the fires of November 2016, and reopened in 2018. Every good tree over fifteen inches was cut from these slopes in the logging era, and the forest on them is a century old or less. What grows on the balds and in the bogs below the crest, and why the balds exist at all, is work the atlas has still to do.