Knoxville to Asheville: The Mountains Begin

East of Knoxville, Interstate Forty begins climbing into the Southern Appalachians, and the landscape changes abruptly enough that drivers who have been on cruise control across Tennessee begin paying attention. The mountains here are old, among the oldest exposed rock on the continent, formed some three hundred million to a billion years ago, worn down by erosion to rounded profiles and dense forest. The Great Smoky Mountains straddle the Tennessee-North Carolina border to your south.

The Smokies are named for the atmospheric haze produced by isoprene, a hydrocarbon released by the forest itself, the haze is biogenic, a consequence of billions of trees transpiring simultaneously. The Cherokee Nation called these mountains their homeland for thousands of years before the European settlement of the interior. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians still lives here, on the Qualla Boundary, a land trust that was secured through a legal battle in the eighteen thirties and forties and that survived the forced removal that took most Cherokee west on the Trail of Tears in eighteen thirty-eight and eighteen thirty-nine.

About a thousand Cherokee hid in the North Carolina mountains during the removal and were eventually allowed to stay. Their descendants are the Eastern Band. The Qualla Boundary sits about twenty miles south of Interstate Forty.

Asheville, forty miles east, is a different kind of mountain city, the Biltmore Estate, the largest private house in the United States, sits inside the city limits. George Vanderbilt built it between eighteen eighty-nine and eighteen ninety-five as a summer house. It has two hundred fifty rooms.