Exploring One of the Last Virgin Forests
By Cara Siera
Posted October 6, 2024
We were rafting down the Nantahala River in North Carolina, soon to brave my first Class III rapid. As I chatted with our guide about the flora visible on the riverbanks, she said, “You know there’s a stand of virgin forest less than an hour from here.”
My companions and I would be homeward-bound the next day, but I felt deeply compelled to see that forest. I’ve long held a love for ancient trees. I have favorites—trees to climb and trees to sit in the shade of—on my parents’ and grandparents’ rural properties. Also, the stately redwood forests of California have been on my bucket list for as long as can remember. Towering gum trees in Australia and a pre-Civil War live oak in Panama City left me breathless.
Fortunately, my travel companions were just as eager.
How the Trees Survived
Old-growth forests—those where the lives of most mature trees span at least 120 years old—are rare in the United States. Virgin forests that have never been logged or cleared are even harder to find.
Prior to European colonization, the land that would become the U.S. housed more than a billion acres of untouched virgin forest. According to one estimate, less than four percent of America’s original forests remain. Stated another way, more than 96 percent of U.S. forests have been logged at least once since the 1600s.
Much of the remaining old growth is protected within national parks—the Great Smoky Mountains, Chattahoochee National Forest, Congaree National Park, and the Nantahala National Forest, to name a few. How did one of the last remaining stands of virgin timber in Nantahala’s Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness survive?
Three thousand eight hundred forested acres were set aside in 1936 in honor of a World War I soldier by the name of Joyce Kilmer who was killed in action in France. You may not know Kilmer by name, but you have no doubt heard his most famous poem; “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.”
The Story Expands
Around 1915, two companies began logging the surrounding watershed, assisted by newly built railroads. The railroads made logging fast and efficient, circumventing the tedious process of floating the lumber downriver. Deforestation became possible at a pace never seen before. According to locals, however, the loggers appreciated the beauty of the largest of the old poplars and wished to cut them down only when the surrounding timber was exhausted.
Construction began on a hydroelectric dam around 1929. Its presence eventually caused the Little Tennessee River to flood many of the rail lines. This, combined with declining lumber prices due to the Great Depression, caused a slackening of logging operations.
Five years later, the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VWF) requested “that the government of the United States examine its millions of forested acres and set aside a fitting area of trees to stand for all time as a living memorial” to Kilmer. The Forest Service considered groves from one end of the continent to the other and dedicated the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest in 1936.
It was selected for the sheer age and stature of the trees, many over 400 years old, over 100 feet tall, and 20 feet in circumference. The stand of towering poplars had been saved for a lifetime.
Hiking the Virgin Forest
By Googling “virgin forest named after poet,” we quickly found our destination and photos of its oldest trees. We stopped at a service station in the small town of Robbinsville, North Carolina, and picked up a map. This was fortuitous, as we lost cell signal with ten miles of weaving mountain roads to go.
Upon arrival, we visited a museum-like gazebo that related the story of the Forest’s founding. Then, we crossed a wooden bridge spanning Little Santeetlah Creek and embarked on a two-mile pilgrimage to the Virgin grove.
The hiking trail winds in a figure-eight shape. Via the lower 1.25-mile loop, you reach the Joyce Kilmer Memorial plaque—a patinaed metal plaque set into a huge boulder nearly a century ago. But you haven’t reached your destination yet. To see the oldest and largest trees in the protected swath of forest, you’ll need to continue on the 0.75-mile upper loop through the Poplar Grove.
The lower loop is steep, the trail wet and rocky. We could hear the stream trickling below. The encroaching brush was bespeckled with blossoming rhododendrons, bright orange mushrooms, black-neon-tinted beetles, and two-inch-long eastern whitelip snails.
Focus on the Ancient Trees
Early in our hike, we laid eyes on the ancient trees. We stopped at one massive, hollow half-tree that had been split down the middle by lightning or decay. While taking photos within the old tree’s embrace, we heard a fellow hiker call out, “That one’s nothing.”
We stopped at another tree, the largest we’d seen yet, and took a photo demonstrating that it took the arm spans of four individuals to encircle it. After passing the plaque, however, we began to understand what the other hiker meant. Each stately tree grew larger than the last.
The hiking trail was intentionally designed to pass the largest trees and the most interesting remnants. These “celebrities” waited patiently for us as if in a receiving line. There were the twins, two trees that had grown up together, their roots forever bound, leaning slightly at opposing angles. Another highlight unveiled a huge hollow stump in which our party of seven easily fit like a family of squirrels in an ordinary tree. Finally, we met the largest of all the giants, which required six of us, hand-in-hand, to gird its mighty girth.
We often paused mid-trail to take in the gravity of where we stood. With more than 100 tree species, this old growth cove hardwood forest displays an ecosystem unique to the Appalachian mountains. Many of the largest trees are tulip trees, also called tulip poplars or yellow poplars. There are also larger-than-average examples of cucumbertrees (a hardy species of magnolia), silverbells, yellow and sweet birch, American beech, eastern hemlock, sugar and red maples, basswood, sycamores, and other magnolias. Dogwoods, spicebush, and rhododendrons fill the understory.
The Human Impact on Old Growth Trees
Old growth examples of the American chestnut are conspicuously missing. Accidentally introduced to the United States in the early 1900s, Chestnut blight likely caused the Memorial Forest’s ancient chestnuts to die out before 1940. Their wood, however, is so rot-resistant that remnants of their logs and stumps remain, a ghostly testament to this “functionally extinct” species. Interestingly, chestnut saplings still occasionally spring up from old seeds in the grove.
Other ancient fallen logs represent hemlocks killed by the hemlock woolly adelgid insect, another non-native pest inadvertently introduced. Their loss changed the grove’s microenvironments, opening the canopy and making it brighter and drier. Both species remind us of our bittersweet relationship with the forest.
When the crunching sounds of our footfalls ceased, the forest seemed eerily quiet—and very peaceful. The leaves rustled gently in the canopy to a harmony of bird calls and water droplets. Often, beyond our small group, there were no other hikers in sight. For the first time in my life, the persistent background drone of human activity—vehicles, airplanes, and other sources of noise pollution became undetectable.
A Generational Forest
As we hiked back out, we stopped at the plaque to rest and rehydrate. An elderly couple on their way up the mountain paused alongside us. The wife, smiling broadly, told us that they had come there on their honeymoon and were returning to celebrate their fortieth wedding anniversary. It seemed fitting that they could revisit these sentinel timekeepers that didn’t appear to have changed in a human lifetime.
It is estimated that some of the trees in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest are over 450 years old. The massive yellow poplars boast an average lifespan of 200 to 250 years, but in optimal conditions such as these enjoy, they often live more than 500 years. Still, each of these huge trees eventually comes to an end. Middle-aged trees, already hundreds of years old, stand ready to take their place.
I thought of the poplar seedling in my own backyard, just months since its first leaves saw the sunlight. Would it still be around in 400 years, huge like these graceful giants? Would it and they stick around to capture the carbon we’ve produced, saving us in turn?
Snatched from the brink of deforestation, I took in a final lungful of the damp, earthy air and hoped this forest would continue to stand for generations to come.
Editor’s Note: The Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest is located in the region recently effected by Hurricane Helene. We recommend saving the experience of exploring this treasure for a future time after Western North Carolina heals from this devastating disaster.