Since the end of the Civil War, Southerners have been fleeing to the southern mountains to escape the torrid summers of low country Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and adjacent regions. A promotional pamphlet titled “The Blue Ridge Highlands” was issued in 1876 by the “Daily News” in Greenville, S.C. This publication extolled the fact that there was “no better climate in the world for health, comfort & enjoyment” than that found in the uplands.

Readers were advised that the climate of the region “is not excelled, if indeed, it is equaled, in the United States, for health and comfort .... The atmosphere is light and clear and pure [with] the sun always shining out as bright when it rises above the horizon as at midday .... The temperature is seldom above eighty in summer. Showers usually come up with barely enough breeze to rustle the leaves in the tree tops. The elevation accounts for our cool summers and clear, pure atmosphere.”

Aside from the hyperbole, the pamphleteer was right about the effects of elevation on summer temperatures. In the massive Southern Blue Ridge Province, which extends from southwestern Virginia to north Georgia (including the mountainous portions of east Tennessee, western North Carolina, and northwest South Carolina), there are 80 mountains exceeding 5,000 feet in elevation. Forty or so these top 6,000 feet. And about 35 or so of those that exceed 6,000 feet are situated in Western North Carolina. For every 1,000 feet gained in elevation, there’s a mean temperature decrease of about four degrees Fahrenheit, which is equivalent to a change of about 225 miles in latitude.

In other words, going from the lowest elevations in the southern mountains to the highest elevations is like going more than a 1,000 miles to the north in regard to the habitats one will encounter. That’s why a spruce-fir forest is the prototypical habitat on our highest peaks and a northern hardwood-type forest dominates the elevational zone between 4,000 and 6,000 feet.

Looming on the horizon about 10 miles to the north of my office here in Bryson City is Clingmans Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The elevation here in town is 1,736 feet, while Clingmans Dome at 6,642 feet is the second highest peak in the eastern United States. The 40-minute drive from Bryson City to Clingmans Dome (via Cherokee, U.S. 441, and the spur road at Newfound Gap) takes me from a spot where the average mid-summer temperature is about 75 degrees to one that averages 59 degrees. That’s real air conditioning.

During the last Ice Age (which reached its apogee about 18,000 years ago during the Wisconsin Epoch), continental sheets of glacial ice did not extend this far south. Nevertheless, huge boulderfields scattered throughout the mountains in high-elevation ravines provide evidence of a much colder period when snow packs and ice fields accumulated for long periods. As recently as 16,500 years ago, the higher peaks of the southern mountains had an alpine tundra above a distinct timberline and a mean annual temperature averaging well below 32 degrees.

Today’s mixed Fraser fir and red spruce forests of the highest elevations are extensions of the boreal forest of the far north. They, too, are relicts of the Ice Age period when numerous plants and animals “fled” south to escape the glacial sheets. After the glaciers melted, spruce-fir persisted on the higher peaks due to the low temperatures and high rainfall. In this mist-shrouded habitat, one finds “relic” plants and animals from the far north like the Canada mayflower, bluebead lily and the northern flying squirrel.

Instead of migrating horizontally north, birds like the brown creeper, golden-crowned kinglet, junco, winter wren, and red-breasted nuthatch-which winter in the lower elevations with us-migrate a few thousand feet up into the spruce-fir to nest. By so doing, they have learned to save themselves flights of hundreds of miles and untold amounts of energy and time.

In addition to its invigorating climate, the high country of the southern mountains does provide some of the most interesting and scenic terrain in North America. And it’s not hyperbole to observe that this region is a wonderland of varied habitats, rare plants, and curious animals just waiting to be explored, comprehended, and savored.

George Ellison 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. In June 2005, a selection of his Back Then columns was published by The History Press in Charleston as Mountain Passages: Natural and Cultural History of Western North Carolina and the Great Smoky Mountains. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C., 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com.