A Window in the Mountains

Let me ask you something, looking out at all this flat green pasture. Why is it here? You just drove through miles of steep, tangled, rock-ribbed Smoky Mountains to get to this spot — and then the land just... opens up. Flat as a tabletop, soft and fertile, corn-growing bottomland smack in the middle of some of the oldest, hardest mountains on the continent. That's not normal. That's the whole reason there's a Cades Cove at all.

Here's the secret, and the geologists have a great word for it. Cades Cove is a window. Not a glass one — a geologic one. See, most of these mountains are made of ancient, tough sandstone and slate, rock so old it was laid down before there were bones or leaves to fossilize. But hidden underneath all that, in a few special spots, there's younger limestone. And over untold millions of years, water and weather wore a hole clean through the old hard rock right here — like rubbing a threadbare spot through a heavy coat — and exposed the softer limestone underneath.

Now limestone does two things sandstone won't. It dissolves, so it wears down low and flat instead of standing up in ridges. And when it breaks down, it makes rich, sweet soil. So you get exactly what's outside your window: a flat, fertile floor, sitting lower than everything around it, ringed by the hard rock that wouldn't wear away.

The settlers didn't know a word of that geology. They just knew this cove would grow corn when the ridges wouldn't, and they came for it. Every cabin, every church, every story on this whole loop — all of it grew out of a hole worn in the mountains. A window. Pretty good, isn't it?