A day trip with clear blue skies took us across Pisgah National Forest to the eastern end of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Higher elevations than where we're staying meant most of the deciduous trees still seemed bare - except for maples with dazzling cherry-like samaras like the one above, in a clearing by the Pisgah Ranger/Visitor Center, whose branches were low enough that I could get close.
At Cataloochee Valley Overlook we were high enough up a typically steep mountainside (we'd just navigated the hairpin-winding unpaved one-lane road into the Park) to see the tops of a few other trees. Spring is happening here too, but too high above to easily make out. Meanwhile the understory here is often lush with evergreens like rhododendron, on a day like ours dazzling with reflected sunlight.
This particular stand made me gasp in astonishment; I felt like I was bathed in the lights of stained glass windows in a cathedral. I can't really imagine what these forests will will like once the canopy closes up with leaf, though the vaulted ceiling will remain as soaringly high as a gothic cathedral. The forest floor, for its part, was busy soaking up the sunlight it could - trilium! - though I'm not sure the American
American cancer root
cancer root which parasitizes oak and beech roots needs light. Also amusingly overstory-less were a group of elk (reintroduced to Great Smoky only in 2001, two centuries after being eliminated from the region by settler hunters), last year's antlers shed, this year's not yet growing. A smokeless day in the Smokies - not a cloud in the sky all day, nor rising from the hills! - but plenty of fire.
