Mount Mitchell ( Attakulla in Cherokee)
Geography
The peak is the highest mountain in the United States east of the Mississippi River,
and the highest in all of eastern North America south of the Arctic Cordillera.
Barbeau Peak is higher but is located in the very remote
Canadian Arctic. The nearest higher peaks are in the
Black Hills of South Dakota and the highland foothills of
Colorado. The mountain's topographic isolation is calculated from the nearest discernible single higher point: Lone Butte, which is 1,189 miles (1,913 km) away in southeastern Colorado.
History
Mount Mitchell was the highest mountain of the
United States from 1789 until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 when
Mount Elbert became the highest mountain claimed by the United States. Mount Mitchell was also the most isolated peak in the United States from 1789 until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 when
Mount Whitney became the most isolated.
The Cherokee people, who long occupied this area as part of their homeland, called the mountain Attakulla.
A road (NC 128) connects the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway to a parking lot where a steep paved trail leads through a conifer forest to the summit. The stone observation tower on the summit was torn down in late 2006. A new observation deck was constructed and opened to visitors in January 2009.
Description
Mount Mitchell was formed during the Precambrian when marine deposits were metamorphosed into
gneiss and
schist. These
metasedimentary rocks were later uplifted during the Alleghenian orogeny.
The soils are well drained, dark brown and stony with fine-earth material ranging in texture from sandy clay loam to loam or sandy loam; Burton and Craggey are the most common series around the summit.
[ SoilWeb , University of California-Davis California Soil Resource Lab, Natural Resources Conservation Service. Accessed: 11 January 2016.]
Environment
The mountain's summit is coated in a dense stand of Southern Appalachian spruce-fir forest, which consists primarily of two evergreen species—the
Picea rubens and the
Abies fraseri. Most of the mature Fraser firs, however, were killed off by the non-native Balsam woolly adelgid in the latter half of the 20th century. The high elevations expose plant life to high levels of pollution, including acid precipitation in the form of rain, snow, and fog. These acids damage the red spruce trees in part by releasing natural metals from the soil, such as
aluminum, and by leaching important
. To what extent this pollution harms the high-altitude ecosystem is debatable.
[Steve Nash, Blue Ridge 2020: An Owner's Manual (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 25-28, 61-63.]
While the mountain is still mostly lush and green in the summer, many dead Fraser fir trunks can be seen due to these serious problems. Reducing air pollution is a difficult issue, as the pollutants are often carried by air to this area from long distances. Sources can be local or hundreds of miles away, requiring cooperation from as far away as the Midwest.
Wildflowers are abundant all summer long. Young fir and spruce trees do well in the subalpine climate, and their cones feed the birds along with wild blueberry and blackberry shrubs.
The second highest point in eastern North America, Mount Craig at , is roughly a mile to the north of Mount Mitchell.
Climate
The summit area of Mount Mitchell is marked by a warm-summer humid continental climate (Köppen
Dfb), with mild summers and long, moderately cold winters, being more similar to southeastern Canada than the southeastern U.S. The monthly daily average temperature ranges from in January to in July. The coldest temperature ever recorded in the state occurred there on January 21, 1985, when it fell to , during a severe cold spell. It is also the coldest average reporting station in the state at , well below any other station.
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Unlike the lower elevations in the surrounding regions, heavy snows often fall from December to March, with accumulating in the Great Blizzard of 1993 and in the January 2016 blizzard.
Mount Mitchell recorded a new state record of of precipitation in 2018, which is also the highest total rainfall recorded during a calendar year anywhere east of the Cascade Range in the Contiguous United States.
See also
-
Assault on Mount Mitchell, bicycling endurance
-
List of mountains in North Carolina
-
Mountains-to-Sea Trail
External links
