Cherokee National Forest and the Trail That Crosses It

The Appalachian Trail enters Cherokee National Forest from the north, runs along the ridgeline of the Unaka Mountains and the Roan Highlands, and eventually crosses into Great Smoky Mountains National Park at the park's northern boundary. The Cherokee National Forest corridor provides roughly one hundred forty miles of the trail's route through Tennessee, a stretch that includes some of the highest and most exposed terrain on the entire path, which today runs roughly two thousand two hundred miles.

The forest's name is not incidental. The Cherokee people occupied this mountain country for at least fifteen hundred years before European contact, building towns along the river valleys below these ridges, developing a sophisticated agricultural economy, and maintaining trade networks that extended from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes. The Overhill Cherokee towns along the Little Tennessee River, sites like Chota and Toqua, were the diplomatic and military centers of the Cherokee nation through most of the eighteenth century.

What the Appalachian Trail now crosses was, within living memory, Cherokee homeland. The Indian Removal Act of eighteen thirty and the Treaty of New Echota of eighteen thirty-five set in motion the chain of events that ended with the forced march of eighteen thirty-eight, the Trail of Tears, which moved most of the Cherokee nation west to Indian Territory in present-day Oklahoma. The land they left behind became, over the following century, national forest.

Roan Mountain, at an elevation of six thousand two hundred eighty-six feet, is one of the trail's celebrated destinations in this stretch. It carries a natural rhododendron garden near its summit that blooms in late June, covering several hundred acres with flowers visible from miles away. The Cherokee called the mountain Unakawi, the place of the white. The name refers to the clouds that habitually settle on the summit.