Here's a thing that ought to nag at you as you drive, and most people never think to ask it. This is a national park. Parks are supposed to be wild — let nature take it back, right? So how come Cades Cove is still open fields and split-rail fences and mowed pasture, a hundred years after the last farmer left? Why hasn't the forest just marched back in and swallowed all this up?
Because the park is holding it open. On purpose. With a lot of work.
See, if the Park Service did nothing, this whole valley would be young forest inside a couple of decades — the fields would grow up in brush and pine and then hardwood, and the cabins would sit hidden in the trees, and Cades Cove as you're seeing it would simply vanish. So the park makes a deliberate choice: they mow the fields, they keep the pastures cut, they maintain the fences and the lanes, they even lease some of the ground to local farmers who hay it and graze cattle — all to freeze this valley at a moment in time. To keep it looking like the working farm community it was.
And there's a bonus in it. All that open meadow is exactly what the deer and the turkeys and, yes, the bears love — which is a big reason the wildlife viewing here is so good. The open cove is a partly man-made thing, kept alive by mowers and management, and it feeds the very animals you came to see.
I find that worth knowing. The 'timeless' view out your window is anything but automatic. Somebody decided this valley was worth remembering, and somebody mows it every year to keep the memory from growing over.
Photo: P. Hughes · CC BY-SA 4.0
