Big Yellow Mountain

Cows on the bald

Most of the Roan’s grassy balds are kept open by volunteers with mowers and a summer herd of goats. Big Yellow Mountain still has cattle. The Nature Conservancy bought the summit in 1975, after a sale to a developer fell through, and runs it with the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy as the Big Yellow Mountain Preserve. A herd belonging to the Hoilman family grazes the top. Ted Hoilman and his brothers told the Highlands Conservancy in 2014 that their family has run cattle up here for more than 150 years, and the Conservancy has since bought a piece of their winter pasture in the valley to keep the arrangement going. Carolina Public Press put the grassy top at about 500 acres in 2022 and named the plants the cows keep out: hawthorn and blackberry.

The ground is mostly mountain oatgrass and three-toothed cinquefoil, by the Nature Conservancy’s account, with Gray’s lily, Turk’s cap lily and fringed phacelia flowering from spring into fall. The Conservancy also reports the largest known population in the Southeast of Schweinitz’s groundsel, a northern plant it says grows on only a few North Carolina balds. Monarchs pile up here on their way south in September and October, and hawk watchers sometimes catch a golden eagle.

Below the bald, a 70-acre tract the Highlands Conservancy bought in 2016 runs from 4,440 to 5,380 feet through beech gap forest and boulderfields, where seeps feed the head of Roaring Creek.

Natural or kept

Nobody has settled how the Southern Appalachian balds got started. The Nature Conservancy’s own page lists climate, grazing and fires set by people, and allows that the balds may be left over from the last ice age. Peter Weigl and Travis Knowles argue that big grazing animals held them open after the glaciers, mastodons and mammoths first, then elk and bison. What everyone agrees on is the recent part. The Forest Service’s fire-effects summary of the literature says the balds filled with woody plants once grazing fell off and fires were put out. Knowles, quoted in 2022, said he was astonished by how much the balds have closed since the 1980s. On Big Yellow the grazing never stopped, which makes it the nearest thing on the Roan to the older way of keeping a bald.

Getting there

You can’t wander up on your own. The preserve is closed except for guided hikes the two conservancies offer from time to time. The state’s Yellow Mountain State Natural Area, 3,805 acres named for Big and Little Yellow, got its first superintendent in 2025 and has no public facilities yet. The name is old. Bob Fulcher’s reading of André Michaux’s journal has the botanist arriving “at Yellow Mountain” in 1794, and in September 1780 the Overmountain Men crossed Yellow Mountain Gap in snow on their way to Kings Mountain.