Elk River Falls and the Ghost of the Vanished Herds

Not far from Banner Elk, the Elk River gathers itself and plunges some fifty feet over a broad rock cliff into a deep pool. This is Elk River Falls, once known simply as Big Falls, tucked into the Pisgah National Forest near the little town of Elk Park. The river and the falls carry a name that is also a memorial.

Real elk, great animals weighing close to a thousand pounds, once roamed these valleys in large numbers. But unregulated hunting and the loss of their habitat drove them out, and the last elk in North Carolina had vanished by around the seventeen nineties, near the turn of the nineteenth century. The settlers who came afterward never forgot them.

They scattered the word elk across the map, naming this river, this waterfall, and the town of Banner Elk, where the Banner family settled, for a creature that had already disappeared. For nearly two centuries the elk were only a ghost in place names. Then, in a celebrated conservation effort, biologists reintroduced elk to the southern Appalachians, and once again their bugling calls echo through nearby mountains.

Standing at these falls, you can hear the river that still carries their name, and think about an animal that left the valley and, at last, came home.