The Island of Canada

Notice the forest right along the very top here — dark, dense, spiky, evergreen. Roll your window down and it even smells different: cold and resinous, like Christmas. This is red spruce and Fraser fir, and it has no business being this far south. It's an island of Canada, marooned on a mountaintop in the Carolinas, and it's a genuine ghost of the Ice Age.

Here's the magic of it. Twenty thousand years ago, when the great glaciers pushed south and the whole region was cold, this spruce-fir forest blanketed the lowlands all through the South. Then the ice retreated and the climate warmed, and that cold forest died out of the valleys — except up here. On the highest, coldest peaks, the climate stayed cool enough that the spruce and fir could hang on. So they retreated uphill and stranded themselves on the summits, little arctic islands in a warming sea, and they've held that high ground for ten thousand years.

Which means when you drive across the crest of this Skyway, you're not just climbing a mountain — you're driving back into the Ice Age for a few miles, into a forest that belongs a thousand miles north. Then you come down the far side and it's gone again, back into the warm Southern hardwoods. Two different worlds, one road, a mile of elevation apart. Roll that window down while you're up here and breathe it in — it's the smell of the last Ice Age, still hanging on.