Near Santeetlah Gap, where a side road leads to Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest — one of the last stands of old-growth cove hardwood in the East, named for the WWI poet.
Off the Skyway near here, a side road leads to something rare and worth knowing about, even if you don't have time to detour to it today: the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, one of the last uncut, old-growth forests left in the eastern United States.
Almost every forest you've driven through today, remember, is second-growth — it was all logged a century ago. But a few thousand acres down that road somehow escaped the saws, and what stands there is a cathedral: tulip poplars four hundred years old, twenty feet around, a hundred feet tall, with a hush underneath them you can feel. It's what this entire country looked like before we cut it — and almost the only place you can still stand inside that lost world.
It's named for Joyce Kilmer, an American poet who wrote a famous little poem called 'Trees' — 'I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree' — and who was killed in action in France in the First World War, in nineteen eighteen. When veterans looked for a fitting memorial, they chose a forest of the oldest trees they could find. Boone will tell you more about the man. For now, just know that some of the grandest living things in the East are standing quietly, right down that road.
Photo: Notneb82 · CC BY-SA 3.0
