William Bartram was the first naturalist to explore and write about the southern Appalachians.
What he saw in 1776 was a virgin forest that had never been cut for timber and was home
only to the Cherokee Indians.
The giant chestnuts, hemlocks, and yellow poplars of the coves grew to eight and nine
foot diameters.
It would have taken six men to reach hand in hand around the trunk of one of those giants.
In his journal, Bartram wrote that the forest was vocal with a melody of feathered songsters.
He listed over 100 species of birds from the area.
An indigo bunting picks a worm off a spring branch.
The brilliant scarlet tanager worked so high in the canopy, Bartram was lucky to see it.
But William Bartram was a Philadelphia botanist and plants were his passion.
Here in the southern Appalachian woodlands, he discovered a botanical paradise richer
than all of western Europe.
With the flowering plants alone, there were more than 1,400 different kinds mixing in
a bewildering array of northern and southern species.
If Bartram had journeyed here in the summer, he would have seen the white rhododendron
in bloom.
It's just as well, he experienced instead the more beautiful pink catawba rhododendron
putting out luscious blossoms in the spring when he was here to see them.
But it was upon being the first naturalist to discover the magnificent flame azalea that
Bartram wrote this tantalizing description.
The flowers were of the finest red lead, orange and bright gold, and in such incredible profusion
on the hillsides that upon suddenly stepping into view from dark shades, one is alarmed
with the apprehension of the hill being set afire.
Then, while resting on a high peak 200 years ago, Bartram recorded this impression, I beheld
with rapture and astonishment a sublimely awful scene of power and magnificence, a world
of mountains piled upon mountains.
Today we know that under that weathered mantle of soil is an underpinning of solid rock,
rock too old to contain any fossils.
The rock was thrust higher in the south than elsewhere in the Appalachians, and on the
highest peaks we find Fraser fir and red spruce.
We think we are in Canada.
Most of the highest mountains in the eastern United States are in what is today the Great
Smoky Mountains National Park.
They include Clingmans Dome, Mount Geo, and Montlecanque.
Only Mount Mitchell, 50 miles east of the park, is taller.
It is 6,684 feet high.
Despite the grandeur of his descriptions, William Bartram never set foot in the tallest
of the Smokies.
Curiously, he ended his journey just a few miles to the south.
Our Smoky Mountain journey today will include the National Park, perched here on the Tennessee-North
Carolina border, as well as the public and private lands nearby.
Forty miles south of the park in the woods of North Georgia One Spring, filmmaker Rich
Kern encountered another botanist of sorts.
Kenny Runyon was in the woods hunting remedies for a bad cold.
Textbooks say that parts of the May apple plant are poisonous, but Kenny's mother taught
him to make a pill out of the base of the stem near the root.
Kenny said you just bake it, grind it up, add water, and make pills out of it.
He admitted the pill may make you sicker for a while, but after that, you'll get well fast.
A little garter snake caught his eye.
You won't have any trouble recognizing sassafras once you notice that the leaves look like
little mittens with one, two, or three fingers.
Three kinds of leaves on the same tree.
Kenny made a spring tonic out of the root.
He dug it up and boiled it in water.
He made a tea that tasted like root beer, and he claimed it will build up your blood.
But his favorite of all plants was the yellow root.
He said you can cure a dozen things with it.
He claimed it works on the flu, stomach and liver problems, pellagra.
Kenny said you just chew up the root and swallow the juice.
He said it'll turn your lips as yellow as gold.
Break the root and you'll see yellow sap that makes this plant so popular among the mountain
people.
In the Foxfire books, you can read more of Kenny Runyon's ideas on how to relieve minor
ailments the natural way.
Ninety-one-year-old Jake Waldrop was no fool either.
He knew that gathering in the woods is a lot cheaper than gathering in the grocery store.
And if you happen to like ramps, Jake said, you've got to get into the coves in early
spring when the ramps are right for eating.
The ramp is a member of the lily family, and the underground bulb and new leaves are the
edible parts.
Jake said there's no neutral ground on the subject of ramps.
You either love them or you hate them.
He said you can make fried ramps, ramp soup, or ramp salad.
But as one man said, you've got to go into solitary confinement in the woods for a couple
of weeks.
Nobody will be able to stand your breath after you've eaten them.
