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Hiking Carolina Beach State Park

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Foot-long pine needles lay on the fine, white sand, forming copper mats that nearly covered the ground. Overhead, the longleaf pines (Pinus palustris) were no more than twenty feet tall and maybe a few decades old. All around us, turkey oaks (Quercus laevis) formed a scraggly thicket in the understory. The morning was cloudy with a warm, moist breeze.

Hiker on Carolina Beach State Park Swamp Trail

Elizabeth and I had been walking through the pine savanna for over a mile. We were in Carolina Beach State Park, a patch of remnant forest on Pleasure Island, off the coast of southeastern North Carolina. Bounded by water on two sides and roads and houses on the other two, the forest wasn’t very large, and we were able to hike nearly all of its trails.

Forest on Sugarloaf Dome in Carolina Beach State Park

We climbed Sugarloaf Dune, a sandhill whose summit elevation — fifty feet — was the highest point in the park. The sandhill supported a beautiful grove of sand live oaks (Quercus geminata), short trees whose furrowed bark and twisting branches were adorned with Spanish moss. The clouds began to break and gave us a fine view west toward the mainland.

We descended from the rarefied heights of Sugarloaf Dune and returned to the longleaf pine savanna. As if someone had flipped a switch, the clouds suddenly dissipated, revealing a pale blue sky and a sun that turned the savanna instantly hot. The white sand became too bright to look at.

Venus fly trap on Carolina Beach State Park Flytrap Trail

We skirted a pocosin, a shallow bog of pond pines (Pinus serotina), red maples (Acer rubrum), and shrubs. The low levels of nitrogen and phosphorous in the pocosin’s soil have made it a home for plants that get nutrients from other sources, namely insects and spiders: the pocosin is one of the few places on earth where you can find wild Venus fly traps (Dionaea muscipula).

Hiker and forest in Carolina Beach State Park

After the pocosin, we took the Swamp Trail through a tall, dense coastal-fringe forest. Dark magnolias (Magnolia grandiflora), leafy sweetgums (Liquidambar styraciflua), and stout loblolly pines (Pinus taeda) closed in on the trail, and poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans), wild grape (Vitis sp.), and Virginia creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) wrapped tree trunks and hung from branches.

We took the Snow’s Cut Trail back to camp, completing our hike in three hours.

Coarse woody debris

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In early September 1996, Hurricane Fran swept over the barrier islands of North Carolina and pushed inland toward Raleigh-Durham. As it approached, its winds became stronger than anyone had expected. Umstead State Park, a heavily forested area between the two cities, was hit particularly hard. Fran blew down thousands of trees, snapping power lines, wrecking buildings, and blocking over thirty miles of trails. The park was closed for eight months. But despite the devastation to the park’s built environment, the hurricane was probably beneficial to the park’s natural environment.

Today, the sky over Umstead Park was a sheet of high, gray clouds. Last night’s rain had left the forest glistening green and left the ground a damp carpet of pine needles and crushed leaves. A cool breeze blew through the understory. It was a perfect day for being out in the woods, and a pleasant taste of the coming autumn.

White oak (Quercus alba) on William B. Umstead State Park Sycamore Trail

The forest was diverse, populated with three species of pine, six species of hickory, and a dozen species of oak. But this was my first time out in the southeastern mixed forests and I couldn’t identify most of them. The white oaks (Quercus alba) were huge, with thick trunks and low, spreading branches. They looked like old trees that might have already been growing when Umstead was formed from farmland in the 1930s.

Many of the parks in America’s eastern forests were created during this time — between the Civil War and the Great Depression — when eastern farms were abandoned for more easily cultivated grasslands to the west. As each park was designated, its forests began growing all at once from fields and pastures, resulting in forests with a similar look: tall, straight trees, evenly spaced over a lawn-like understory of grass and ferns.

These woods are undeniably pretty and pleasant to visit, but they’re missing something. Even though they are eighty, ninety, sometimes a hundred years old, they are immature. Like a city that has no cemetery because its inhabitants are all the same age, the trees are decades from a natural death, and the forest floor is strangely devoid of dead wood. But this wood, called coarse woody debris, might be the most important and conspicuous characteristic of a mature forest.

