Alum Cave: Confederate Pharmacy and High Country Route

The shelters partway up the Alum Cave trail are not actually caves. They are concave overhangs, bluffs of black metamorphic slate curved inward by thousands of years of water seeping through the rock and dissolving the layers behind the face. The alum and saltpeter and Epsom salts that give the trail its name are mineral deposits left behind by that slow process, white and crystalline against the dark rock.

During the Civil War, Confederate forces mined these shelters for the minerals they needed. Alum was used in tanning and dyeing. Saltpeter was a primary ingredient in black powder. Epsom salts served as a medical purgative that the Confederate army went through in considerable quantities. The scale of the mining operation is not fully captured in the surviving records, and accounts vary on how extensive the extraction was. The shelters themselves still show the mineral deposits, and the chemistry that deposited them has not changed.

The same trail continues upward past the cave shelters to Le Conte Lodge, sitting above six thousand feet on Mount Le Conte, the third-highest peak in the Great Smoky Mountains. Le Conte Lodge is one of the few remaining backcountry lodge operations in the eastern national park system: no road access, no electricity from the grid, supplies brought in by llama train. Overnight reservations are required and are typically booked between six months and a year in advance. The trail from the Alum Cave parking area to the lodge is roughly five and a half miles one way.

The Confederate mining operation and the high-country lodge occupy the same piece of mountain. History and geography in the Smokies rarely keep polite distance from each other.