A few miles east of Raven Gap, Georgia, along a winding dirt path, was the homestead of
Annie Perry.
Annie, like most other mountain people, planted her garden by the signs of the zodiac.
She said, I also make jelly on the new of the moon because it gels quicker, and I slaughter
hogs on the decrease of the moon.
Her old log cabin was built in 1869 by her grandfather.
That stood the test of time.
Annie had lived a very simple life.
She said, my parents never had to buy very many things because mama made all our stockings,
skirts, and sweaters.
And she would venture into town only to buy coffee, sugar, and salt.
Then came electricity and a few conveniences, but Annie still lived close to nature, and
the animals came around often, especially when the dog was dozing off under the front
porch.
Her old rustic kitchen did have an electric refrigerator and an electric stove, but she
didn't like the stove and went back to cooking with wood.
The only thing she used her new one for was storing her pots and pans.
When Annie spotted some ants stealing crumbs, she let them have it with a bunch of scallions.
Resourcefulness spells survival in the mountains.
A lacy white flower called a yarrow grows among the grasses in hay fields.
The mountain people pick it, dry it, and combine it with other dry flowers to make beautiful
arrangements.
Some of these end up in the curb market in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
There Mrs. C.C. Marshall stitches up a three-way doll that tells the whole story of Little
Red Riding Hood.
Turn her over, and there's the grandmother.
Pull her bonnet back, and there hides the wolf.
Where have all the bears gone?
Many tourists remember a day when you could see a dozen black bears on one trip from Gatlinburg
to Cherokee.
There are probably 500 or 600 black bears in the national park today, but they are shy
backwoods creatures that creep through the darkest shades on the remotest hillsides.
And so it was a piece of luck that filmmaker Rich Kern and his wife, Judy, found a female
with two cubs not far from the road to Newfound Gap.
Most of the roadside bears, the so-called panhandler bears in the national park, have
been relocated by the park service.
They have been taken to distant forest where they will cause fewer traffic jams and pose
less of a threat to people who sometimes get too close.
There are plenty of bears in the woods today, but you are less likely to see them.
Black bears spend a lot of time in the trees.
Maybe we should be walking through the woods looking up.
We might see more bears that way.
Black bears climb trees not only for fun.
They gather acorns, beech nuts, wild persimmons, and fire cherries.
It's just that the cubs have a hard time getting serious about it.
Plants low to the ground, like snake root, are easier to reach, but you don't get very
fat on leaves and bark.
This is no problem for the cubs because they are still being nursed by the mother.
And so the pressure on the mother is tremendous in early summer, and whatever the cubs can
find, even a little jewelweed, is a big help to her.
When the berries start to ripen, nutrition improves.
We must reshape our image of the black bear.
He is not a vicious aggressor by nature, but a shy giant of the hills.
He is capable of great speed and power, but is more inclined to eat berries and bark than
the other animals of the forest.
You wouldn't think that the box turtle would be in competition with the bear, but when
the blackberries start to ripen, he is in there trying for the low ones.
Dawn creeps pearl gray over the Smogies, and for a few moments, green is a forgotten color.
Summer visitors lie in their beds in Gatlinburg, missing all this splendor.
By the time they get up and go outside, it may be over.
Who can explain the chemistry that works to fill these valleys with a heavy vapor?
The answer could not improve the scene.
The river is a dream too delicate to touch.
It is a source of vapor, but we suspect it is not the only source.
The rising sun throws warm colors to the scene and gives sudden life to the vapors.
The dance of the vapors is beautiful, but it is also brief, for the dance is a dissipation.
The sun warms the damp grasses, and these too produce vapors.
Even the trees generate smoke, for which these mountains are famous.
By midsummer, the whole forest floor is heavily shaded by a canopy of trees, but the stream
and its banks are open overhead, and this provides just enough light to reveal some
of the little forest inhabitants.
A polygyrid snail the size of a walnut has a bulging eye at the end of each tentacle,
Martian style.
The millipede does not really have a thousand legs, as its metric name suggests, but with
two pairs of legs for every body segment, you have to admit, it is over-equipped.
And like everything else these days, millipedes come in different models.
The handsome red-cheeked salamander is one of the most important animals in the national
park, because that is the only place on earth where you can find one.
