The Balds

My mother's father's mother's maiden name is Ballard which means bald men in some language, I forget which one. Indeed, all of my mom's brothers are very bald. Most of the mountains we'll be hiking are also Ballards, but unlike my uncles' conditions, the mountain 'balds' cannot be explained by modern science. A hiker will have been trapsing through dense trees for days and then all of a sudden, angels sing and they will stumble out onto an opening that graces the hiker with an awe-inspiring view. How did this forest curtain open and why? Botanists think that the balds are bare of trees because there have been no seeds to reforest them. In the wake of the last glacial epoch there existed a warming period that nearly eliminated spruce and fir from the lower summits of the southern Appalachians. When the climate cooled again, spruce did not recover on these summits because of the absence of a nearby source of seeds. Severe attacks by wind, ice and insects didn't help their chances, either. But these are all just theories and no one really knows why the mountains loose their green hair in certain spots. One bald in particular that Mike and I will be excited to hang out at and air our stinky feet is Gregory Bald Mountain along the AT on the TN/NC border in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The mountain is known as a grassy bald because unlike most of the Appalachian Mountains, its top is covered in thick wild grasses, not trees. The mountain is naturally de-treed, for reasons unknown but in this particular time and climate, the National Park Service has to struggle to keep the area free of trees which is an unusual situation, usually it's the other way around. Gregory Bald's grasses grow on the mountain 5000 meters above sea level. The Cherokee called it Tsistuyi, the rabbit place, because the sly and trickey king of the rabbits ruled there on this grassy heaven, he his called The Great Rabbit, naturally. I hope we meet him. The Cherokee who inhabited this area in America's early history had a name for balds more generally, it is udawagunta. They believed that long ago, hornet like monsters called ulagus swept down and snatched up unwary children travelling in the mountains with their families. The Cherokee people called a meeting and prayed to the Great Spirit to help rid them of these beasts. He acknowledged their cries and sent a huge bolt of lightning to shear off the cliffside when a host of ulagu were gathered on it, destroying them. The Great Spirit decreed that the summits would remain deforested so that the people could station sentinels to keep lookout for other ulagus.