Black Balsam Knob

Black Balsam Knob in Pisgah National Forest rises to six thousand two hundred fourteen feet, the high point of the Art Loeb Trail. The treeless, windswept summit looks ancient, but its open balds are actually the result of human activity. Logging crews and locomotive fires in nineteen twenty-five and nineteen forty-two burned the spruce-fir forest off the ridge and left the exposed rock and heath that hikers walk across today.

The Art Loeb Trail, dedicated in November nineteen sixty-nine, was named for an avid Carolina Mountain Club member from Brevard who spent decades exploring and maintaining these ridges. A plaque honoring Loeb is said to stand along the trail. At thirty miles, the trail is among the longest in Pisgah National Forest, and the exposed ridge between Black Balsam and Tennent Mountain is considered one of the finest high-altitude walks in the southern Appalachians.