Forest on William B. Umstead State Park Sycamore Trail

Coarse woody debris encompasses everything from broken branches to rotting stumps, from fallen trees to tipped-up roots. It accumulates naturally as a forest ages, and can account for over a quarter of all the wood in a mature forest. For people who have only seen young, manicured forests all their lives — and there are a lot of these people — the appearance of pervasive disorder created by coarse woody debris can be upsetting. It looks as if something’s gone wrong. But the truth is that it’s the sign of a healthy forest. Coarse woody debris increases the biodiversity of a landscape. It’s a way nutrients get recycled back to the earth. It’s habitat for mosses and fungi, shelter for small animals, home for insects, and a buffet for the animals that eat those insects. Have you ever watched a bear shred a rotten log looking for ants? That’s coarse woody debris he’s eating out of.

Creek on William B. Umstead State Park Sycamore Trail

The benefits of coarse woody debris are now so well-known that foresters have developed techniques to accelerate its development. A guide published by the University of Massachusetts, for example, gives forest owners instructions on how to girdle trees so that they die and turn into standing snags, how to fell others so their logs rot on the forest floor, and how to create clearings around big trees so they can grow even bigger. By increasing the habitat diversity in a forest, these artificial means lead to a natural end. But these artificial techniques won’t be necessary in Umstead Park, thanks to Hurricane Fran.

I was walking next to murky, brown Sycamore Creek. It flowed silent and deep in some places, loud and rocky in others. The forest floor on both sides was littered with the coarse woody debris left by the hurricane. The fallen wood has made the forest mature, leaving it filled with a variety of microhabitats that hadn’t existed before, and leaving gaps in the canopy that let more sunlight into the understory. The forest has become more diverse, a mix of old trees and saplings, shady groves and sunny gaps that support a greater variety of wildlife than a uniform forest. Hurricane Fran’s impact was, so to speak, a windfall for the park’s environment.

Same forest twice

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We started hiking in the spring. The air was warm and the forest was pale green with unfurling leaves. But as we climbed, the air turned cold and the leaves disappeared. By the time we reached the summit of Mount Sterling, 5,820 feet above sea level, it was winter. A dusting of snow lay on the ground and the temperature was below freezing. We set up our tents, ate our dinners in the cold, and then went to sleep. By the next morning, our tents were covered with fresh snow and our water bottles were filled with ice. We had planned to do a multi-day backpacking trip in the Smoky Mountains, but we weren’t prepared for such cold weather. We turned back and left the Smokies that afternoon, but the memory of that vast forested wilderness stayed with me and I promised myself I’d return.

That was several years ago. Now I was back in the Smoky Mountains in September with plans to hike and with a day of good weather forecasted — the perfect opportunity to return to Mount Sterling. A day hike promised a bottom-to-top tour of the the Smoky Mountain forests capped with great views from the summit.

Elizabeth and I started hiking at 10:15 under a sky of low, puffy clouds. The air was warm and humid and the forest floor was thick with grass and ferns. Insects buzzed and clicked.

Forest on Baxter Creek Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park

We were at an elevation of 1,700 feet in the Big Creek valley. The hillside was covered with a cove forest of sycamores (Platanus occidentalis), tulip trees (Liriodendron tulipifera), eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis), yellow birches (Betula alleghaniensis), and rhododendrons (Rhododendron maximum) — a cosmopolitan mixture of trees from all over the eastern United States. A little higher, we found yellow buckeye (Aesculus flava), sugar maples (Acer saccharum), beech (Fagus grandifolia), and striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum) — trees more typical of Michigan than North Carolina. They were very tall and had enormous trunks, and I was convinced we were walking through an old-growth forest that had been undisturbed for centuries.

Beneath these giant trees of the Baxter Creek valley we found four men standing off-trail, carrying an impressive amount of gear. They had overnight backpacks, which were no surprise, but also helmets, climbing equipment, and serious scientific instruments.

They couldn’t have been climbing rocks — there weren’t any around. So I asked them if they were climbing trees. Yes, they said, they were from the Eastern Native Tree Society and they were here to climb the tulip trees to study how their structure changes over time. Many of the trees in this valley were the tallest individuals of their species in the world, two, maybe three, times taller than what most people ever see east of the Rocky Mountains. One of the tulip trees, not far from where we were standing, was the tallest ever measured: 178.5 feet.

I told them that I was into big trees, too, but they looked at me dubiously. One glance at all their gear was all it took to see that I wasn’t into trees the way they were.

We talked some more, then parted ways. “It was pretty neat to find ENTS next to the trail”, I said.

“ENTS? Who are the ENTS? Oh! The Eastern Native Tree Society! Their abbreviation is E. N. T. S. That’s so cool!” Elizabeth responded.

“Yeah, ENTS. Why is that cool?” I said.

“Oh right! You’re not into the Lord of the Rings. The Ents are characters from the story. They were the protectors of the forest and the shepherds of the trees.”

“Really? Like tree people? The abbreviation makes so much more sense now.”

