horizon, is an experience not to be forgotten. But they are far more than just grassy
curiosities. According to the writer Hiram Rogers, grassy balds cover just 0.015 percent of
the Smokies landscape yet hold 29 percent of its flora. For unknown numbers of years
they were used first by Indians and then by European settlers for grazing summer
livestock, but now, with graziers banished and the Park Service doing nothing, woody
species like hawthorn and blackberry are steadily reclaiming the mountaintops. Within
twenty years, there may be no balds left in the Smokies. Ninety plant species have
disappeared from the balds since the park was opened in the 1930s. At least twenty-five
more are expected to go in the next few years. There is no plan to save them.
Now you might conclude from this that I don't much admire the Park Service and its
people, and that's not quite so. I never met a ranger who wasn't cheerful, dedicated, and
generally well informed. (Mind you, I hardly ever met a ranger because most of them
have been laid off, but the ones I encountered were entirely noble and good.) No, my
problem is not with the people on the ground, it is with the Park Service itself. A lot of
people point out in defense of the national parks that they have been starved of funds,
and this is indubitably so. In constant dollars, the Park Service budget today is $200
million a year less than it was a decade ago. In consequence, even as visitor numbers
have soared--from 79 million in 1960 to almost 270 million today--campsites and
interpretation centers have been shut, warden numbers slashed, and essential
maintenance deferred to a positively ludicrous degree. By 1997, the repair backlog for the
national parks had reached $6 billion. All quite scandalous. But consider this. In 1991, as
its trees were dying, its buildings crumbling, its visitors being turned away from
campgrounds it could not afford to keep open, and its employees being laid off in record
numbers, the National Park Service threw a seventy-fifth anniversary party for itself in
Vail, Colorado. It spent $500,000 on the event. That may not be quite as moronically
negligent as tipping hundreds of gallons of poison into a wilderness stream, but it is
certainly in the right spirit.
But, hey, let's not lose our perspective here. The Smokies achieved their natural
splendor without the guidance of a national park service and don't actually need it now.
Indeed, given the Park Service's bizarre and erratic behavior throughout its history (here's
another one for you: in the 1960s it invited the Walt Disney Corporation to build an
amusement complex in Sequoia National Park in California) it is perhaps not an altogether
bad idea to starve it of funds. I am almost certain that if that $200 million a year were
restored to the budget, nearly all of it would go into building more parking lots and RV
hookups, not into saving trees and certainly not into restoring the precious, lovely grassy
balds. It is actually Park Service policy to let the balds vanish. Having gotten everyone in a
lather by interfering with nature for years, it has decided now not to interfere with nature
at all, even when that interference would be demonstrably beneficial. I tell you, these
people are a wonder.
Dusk was settling in when we reached Birch Spring Gap Shelter, standing on a slope
beside a muddy stream a couple of hundred feet downhill from the trail. In the silvery
half-light, it looked wonderful. In contrast to the utilitarian plywood structures found
elsewhere on the trail, the shelters of the Smokies were solidly built of stone in an
intentionally quaint, rustic style, so from a distance Birch Spring Gap Shelter had the
snug, homey, inviting look of a cabin. Up close, however, it was somewhat less
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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