Kephart Prong

Up this stream, a stone chimney stands in the woods with no house around it. The Kephart Prong trailhead is just ahead on your left, at a small paved pull-off with limited parking. Cross the footbridge, and about two tenths of a mile up the trail you'll find what remains of a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. There's an old pump, a stone wall, a hearth, a masonry message board, and a twenty-foot chimney, among old boxwoods. The whole trail is four miles round trip, with eight hundred and thirty feet of climbing, and the park says many find it leisurely. About two hundred men from this camp built sixty-five miles of trails and twenty-two fish ponds. They built the water system at Newfound Gap and parking there for six hundred cars. They planted about a hundred thousand trees on logged land. They were paid thirty dollars a month, and twenty-five of it was sent home to their families. Keep walking and the valley stacks up its history. There are the remains of a nineteen thirty-six fish hatchery that raised rainbow trout and smallmouth bass. Parts of the trail ride a Champion logging railroad bed from the early nineteen twenties, and that company clear-cut over two thousand acres of spruce up here. A hundred yards past the footbridge, a side trail to the right leads to the old Oconaluftee Turnpike, finished in eighteen thirty-nine along an older Cherokee trail and still worn up to five feet deep. Its crews blasted rock with gunpowder packed in hollow reeds. They split big boulders by building log fires on them, then dousing the hot rock with cold water. Oconaluftee itself is an English try at the Cherokee Egwanulti, meaning by the river. The stream is named for Horace Kephart. He was a librarian who broke down in nineteen oh four and went looking for what he called a Back of Beyond, a place to begin again. He found it with a map and a compass, in the North Carolina Smokies. He never asked for a peak. His friends did. The first Mount Kephart was a peak Tennesseans had long called Mount Collins, until a Knoxville petition accused the naming board of breaking mountain etiquette. The Collins name went back, and Kephart's moved east of Newfound Gap. He lived to see it.