Bald · Great Balsam Mountains
Black Balsam Knob
An open summit on the Great Balsam crest, in country cleared by logging and fire
Sunrise on the grassy summit of Black Balsam Knob, with fog in the valleys below.
One of the most photographed open summits near the Blue Ridge Parkway. Its grass and blueberry are usually put down to the spruce logging and the slash fires of 1925 and 1942 that opened the country around it.
A bald with a paper trail
Most of the Southern Appalachian balds come with an argument about how they got there. Black Balsam Knob has less of one. The country around it was logged of its spruce and then burned, and that history is well recorded. Nobody has written up the knob by itself, but the account that names it puts its grass down to the same cutting and fire. That makes it a different case from Gregory Bald or the Roan.
The fires are the documented part. The federal wilderness record for the Shining Rock country next door puts the logging between 1906 and 1926 and the fires in 1925 and 1942, and says those two account for the balds there. Cinthia Milner, writing in WNC Magazine in 2012, put the first fire on Thanksgiving eve 1925, running through Suncrest Lumber Company slash and about eight million feet of cut timber over some 25,000 acres from the Little East Fork to Sam’s Knob. A retired Pisgah district ranger told her the fire burned the spruce forest’s duff down to mineral soil, which is why the trees have been so slow to come back. A second fire in April 1942 set things back again. The Sherpa guide tells the 1925 story differently, with the fire breaking out at the opening of trout season and two hundred anglers waiting it out in the pools of the Yellowstone Prong. Both versions can’t be right.
Kept open on purpose
T. D. Robinson’s 1981 study, as the Forest Service’s fire encyclopedia summarises it, describes the bald-like openings of the Balsam Mountains as the product of fires on logging slash in former spruce-fir in the 1920s and 1940s, and says the Forest Service keeps parts of them open with prescribed fire as golden eagle habitat. He found deer used burned ground more than unburned, and that ravens and golden eagles turned up more often in the open than in the woods.
Going
The knob sits in southern Haywood County between the heads of Yellowstone Prong and Flat Laurel Creek. The Sherpa guide sends walkers up the Graveyard Ridge Trail, a spur off the Graveyard Fields trail, and promises blueberries and long views on Black Balsam and on Tennent Mountain next door. Look around while you pick. The open ground under your feet is most likely what the fires of 1925 and 1942 left.
Sources and further reading
- Healing Nature (Cinthia Milner, June 2012)WNC Magazine 6(4)
- Fire Effects on Flora and Fauna of Grassy and Heath BaldsForest Encyclopedia Network (USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station)Summarises Robinson 1981 in Saunders (ed.), Status and Management of Southern Appalachian Mountain Balds
- Shining Rock WildernessWilderness Connect (wilderness.net)
- Graveyard FieldsSherpa Guides (Longstreet Highroad Guide to the North Carolina Mountains)
- Black Balsam KnobWikipediaElevation and the logging-and-fire origin, the latter citing an archived North Carolina Outdoors page
- The North Carolina Gazetteer (William S. Powell), entry "Black Balsam Knob"NCpedia / ncgazetteer.orgLocation between the heads of Yellowstone Prong and Flat Laurel Creek, as transcribed in the Great Balsam dossier