State

To Walk the Trails of Kilmer Forest The sights and silences off a visit to some off the oldest trckes in America. By MARGUERITE SCHUMANN II lakes only five minutes to walk from the parking lot of the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest back across five centuries and into another place — a lofty gray-green natural world of si¬ lent tree giants that were deeply rooted when Columbus first gazed on this hemisphere. The 3.800 acres of Kilmer Forest, located within the Nantahala National Forest on the western edge of North Carolina, have never been touched by the woodsman's axe. It is a virgin stand, one of the most impressive rem¬ nants in America today of the oak- chestnut forest, greatest of all the plant communities, which before the advent of the white man covered the eastern part of the United States like a vast, green, tufted-chenille bedspread. Cherokee Indian hunting parties had stalked the Joyce Kilmer Forest acres in their day. but had made few changes in it. They were not numerous, they did not have efficient tools with which to destroy the forest, and they caused few fires to scorch the earth. They left the land as they had found it. marking it only with Indian place names such as Unicoi Mountains (a corruption of un- ega. meaning "white"). Snowbird Range (litiyi. meaning "snowbird place") and Santeetlah Creek (nayuhi geyuni. or "sandplacc stream"). When the white man pushed into the Southern Appalachians in search of 8 farm land and timber, the land which is now Kilmer Forest — the whole of Lit¬ tle Santeetlah Creek watershed — still was left untouched, perhaps because its steep-sided cove is protected by a horseshoe of ridges nearly a mile high which made logging unprofitable. Nearby forests were not so lucky. The land now making up Great Smoky Na¬ tional Park. America’s most heavily visited natural area, was 65% logged before it came into federal ownership, but nature is a fast healer in the south¬ ern mountains, and today it is a solid, hazy blue-green. A walk through the Joyce Kilmer Forest is memorable for three things — the light, the silence, and the size of the patriarch trees lifting proudly above an understory that is almost jungle-like in its luxury. A Memorable Walk First, the light. The rooftree of Joyce Kilmer Forest is so high and dense, with only a few rips in the canopy, that only at noon — when the sun is fierce overhead — do a few rays of gold find the forest floor. The light is even, pearl-gray, and diffused, like a church with monotone grisaille windows. The heavy, moist atmosphere of the tem¬ perate rain forest makes the light even softer, and lightly burnishes the up¬ turned rhododendron leaves. Second, the silence. A forest of an¬ cient trees such as Joyce Kilmer has its own particular hush. It both absorbs and echoes sound; a sneeze or a hand¬ clap receives lovely muted answer from deep in the trees. Not two hundred feet from the parking lot — where a mowing machine clatters at work and a group of day campers from nearby Robbinsville are at play — there are only the sounds of nature. (One of the campers, wearing a T-shirt proclaiming "Love is a good vibra¬ tion." had panted up to me as 1 sat with a wounded black butterfly on my lap. "Did you train that butterfly?" he asked, star-eyed.) The acoustical transition from the twentieth to the fifteenth centuries be¬ gins with the obliterating sound of water music — Little Santeetlah Creek as it crashes to a crescendo beneath a log footbridge. It recalled the Moors of distant Africa and Spain who thought the most beautiful sound in their dry world was the tinkle of falling water, and designed their gardens w ith this in mind. Beyond the charm for the ear was the charm of tactile sensation. The deep, refrigerated chill that hangs over the bed of a mountain stream shocks the dangled hand with pleasure. As I left the stream and climbed the upward path, the silence began — almost total. A hike mlo Joyce Kilmer Forest is on odventure within the copoeity of even on ineipenenced hiker, •or о three-quorter mile loop trail leods from the porkmg lot to this memorial set on о huge boulder surrounded by gionf hemlocks in the forest's depths For others there ore forest trails which Icod to scenic points as for os seven miles from the entronce. THE STATE. JUNE 1976