Along Newfound Gap Road, the forest shifts with elevation from cove hardwoods to the spruce-fir forest of the crest, a climate that ecologist Royal Shanks matched to northeastern Maine and New Brunswick after five years of readings on this road. Fraser fir, which lost ninety percent of its park trees to an insect from Europe, has saplings growing back on Kuwohi.
Roll a window down for this one. Somewhere along here, the forest changes countries. It's been written that a driver leaving Gatlinburg or Cherokee can be in a Canadian environment in thirty minutes. Ecologist Royal Shanks spent five years taking temperature and rain readings along this very road. The nearest low-elevation match for the spruce-fir forest up top, he found, is about a thousand miles northeast, in northeastern Maine or New Brunswick. You can feel it. In July the average high on Kuwohi is sixty-five degrees, while Gatlinburg's is eighty-eight. The upper tunnel, near Morton Overlook, marks the edge of the spruce-fir forest. Look for red spruce and Fraser fir. The fir is the only tree in the park with upright cones. The fir nearly didn't make it. The balsam woolly adelgid, an insect from Europe, reached the Smokies around nineteen sixty. By two thousand nine it had killed ninety percent of the park's firs. The world's smallest tarantula, no bigger than a BB pellet, lived in moss those firs kept damp. A researcher said in twenty seventeen that it had disappeared from Kuwohi. But the adelgid doesn't kill young firs, so a new generation grew up beneath the dead ones. In twenty twenty-four the saplings along the Kuwohi Trail were thriving, and the number of firs on Kuwohi is estimated to have nearly tripled.
Photo: James St. John, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0