Wayah Bald

The bald

The state gazetteer gives the name Nantahala Balds to the grassy openings along the Nantahala Mountains in western Macon County, and names Wayah Bald as the most prominent of them. The Sherpa guidebook describes the bald itself as small, ringed by oaks stunted and pruned by the wind, with rhododendron and azalea in bloom in May and June and ruffed grouse, scarlet tanagers and veeries among the birds of late spring.

Wayah is given as the Cherokee word for wolf. The same guidebook says red wolves were common here until a bounty finished them around the middle of the nineteenth century.

Two elevations are in circulation. The Forest Service marker at the tower says 5,342 feet, while the guidebook and Wikipedia say 5,385. The difference may be the tower’s footing against the true top, but neither source says so.

The tower

People were coming up the mountain long before the lookout. The Forest Service marker recalls camping parties in the late 1800s, chaperoned outings, Sunday services, and a sermon preached on the bald in 1886 by a Presbyterian minister named Sample. The Civilian Conservation Corps worked on the road in 1934.

A cabin served as the first lookout from 1927, and a wooden tower followed around 1929. In 1935 the CCC began a tower of quarried stone, which opened to the public on September 6, 1937, dedicated to John B. Byrne, a former forest supervisor. More than 9,000 people signed its visitor book in the first year. Its height is given as 53 feet by the Forest Service, 60 by the guidebook, and 43 in a notice of August 1936 quoted alongside the marker.

Water got into the stone. The tower was retired as a lookout in 1945, its upper levels were taken off in 1947 and the stump capped, and in 1983 it was rebuilt with hemlock beams and a cedar-shake roof. The wildfires of November 2016 burned that roof, and the tower reopened in 2018. In 2025 Job Corps students and HistoriCorps volunteers removed years of hardened paint and graffiti from its base.