There are so many kinds of salamanders in the Smokies that they are called the salamander
capital of the world.
The red-cheeked does not come out very often during the day, but when he does, he can clear
off a patch of moss in a hurry.
A more common amphibian called the American toad is found throughout much of the eastern
United States.
Like the red-cheeked salamander, he can make insects disappear in a flash.
Now you see it?
Now you don't.
Now it is common knowledge that daddy long legs feed on tiny insects, but here is a strange
story.
One day on a stream boulder, Rich Kern found the daddy long legs nibbling on a dead hornet.
As prey it did seem a bit large, but what was one to think?
Suddenly a big yellow loop started to emerge from the hole.
At first Kern figured it must be the hornet's intestine, but that didn't make sense.
The loop was moving, and the hornet was dead.
It turned out to be a parasitic round worm that had been the cause of the hornet's death,
and daddy long legs had just let it out.
Here's another strange story about the stream bank.
If you spend much time in the smokies, you will find big clusters of swallowtails on the
ground here and there.
Get down to take a close look, and your nose will solve the mystery.
These are places where forest animals have urinated on the ground.
Each butterfly can be seen sipping from the earth.
The mountain stream, like any earthly habitat, is far more complex than first meets the eye.
It begins thin and dark in the high mountain, too narrow to throw open the canopy of trees.
As other creeks join in, it picks up force and goes roaring down the steepest slope of
the mountain.
Finally, at lower elevation, it spreads out and takes the wide, lazy form of a river.
The stream, like anything else, has its own anatomy.
Down the center is a channel of fast-moving water where only the strongest fish dares
to swim.
The water along the bottom and sides of the stream moves much more slowly due to friction.
A quiet pool along the edge is a much different habitat than the central channel.
A water strider gliding on the smooth surface casts a ghostly shadow on the bottom.
Rocks help to aerate the streams by beating oxygen into the water that will eventually
be breathed by fish.
The most effective aerators of the stream are the spectacular Cascades and Waterfalls
all through the southern Appalachians.
Abrams Falls lies at the end of a two-and-one-half-mile hike from Cades Cove in the National Park.
Looking Glass Falls is in the Pisgah National Forest near Brevard, North Carolina.
Even far in front of the falls grows lush from the powerful spray.
At Dry Falls in the Nantahala National Forest near Highlands, North Carolina, the river
hurls itself so far beyond the brink of the cliff that you can walk behind it and stay
dry.
William Bartram hiked very close to Dry Falls 200 years ago.
The stream is a complex thing.
The water level rises and falls with the rain shifting rocks and changing the pattern of
flow.
The force of the water is too great for most green plants to survive, but there is a thin
layer of slimy algae coating each rock.
A little school of fish hugs the bottom where the force of the water is not so great.
Leaves and other bits of debris that tumble into the stream sink to the bottom and form
the detritus that is gobbled up by bottom dwellers like the crayfish.
The reckless crayfish has been known to leave his sheltered retreat under a rock and go
out and battle the currents.
His antennae are swept back like a long mustache.
One false move and it could be a long trip.
A large boulder blocks this flow forming a protected lee.
The northern water snake finds this to be a suitable place for fishing but has to come
up for a breath of air.
This alerts the war paint shiner nearby.
The hog sucker has a face only its mother could love.
It roots around through the stones like a hog sucking up slime and bits of debris.
With a mouth like that you can tell the hog sucker belongs on the bottom.
Nearly the high elevation streams of the smokies are the habitat of the beautiful brook trout,
the only native trout of the southern Appalachians.
The common brown trout and rainbow trout that we find in the streams today were put there
by man and have chased the little brookies out of much of their former range.
Notice how this male uses his pectoral fins to align himself in the current in order to
catch insects above and below the surface.
Further downstream where the water is slower, wider and warmer we find some different animals
like the muskrat.
This one carries a leaf it has cut loose.
From above the surface of the water the rocks of the stream look the same as always but
under water something is wrong.
One of the rocks not only moves but looks at us with a tiny eye.
This bad dream is the front end of a giant salamander called a hellbender.
With a head as big as a man's fist he looks like a cross between a potato and a cookie
monster.
The crayfish thinks maybe he'll find another way around that rock.
It's hard to appreciate the size of a hellbender until all two feet of him decides to come
up for air.