“Yeah. And in time the Ents actually began to resemble the trees they protected.”

I considered the ENTS’s beards, calloused hands, and sinewy muscles. “No kidding,” I said.

By 2,600 feet, we had left the valleys of Big and Baxter creeks and reached a drier hillside. Fraser magnolias (Magnolia fraseri), black tupelos (Nyssa sylvatica), and red oaks (Quercus rubra) appeared, as did bigleaf magnolias (Magnolia macrophylla), whose elephant-ear leaves were over two feet long.

Rhododendron thicket on Baxter Creek Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park

At 2,900 feet, rhododendron thickets took over the hillside, crowding out trees with an alarming ferocity. The shrubs were over ten feet tall and so thick that the trail had to tunnel through them. Only a rare red maple (Acer rubrum) or black tupelo emerged from the thicket’s deep shade.

We entered a grove of eastern hemlocks. They were old and tall, with trunks that dwarfed us as we walked by. For centuries, their branches — packed with dark little needles — had spread cool shadows on the forest floor, depriving it of the sunlight needed for the growth of other plants. But now the forest floor was sunny and filled with saplings. The hemlocks were dead and their needles were gone. The hemlock woolly adelgid (Adelges tsugae) had killed them within the last couple of years, desiccating the trees and leaving them unable to produce new needles. The hemlocks stood patiently with their limbs outstretched, waiting to fall and return to the earth. The forest will remain — new trees are already starting to grow — but it will never be the same again, and no one alive today will see the saplings reach the size of the old hemlocks.

At 3,800 feet, we saw striped maple, sugar maple, yellow birch, beech, and the occasional red maple. This was the northern hardwood forest, an assortment of trees you’d have to travel 500 miles north to find near sea level.

By 4,600 feet, we had seen our first red spruce (Picea rubens). Soon after that, we saw our first Fraser fir (Abies fraseri) and our first Carolina hemlock (Tsuga caroliniana). Yellow birch was still around, but it was joined by paper birch (Betula papyrifera) and shrubs like hobblebush (Viburnum lantanoides) and mountain ash (Sorbus americana). This forest was the analog of the boreal forests found in Canada and the mountains of New England, but this far south, Fraser fir and Carolina hemlock, local endemics, replaced the more widespread balsam fir (Abies balsamea) and eastern hemlock.

Forest on Baxter Creek Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park

We kept climbing. The forest became short and dense. The air turned cool and moist. The ferns, luxuriant grass, and buzzing insects of the of the lower elevations faded away, replaced by moss, fallen needles, and wind murmuring through conifers.

At 1:25 we reached the summit of Mount Sterling. We climbed the 80-foot fire tower on top and watched gray, billowy clouds swirl over the surrounding mountains. The mountains were heavily forested, their lower and middle elevations covered by green broad-leaf trees with rounded crowns and their summits and ridges covered by dark needle-leaf trees with serrated silhouettes.

View from Mount Sterling in Great Smoky Mountains National Park

We ate lunch, then hiked down. We descended through the spruce and fir, through the northern hardwoods, through the dead hemlocks, through the oaks, through the rhododendron thickets, and back to the cove forest. The ENTS were still there, having just completed their climbing for the day. We had been wondering how old the huge trees in the cove forest were, and thought they might know. Elizabeth asked them.

“Eighty, ninety”, one of them said.

“These trees? Here?” I asked, thinking they’d misheard Elizabeth’s question.

But the answer was the same. The tall, massive trees I had assumed were old growth had begun growing in the early 1900s when a field in this valley was abandoned; some of the spindly conifers near the summit, on the other hand, had begun growing hundreds of years ago. One of the ENTS had measured their ages himself. Tree size was not a good proxy for age.

Why were the young trees big, but the old trees small? It was an effect of the environment. I recalled my first visit to the Smoky Mountains, when it was spring in the valleys and winter on the summits. The rich soils, warm temperatures, and abundant rainfall in the cove made trees grow quickly. The rocky soil, cold temperatures, and frequent snows on the high ridges made trees grow slowly.

We said good-bye to the ENTS and kept hiking. I thought about the giant cove forest that hadn’t existed a century ago, and stunted summit trees that had hardly changed in that time. I thought about the dying hemlocks, and the saplings that were going to replace them. And I thought about my previous trip up Mount Sterling and the fact that you can never walk through the same forest twice.

We finished our hike at 4:35.

To do this hike yourself, park at the Big Creek trailhead in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, then take the Baxter Creek Trail out-and-back to the summit of Mount Sterling, a 12-mile hike with 4,200 feet of elevation gain.