week of 1/7/04
 
 
 

Walking Miss Peachtree
By George Ellison

This past New Years day my wife, Elizabeth, and I — along with several other members of the family — decided to revisit Peachtree Creek in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Peachtree is one of those “shut-in” watersheds in the park that are seldom visited because there are no officially designated trails; thereby, they don’t make it into the trail guides most park visitors utilize. They are often partially overgrown and thereby unappetizing to the average tourist. Except for local residents, few people even know or care that they exist.

The flooding of Lake Fontana created a number of these “shut-in” watersheds along its north shore from Bryson City west to Fontana Dam. Among these are the lower half-mile section of Lands Creek, Peachtree Creek, Canebreak Branch, Hickory Flat Branch, Gladys Branch, Jenny Branch, Welch Branch, Chambers Creek, Kirkland Creek, Pilkey Creek, and Calhoun Branch. And at least that many even smaller watersheds are scattered along the flanks of the north shore.

All of these were heavily populated before the coming of the park and Lake Fontana in the 1930s and 1940s. Sixty to fifty years after the fact (depending on when each area was evacuated) these are now teetering between being old-settlement areas and wild areas. The lower elevations of the park are by no means true “wilderness” areas, except, that is, by federal edict.

Along these watersheds one feels what the French call a “frission” (an uncanny sensation or stimulation) created by the tension between the recently settled areas and the encroaching wildness. There are old home sites without homes, excavations, foot logs, worn trails, ornamental shrubs and herbs, and carefully crafted stonework. But no one lives there any more.

My family started visiting Peachtree Creek in 1976, the year we moved into a cove on Lands Creek, the next watershed east of Peachtree.

Through the years we went there to walk or camp many times via a long, somewhat difficult trail that could be accessed from our ridgeline on the park boundary. Those outings became a part of our family’s heritage. But the blizzard of 1993 pretty well decimated that trail. Last week we decided to revisit an old friend and see how “she” was doing. As you may or may not realize, creeks named Peachtree, Hazel, Sweetwater, etc., are “she” creeks; those named Buck, Deep, Rough, etc., are “he” creeks.

We decided to drive to the new boat ramp about three miles west of Bryson City and walk down the north bank of the Tuckasegee River to the mouth of Peachtree. This is the route of old Highway 288, which Swain County lost when the lake was flooded. The unresolved compensation for this loss has resulted in the ongoing “Road To Nowhere” dispute between the county, environmentalists, and federal agencies.

From the gate at the boat ramp, the walk west was muddy and depressing. This section of the lake is pretty enough when the water levels are high, but in winter it’s a bleak wasteland of plastic containers, beer cans, styrofoam, rubber tires, discarded Christmas trees, and every other sort of litter created by our disposable-crazed society.

After crossing the cement bridge at the mouth of Lands Creek, where there is no accessible trail, we continued to the bridge that services the mouth of Peachtree. On the west side of the bridge a broad roadway of sorts leads up to the trailhead. Suddenly, we were in another world. Below us the creek flowed freely, purling and murmuring in its rocky bed. At each turn we came to areas — old home places and exquisite rockwork done by CCC workers — that brought back memories.

“Don’t you remember this?” we kept asking one another.

“Yes, it’s just the way it was,” we kept replying.

There was the ford where the Middle Fork entered from the west, then a rock-hopping back to the main fork where the crude footbridge used to be a quarter of a century ago. We kept looking for the trail that once led up the ridge toward our line. Elizabeth had heard by word of mouth (a powerful form of communication in Swain County) that it was passable again. After several wrong turns, we finally found it. Or maybe it found us?

As always, it undulated delightfully along the foot of the ridge and then suddenly darted steeply upgrade through a rhododendron tunnel for a quarter of a mile or more to the crest of the ridge on the park boundary.

One of my favorite sorts of trails to walk are those that wind through these ancient rhododendron stands. With sunlight filtered to a pea-green color by the overarching shrubs, it’s almost like being underwater.

So, the first news of the year was excellent. Peachtree is alive and well. In fact, “she’s” doing just fine.

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.