Gregory Bald

The azaleas

The Park Service sells Gregory Bald on its flame azaleas, and they are the reason most people make the climb in late June. Botanists who have looked hard at the plants say they are more mixed than that. F. C. Galle of Callaway Gardens, who started visiting in 1947 and kept at it after a bear made off with his notebook in 1954, called the population “a complex hybrid swarm” and named Rhododendron cumberlandense, R. arborescens and R. viscosum among the parents, with typical flame azalea, R. calendulaceum, growing lower down at places like Rich Gap. Donald Hyatt, writing in 1998 for the American Rhododendron Society, listed what the crosses look like in bloom: white, salmon, coral, gold, cherry, fuchsia and nearly purple, some solid and some with a yellow blotch. His group found the bald at peak on July 10, 1997, about a week later than two years before, after a cool spring.

Hyatt wondered whether Cades Cove settlers had carried azaleas up and planted them, pointing to a single old rosebay rhododendron on the bald that he said shouldn’t be there at that height. That is his guess, and nobody has tested it.

How it stayed open

The grass is older than the park, though how much older is unknown. Mary Lindsay’s 1976 history for the Park Service found the bald marked as “Bald Spot” on an 1833 map and quoted a Cades Cove woman who had it from people long dead that Gregory had always been a blueberry meadow. Herds came up from the cove in summer, run by the Burchfields in the 1920s and by the Caughron and Oliver families in the last years before the park. The horticulturist Harlan Kelsey called the azalea show on and around Gregory the best in the country. Once the cattle left, the woods came in. By Lindsay’s count less than half the old grassy area was left, much of it gone to blueberry, and hawthorn, which no one remembered there before, had become the worst invader.

In the early 1980s the park asked visitors which balds to keep, and kept Gregory and Andrews. The Park Service’s page leans on the idea that grazing animals kept balds open long before cattle, from mastodons down to elk and deer. Fire has been tried too. Lindsay and Bratton reported oatgrass seedlings coming up a week after a spring burn on Gregory.

Going

There’s no road to the top. The Gregory Bald Trail is 9 miles round trip and the Gregory Ridge Trail 11.4, both from the Cades Cove side, and backcountry campsite 13 at Sheep Pen Gap sits close by. From the bald you look straight down on Cades Cove. The Park Service puts the bloom in late June. In a cool year it can run into July.