GATLINBURG, Tenn. — The ancient blue-green mountains with breathtaking vistas and distinctive mists are home to salamanders and black bears, 19th century log cabins, rippling streams, waterfalls and more than 800 miles of trails, including a large section of the Georgia-to-Maine Appalachian Trail.
It’s little wonder the Great Smoky Mountains attracts more than 9 million visitors a year, twice as many as any other national park in the United States.
The 520,000-acre preserve straddling the Tennessee-North Carolina border, named by the Cherokee Indians as “The Land of Blue Smoke” for its signature natural mist, marks its 75th birthday on June 15.
Dozens of activities are occurring throughout the year — museum exhibitions, parades, family reunions and a Dolly Parton-penned musical about the Smokies at her Dollywood theme park in Pigeon Forge, with CD profits benefiting the park.
In his 1940 dedication, President Roosevelt said Americans had “used up or destroyed much of our natural heritage just because that heritage was so bountiful.”
In the Smokies, he said, “are trees … that stood before our forefathers ever came to this continent; there are brooks that still run as clear as on the day the first pioneer cupped his hand and drank from them.
“In this park, we shall conserve these trees, … the trout and the thrush for the happiness of the American people.”
In fact, the Smokies had been heavily logged by timber companies, muddying the streams and leaving only about a quarter of the old-growth forest intact.
Boar from nearby game preserves moved in, nonnative rainbow trout were stocked in streams and a blight soon killed off the massive American Chestnut trees that once covered 40 percent of the forest.
Park managers continue to battle these issues, while new pests threaten hemlocks and dogwoods and decimate the firs in the park’s Nova Scotia-like higher elevations.
Still, Supervisory Ranger Kent Cave said, “It is a testament to the regenerative powers of Mother Nature that the forest has regrown. It looks, I am sure, similar to the way it did when Native Americans used the land or the first European settlers came.”
The park is designated an International Biosphere Reserve and a World Heritage Site with one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet, supporting fireflies that blink in unison, 2-foot-long salamanders, 300-pound black bears, a small herd of reintroduced elk and growing numbers of native brook trout.
If you go …
Great Smoky Mountains National Park: Headquartered in Gatlinburg, Tenn.; www.nps.gov/grsm/. Events related to park’s 75th anniversary: greatsmokies75th.org.
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