Apr 30 Husky Gap

 

Due to limited parking, we boarded a bus at Sugarlands Visitor Center for the short drive to the Husky Gap Trailhead. It turned out to be kids day. All the young botanists with kids attending Spring Wildflower Pilgrimage, brought them along for this shortish hike up and back. The kids ran wild and didn't pay much if any attention to the botany commentary. Still, we managed to enjoy this hike. The Canada Violets were huge. As were the grape vines.

At the conclusion of the hike, some of us, walked on the nearby quiet walkway to see this Dutchmans Pipe vine in bloom. 

Apr 29 Long Bunk

 

I think the long drive to Mt Sterling trailhead deterred some folks. It was a small but wonderful group. The hike started up hill but sone we reached the highest elevation of the day and headed down. A wide variety of flowers made their presence today. 

I recalled the abundance of Trillium grandiflorum on this trail. It's still there. Sometimes as far as you could see, it was white trillium poking out above the green undergrowth. 

Toward the end of Long Bunk Trail, Painted Trillium made an appearance. Some it was everywhere.

Once on Little Cataloochee Trail, very showy Showy Orchis grew trailside. The final mile is on an old drivable road. There is a cemetery that is open once a year to those who have family buried there. 

Apr 28 Porter Creek Night Hike

 

Our hike begins about 7pm and ends in darkness. It was so sad to see the Messer cantilevered barn sagging with warning tape wrapped around it. It looks like it could collapse at any time.

There were brilliant displays of Yellow Trillium and Foam Flower along the old road.

The Lady Slippers were brilliant too. 

Apr 28 Tremont Then and Now

 

Brad is our guide today in the Elkmont area. This area of the Smoky Mountains National Park was once the main staging area for the Little River Lumber Company. Beginning in 1900, Colonel Townsend began buying land for the purpose of timbering. Elkmont was 18 miles upriver from the sawmill in Tuckaleechee, now Townsend. Logs were send downriver using a series of splash dams. In 1908 a railroad was built to haul logs to the sawmill. The railroad also brought paying passingers to the area to hunt, fish and sightsee. Eventually, there grew a demand to build more permanent cabins.

A few years later in 1910 The company sold 50 acres near the logging town of Elkmont. The group of wealthy businessmen from Knoxville formed the Appalachian Club and sold plots of land for cabins. In 1912 another 65 acres was sold to another club - the Wonderland Hotel. The two rival clubs thrived. About 75 cabins were built along with clubhouses where meals and social functions took place.

The black and white photos here are of the logging town of Elkmont. They were taken at what is now the NPS campground at Elkmont. 

In the 1920s talk of establishing a national park began. The lumber company which had timbered much of its 50,000 acres of land, sold their property. Another 25,000 acres of land in the Little River watershed was taken by eminent domain. The residents of Elkmont, being well educated and wealthier than the many subsistence farmers of the area, negotiated lifetime leases for their properties. Those 20 year leases were renewed and renewed again until 1992. 

Once all the residents vacated the properties once the leases ran out, the NPS did not have the funds to maintain or repair the structures. The structures, even the 49 which were on the National Register of Historic Places. Beginning in 2017 work to restore some began.  About a half dozen have been opened to the public. We are told that vandalism is a persistent issue. We saw much evidence of this.

How this all plays out is anyone's guess. Elkmont has been a fluid situation from the get go.

Apr 28 Twin Creeks Science Center & House of the Fairies

 

Located a short drive from downtown Gatlinburg, in a rather inconspicuous location, The NPS houses many of its natural history collections in this 15,000 square foot building. Opened in 2007, I first visited a couple years later for a Wilderness First Aid course offered by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. This visit was a brief tour of the collections and explanation the work preformed here.  

Our guide is Baird Todd, Park Curator. His job is to manage the collection. He is not so much a researcher as he is a caretaker. This room may look like a laundromat, but it is more an important repository for tens of thousands of specimens collected in the park. Some are donations are from private collections. Baird must make sure these specimens are preserved as well as possible. He explained the quarantine process when new specimens are received, what substances are used the preserve specimens and climate control of the room's environment.  

The park does maintain an herbarium of plants but the herbarium at University of Tennessee houses a much larger collection. Nevertheless, the park's collection is an important record of what is growing and has grown in the park. Currently, the collection is being digitized. 

While viewing some of the bird specimens, Baird says there is a growing consensus that birds collected 50 or more years ago had more vibrant colorations. It is thought that air pollution has dulled their colors. 

This cabinet contains "wet" specimens. Snakes, salamanders, frogs and their allies are stored in alcohol. The largest jar in the cabinet contains a Hellbender collected in 1940. It measures over 70cm (28 inches) long.

The Park's firefly collection

Baird explained that his specialty is cultural history items, although they are not housed in this building. That collection is stored at another facility in Townsend. That collection houses furniture, clothing, tools etc. A sizeable part of that collection came from the Walker Sisters of Little Greenbrier. The Walkers had 11 children in the late 1800s, seven of them girls. By the creation of the park, 5 sisters survived and were given a lifetime lease to stay on their farm. None ever married and they carried on farm work as they always had. They became minor celebrities and many park visitors would visit them out of curiosity. The last sister died in 1964. What items left in the household, were purchased by what is now, the Smoky Mountain Association and donated to the park.

Passenger Pigeons were declared extinct over 100 years ago. This one was collected in the 1840s. In 1833 James Audubon declared that the Passenger Pigeon the most numerous bird species in the North America. It was estimated that there were 3 billion of them and they made up about 1/3 of all birds in North America. They were completely wiped out of the wild by 1900 and Martha, the last survivor in captivity dies in 1914.     

The main room of the building filled with work cubicles. 

After our tour, we walked a short distance to the so called, "House of the Fairies". It was a spring house built around 1930 as part of the Voorhis estate which occupied the area prior to creation of the park.