Kuwohi

The name

Kuwohi is the highest point in the Great Smoky Mountains, 6,643 feet by the Park Service’s figure and a foot lower in the Geological Survey’s 1968 report on the park. The Park Service ranks it third among summits east of the Mississippi. The mountain was named for Thomas Clingman in 1859. In 2022 Lavita Hill and Mary Crowe, enrolled members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, began an effort to restore its Cherokee name, and Principal Chief Michell Hicks filed the application with more than 150 pages of support. The federal Board on Geographic Names approved Kuwohi on September 18, 2024.

Kuwohi means mulberry place. The Park Service points out that mulberry is not known to grow above 3,500 feet and calls the name something of a mystery. In the 1830s the summit was a refuge for Cherokee people evading removal, and medicine people went there.

The rock

Coverage of the renaming described the dome as granite, which the Geological Survey’s mapping does not bear out. The summit belongs to the Great Smoky Group, sandstone and slate laid down in a rift basin late in the Precambrian, metamorphosed, and later carried northwest over younger Paleozoic rock along the Great Smoky fault. The Tennessee ecoregion map places the summit in its Southern Metasedimentary Mountains, where spruce-fir grows generally above 5,500 feet.

The air

The Park Service keeps its highest-elevation cloud-water station on Kuwohi, along with a collector for mercury in precipitation. Rain in the park averages about pH 4.5. Cloud water over the high forests can fall as low as pH 2 for part of the growing season, and by the Park Service’s account no monitored national park takes more sulfur and nitrogen from the air. Soils on some high slopes are well along toward nitrogen saturation.