The hellbender looks like his skin is about three sizes too big.
Since this salamander is aquatic, spends his entire life under water and is active mostly
at night, Rich Kern and his wife had to go slipping and tripping through an icy stream
for five nights before they even caught a glimpse of one.
Sometimes mountain people catch one on a fishing pole and when they pull him out they say look
it's a water dog.
The hellbender is a hunter.
He catches aquatic insects and fish.
In the next scene you see a little fish called a sculpin and he takes a shot at it.
Sometimes the salamander shoves his head under the rocks for an ambush.
The sculpin lands right on top of his head.
Springing up the hellbender misses the fish but gets a mouthful of rocks instead.
The stream also plays host to droves of aquatic insects that spend part of their lives underwater.
Along Bradley Creek in the Pisgah National Forest, a male black-winged damselflies found
guarding a small bit of territory.
Cloaked in iridescent scales, the male is a striking creature who looks green from one
angle and neon blue from another.
Surprisingly it is the male who selects the egg-laying site.
It must be a shallow pool with some underwater roots in it.
He patrols the site with the hope of attracting females to mate and lay their eggs.
But his fortunes change from day to day.
On this day the male has attracted two females.
He mates with them.
They join briefly in the vegetation.
Then the male makes a swooping dive to the shallow pool and points his abdomen to the
sky.
That's the signal that a female should join him at the site.
She begins to lay her eggs.
We know that many insects lay their eggs in the stream but damselflies are different because
they lay their eggs in underwater roots.
For that purpose the female has a little cutting tool, a tiny thorn at the end of her abdomen.
With that she makes slits in the roots and inserts an egg into each slit.
When she is finished the roots look like they have been pricked with a pen.
One evening the cairns saw thousands of tiny midges laying their eggs in the stream and
became determined to know more about what all these different kinds of eggs develop
into.
With permission from the U.S. Park Service they built a temporary stream enclosure on
the middle prong of the Little River.
A waterfall provided a heavy flow of water by gravity.
The result was a miniature stream habitat that was ideal for filming insects underwater.
With a few adjustments it looked like everything was ready to go.
Then came days of relentless rain turning this into the wettest July in 15 years.
Soon the stream was a wild torrent.
The water level rose several feet and it looked like the enclosure might break loose and dash
against the rocks, but somehow it held fast.
Finally in August the sun shone brightly.
After some minor repairs the cairns were ready to stock their enclosure with insects and
so they made a simple catch net from some fine metal screening.
As they lifted rocks on the bottom any insects clinging to them lost their grip and were
washed downstream into the net.
They caught dozens each time.
Underwater the stonefly nymph looked like an aquatic cockroach.
It was hard to believe that one day it would become a beautiful flying insect.
This one had a slight case of disco fever.
Around every rock in the stream is a thin layer of calm water caused by friction.
To take advantage of this most stream insects like the waterpenny are exceedingly flat.
The waterpenny looks drab scuttling over the rock, but clinging to the glass of the stream
enclosure it looks like a dazzling brooch.
We can easily see the white gill filaments and the six legs of this insect.
Someday this waterpenny will be transformed into a beetle.
The mayfly nymph also looks drab against the rock until we let light shine through it to
illuminate the gills that rim its transparent body.
Nymphs are underwater surprise packages.
This strange beast will become a spectacular dragonfly, perhaps in the spring.
Certainly no stream insect could survive a fury like this.
That's what the cairns thought until they found the net building caddisfly larva.
Stiff as a brush, the tiny silk net is always built in the fastest rapids where the larva
can snatch any morsel that might be swept in by the current.
There are even some kinds of caddisfly larva that glue together tiny pebbles and grains
of sand to make their own mobile homes, not likely to be gobbled up by some hungry trout.
In fact, the sculpin doesn't pay much attention to this little mound of pebbles creeping under
his chin.
The sculpin is the personality kid of the stream bottom.
He looks ready and alert as he perches on his giant pictorial fins, bracing against
the current.
And he has a big clown mouth, ready to take a poke at any stream insect, even the helgramite,
which looks like a centipede and evidently tastes just as bad.
When the sculpin spots a delicious stonefly nymph, he stalks his prey, stalks it like
a cat.
By mid-October, fall has come to the Smokies.
