Mount Mitchell, N.C.: Death Hangs In The Air
The Mountains -- And Our Health -- Hang In The Balance
Michael Gordon is a staff writer for The Charlotte Observer.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published by The Charlotte Observer, and is reprinted with permission.
All this beauty can't mask an awful truth. The N.C. mountains are sick.
They are being poisoned by the very air and moisture upon which they depend. The taller the peak, the graver the symptoms.
Mount Mitchell, the highest point in the East, is a boneyard. Thousands of dead trees lie about, like victims of some massacre whom nobody bothered to bury.
"It makes you want to cry," says Robert Bruck, a longtime Mount Mitchell researcher from N.C. State University who this summer is leading the first major study of the peak's struggles since 1988.
"All that stuff should be living, but beautiful trees are just rotting. It smells like death."
With the state in the midst of an increasingly contentious debate over cleaning its air, North Carolina's mountains are Exhibit 1. A growing chorus of scientists and physicians say that what's happening in the high woods is happening in lungs, too.
"Screw the trees, Bambi and Thumper; we're talking human health," Bruck says. "What we've done to the trees, that's what we're doing to our kids when they're out riding their bikes. That's what we're doing to our elderly. I have people working with me on Mount Mitchell, big strong college kids. And after a month, they're brought back to Raleigh and their doctors ask them, 'Have you ever had asthma before?'"
None of this was a secret to me. The alarms about the mountain air have been sounding for years. But to pedal through the dying forests on a bicycle, to struggle for hours to reach the top of these peaks, only to find parts of them sick and disfigured, has been the one disheartening part of my trip.
From the start, I've run into people talking openly of their concerns about the air.
I was walking around Sylva when I spotted Orville Coward Jr. running intervals on the 107 steps of the Jackson County Courthouse. The 48-year-old attorney pointed down Main Street and toward the mountains above it and said he'd never live anywhere else. "But we have the worst air in the country."
Jonathan Griffith grew up in Burnsville, at the base of Mount Mitchell. From there, the state's highest crown looks like it's losing its hair. Now Griffith, 28, is head ranger at Mount Mitchell State Park, and he says the condition of the trees is easily the most frequent question from visitors.
While recognizing the harm done by the air, the U.S. Forest Service, he explains, still blames a tiny imported pest, the woolly adelgid, for most of the damage.
Bruck says that argument is years out of date. The same conditions killing the trees are making it impossible for the insect to live, too. "The trees used to be white with them," he says, "but we've had trouble finding any for years."
The reason? Sulfur and nitrogen from smokestacks and cars bathe the mountains with acidic rain, mist and fog. More significantly, they help form low-level ozone, especially during the hot, dry weather that is increasingly common in the mountains.
Since 1954, Bruck says, the mean winter temperature on Mitchell has gone up 7 degrees; the summer is 4 degrees warmer. By comparison, he says, an 8-degree drop in the winter brought on the Ice Age.
Since 1987, he continues, much of the escarpment has been in perpetual drought. That has weakened the forests even more. Air pollution builds during hot, dry periods. When the rain finally falls, it does more damage.
The man for whom Mount Mitchell was named is buried near the summit. The research of the Rev. Elisha Mitchell led to the mountain being recognized as the tallest this side of the Mississippi.
Mitchell was killed in an 1857 fall here. Some years later, his body was moved to the summit. And there it sits, closer to heaven than anybody this side of the Rockies, "in hopes of blessed resurrection."
Say the same prayer for the mountains.
Published: Jun 06 2002
