The Blue Ridge and the Mountain West, A Separate Country

The mountains in the western corner of North Carolina are old in a way that resists easy description. The Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains are part of the Appalachian chain, among the oldest rock formations on earth, worn down over hundreds of millions of years into rounded, forested ridges that roll south and west from Virginia toward Georgia. Mount Mitchell, at six thousand six hundred eighty-four feet above sea level, is the highest peak east of the Mississippi River.

It was named for Elisha Mitchell, a University of North Carolina professor who spent years surveying it and died in eighteen fifty-seven in a fall at a waterfall near the mountain while rechecking his measurements. The mountains created a culture distinct from the rest of the state. The Cherokee had lived here for at least a thousand years before European contact.

Scots-Irish settlers followed in the eighteenth century, pushing up the river valleys from Virginia and Pennsylvania. They brought fiddles and ballads and a fierce independence that the mountains reinforced. In the Civil War, the highland counties of western North Carolina were largely Unionist, and many communities sent men to fight for the North while the rest of the state went Confederate.

The ecology of the Smokies is extraordinary. The combination of altitude, rainfall, and latitude makes western North Carolina one of the most biologically diverse temperate regions on the planet, a place where species that were separated by glaciers have reconnected, producing a density of wildflowers, salamanders, and tree species that rivals tropical rainforests in raw count. More species of trees grow in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park than in all of northern Europe.

This is also the land that gave the country bluegrass and old-time music, a musical tradition rooted in the fiddle tunes and ballads that crossed the Atlantic in the eighteenth century and evolved, in these specific hollows, into something entirely American.