Plants low to the ground, like mullein and wild strawberries, stay speckled with frost
well into the morning because they are shaded from the sun.
But the frost on the trees has already melted.
We are much more likely to find white-tailed deer around an abandoned homestead than in
the mature forest.
The tall forest trees cast their leafy canopies high over the deer's head and well out of
his reach.
The stream flows more slowly now that the summer rains have tapered off.
It reflects the colors of the hills.
The water striders are still skating on their little pool, but now it is a palette of color.
A handsome brown trout patrols a pool so quiet the leaves barely stir on the surface.
Even though food is growing scarce for the trout, the water is also growing colder, slowing
the trout's metabolism and diminishing his hunger.
Most of the forest mammals are working overtime now to put on thick layers of fat for the
winter.
Gray squirrels, for example, feed on the dry fruits of the ironwood trees that grow along
the stream's banks.
The fruits ripen in the fall.
Tears of leafy bracts conceal the tiny edible seeds that also nourish many species of birds.
The gray squirrel has to work fast to make these ironwood fruits worth the effort.
Does it seem strange in this age of sophistication that there are still some who use the cover
of the hills to, well, to make their own, so to speak?
We're going to call this man Jesse.
He'll keep his identity a secret, if you don't mind.
He got out of moonshining a few years back, but with the sheriff's permission, he agreed
to fire up the old still again so we can see how it works.
Federal revenue is used to walk up the streams looking for stills.
Now the job has been given to local sheriffs who only occasionally find time to see what
they can spot from the air.
Normally, it takes about a week for 40 gallons of mash to ferment completely, but the fall
chill has slowed the process, and so this mixture of creek water, cornmeal, sugar, hops,
and yeast is still working.
After transferring the mash to the boiler, Jesse starts to fit the pieces of the still
together.
It's a handmade copper outfit, and the pieces don't fit very tightly.
To solve this problem, he mixes a paste from flour and water and caulks up the cracks.
It's called pasting up the still.
Water is always set up near streams.
They need water to make the mash, but they also needed to cool the condensing coil of
the still.
Jesse has set up stills where he could run a pipe directly from the streams, but here
he has to carry the water.
It takes three or four hours to bring 40 gallons of mash up to the boiling point of alcohol.
Jesse has little to do now but tend the fire.
He might be inclined to remember others from the area who have lost their equipment to
the law.
Photos from the scrapbook of the sheriff in one of eastern Tennessee's poorest counties
show some of the copper outfits confiscated in recent years.
According to the law, the moonshine itself must be destroyed in the presence of both
the sheriff and a minister.
It's called a pouring out party.
The alcohol is starting to boil off now.
The vapor travels up through the neck of the still and down into the thumping keg, which
catches anything that might slop out of the boiler.
From there the vapor is cooled and condensed in a coil that Jesse calls a worm.
The first indication that things are about to happen is the thumping of the thumping
keg.
The first jar out of the still is twice the strength of store bought whiskey.
Then winter comes with the hush of snow high in the spruce fir forest.
Lower down in the deciduous woods, the snow has rid the trees of any remaining leaves
and left a stark skeleton of branches.
The deer move from field to field and into the edge of the forest.
Food is the problem, not the cold weather.
Now that the ground is covered, the deer are browsing on buds and twigs and the boughs
of the eastern hemlock.
Most birds have migrated south because berries and flying insects are scarce, but pollinated
woodpeckers can chip out beetles and grubs in any season, and so they stay through winter.
Like the decay of the colorful fall leaves, the intricate designs of winter are created
only to be erased again by the first warm day.
You can look out and see a billion snowflakes piled up, each one different, so they say.
But not a single flake will ever be examined before it melts.
The beauty is there, whether anyone sees it or not.
The Smoky Mountain winter is often very mild.
Often there is no mantle of snow on the ground, and by the temperature you would swear it
was spring.
It's hard to believe that black bears are still sleeping in their dens.
On this bright day, graduate students from the University of Tennessee are pointing antennas
into the winter sky in hopes of picking up the beeping sounds of a radio-collared black
bear.
This particular study focuses on bear reproduction, and so in late January, when the females are
giving birth in their dens, the researchers are getting ready to pay them a visit.
They visit several dens about a month after the cubs are due to be born.
Most black bears in the national park den in large tree cavities.
