Mount Mitchell

The summit

Mount Mitchell stands at 6,684 feet in the Black Mountains, a short, hooked crest that stays above 6,000 feet for more than half its length. The state gazetteer records Black Dome as an earlier name for the peak and Attakulla as a Cherokee one. Arthur Keith, mapping the range for the Geological Survey in 1905, gave the top as 6,711 feet and credited much of the range’s height to a belt of kyanite gneiss that resists weathering.

The summit holds the state’s cold record. North Carolina’s lowest temperature, 34 degrees below zero, was set here on January 21, 1985. In the summer of 1986 a tower study on the mountain measured cloud water as acid as pH 2.2, against rain of about 4.4.

The measurement

Elisha Mitchell, a professor at Chapel Hill, began climbing into the Blacks with a barometer in 1835. By 1844 he had a figure of 6,708 feet, enough to put the peak above Mount Washington. In 1855 Thomas Clingman, once his student, claimed that Mitchell had measured the wrong summit. Mitchell went back in late June 1857 to settle the matter, set out alone, was caught by a storm, fell at a waterfall and drowned. Big Tom Wilson, a guide from the Cane River headwaters, led the search that found him. Mitchell was buried in Asheville and moved to the summit in June 1858.

The fir

The highest ground carries Fraser fir, about the only tree that holds on there in numbers, with red spruce on the less exposed slopes. The balsam woolly adelgid was first detected at Mitchell in 1957. A study of the summit stands found that by 1966 some four in five of the larger fir stems in pure fir stands had died. Plots resurveyed from 1986 to 2003 showed young fir returning in dense patches, with the long outcome uncertain as those trees grow into the size the insect attacks. The spruce-fir moss spider was first described from this mountain, and the federal recovery plan says the population here is believed to be gone.

Before the adelgid there were saws. A logging railroad reached Camp Alice, half a mile below the summit, in 1914. The legislature made the top a state park on March 3, 1915, while the mill below was still cutting.