The students wouldn't dare enter one of those, but as luck would have it, the female they
are monitoring has denned this year under a large rotten log.
After drugging her with a dart and waiting about 20 minutes, the researchers carefully
approach the site.
Anticipation runs high.
They know she is a female, but will she have cubs, and if so, how many?
She's a mother all right.
She has three newborn cubs about five weeks old.
One of the students picks up a cub, cuddling it as if it were a human infant.
These little cubs will follow their mother throughout the spring and summer.
Next winter, they will den with her again, and so adult females normally give birth
every other year rather than yearly.
It takes practically the whole crew to weigh this heavy mother.
She's about average, 180 pounds.
Males get up to 400 pounds.
Data collected by graduate students has helped us know more about how bears live and reproduce.
These facts have also helped the National Park Service manage the park's population
of nearly 500 bears.
The cubs are mostly fluff.
They weigh in at about four and one-half pounds apiece.
You may wonder where the papa bear is during all this.
Well, as with many other mammals, after mating with the female, he takes no further interest
in the reproductive process.
He wanders off to live a life of solitude.
Do bears hibernate?
The answer is no.
Bears sleep a good deal in the winter, but they do not enter a true hibernation.
In fact, they occasionally walk around outside their dens and sometimes even change to other
denning sites.
With all the data collected, the mother and cubs are now safely in their den.
Soon, the mother will begin to wake up.
This may be a good time for us to leave.
The second den was discovered under a large boulder.
After darting her, it is decided that it would be too difficult to remove the mother, but
her three cubs are pulled out for some quick measurements.
That's when something very strange happens.
Out comes a little guy with white paws and a white chest blaze.
The records will show that this is the first white-footed black bear ever seen.
This time you're in the Smokies, keep a sharp lookout for a very unusual bear.
Spring comes with a scattering of dogwood confetti.
Most trees are sprouting a delicate shade of green, but hickory leaves arrive red and
turn green later.
The little red squirrel, also called a mountain boomer, really likes the spring flowers of
the silverbell tree.
He picks big bouquets of them for lunch.
In the springtime, when the forest floor is very open and well lighted, you have a chance,
but only a slim one, of spotting a gray fox.
Like the bear, the fox is there in the woods, but you hardly ever see him.
The gray fox may catch a squirrel or a mouse every once in a while, but to tell you the
truth, he spends most of his time muzzling around in the dirt, picking up beetles, camel
crickets, centipedes.
The fox, like the bear, surprises us with his humble diet.
Spring is marching up the hillsides.
If you miss a flower bloom in the valley, you might still find it higher up.
The wake robin is one of the prettiest of the trillions.
The painted trillium looks like it's had a touch-up near the center.
Fields at lower elevation are often covered with tangled masses of wild pea.
When the flowers are blooming, the robins often nest in Elsie Cromwell's grape arbor,
not far from her house in towns in Tennessee.
Living close to nature, an event like this is hardly even noticed by Elsie, but even
the simplest things can be made more interesting if we move in for a close-up look.
Along the Blue Ridge Parkway one spring, we go in search of high-elevation nesters and
are not surprised to find the colorful rose-breasted grosbeak.
Unlike the male robin, the male grosbeak shares very few of the feeding chores.
It is his drab mate who tends the chicks, sequestered in a nearby laurel thicket.
High in the mountains and a forest full of sturdy trees, the little chestnut-sided warblers
have selected a thin raspberry stem to support their nest.
It is all they need.
When seen close up, the warblers are much more than specks of fluff in the woods.
Their actions have meaning and purpose, and they are always busy.
Give them a thin raspberry stem and a healthy forest, and they can replenish their kind
in the spring of each year.
It is not too much to ask.
This evening, as the chill sets in, the female warbler broods over her chicks.
The sun casts its glowing spell over the smokies, and the low, slanting rays cut between the
stately trees, lighting up some of the forest animals for a final time.
There are places on earth where wilderness prevails, where life is secret and shadowy,
and there are fewer things seen than unseen.
The magic is in knowing that strange and wonderful creatures lurk on dark hillsides and in dappled
streams, even if we don't see them, and sometimes we're not sure we want to.
There's always that faint chill in the spine.
The smokies appeal to us in just that way.
We preserve them, knowing that by doing it, we keep alive some of the very mystery of
life itself.