(828) 526-0173 | [email protected] | Copyright 2024 – All Rights Reserved.
Addressing Nature Directly
Written By: Lance Hardin - Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust | Issue: March 2024 | Photograph By: Andrew Renfro
The Plateau’s preservation ethic was built into the Appalachian Trail.
You probably know that the Appalachian Trail, or the “AT,” is an iconic 2,200-mile footpath that extends from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine.
You may even be aware that this month, March, is the most-popular starting time for the more than 3,000 ambitious hikers that seek to “thru-hike” each year. But did you know that as originally envisioned, the AT might have passed through Cashiers and Highlands?
The AT was first proposed in 1921 by Benton MacKaye, a Harvard-educated forester and visionary regional planner, as a means to allow an increasingly civilized world to “address nature directly.” MacKaye initially suggested a trail connecting Mount Washington, New Hampshire, the highest mountain in the north, with Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, the highest mountain in the South; to continue the southward trek, two alternatives emerged, one traversing westerly toward the Smoky Mountains, and the second heading south through Asheville and Transylvania County before turning west and climbing the Cashiers-Highlands plateau and then on toward Rabun Bald.
One of MacKaye’s trusted advisors regarding the southern route of the AT was Harlan Kelsey, the son of Highlands’ founder Samuel Kelsey.
In 1922 Harlan Kelsey was a nationally-renowned nursey owner in Salem, Massachusetts, but still took time to pen a letter to MacKaye extolling the beauty of the plateau route; this “section of the trail has the advantage of a large number of very beautiful waterfalls beginning with Linville Falls and ending with a wonderful group of cascades and waterfalls in the vicinity of Highlands and including the Tuckaseegee and Whitewater Waterfalls near the North and South Carolina line and many others I could mention.” Ultimately, however, MacKaye and Kelsey concurred that more wilderness experience could be obtained by routing the AT through what would become Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
But our area’s involvement with the AT doesn’t stop there. In 1934 four regional hiking clubs met at the King’s Inn in Highlands to hear a presentation from MacKaye on recreational opportunities along the AT. The group passed a resolution that included “we deem the preservation of the wilderness in its primitive state vital to a balanced life.”
The Highlands-Cashiers Land Trust still embodies that conservation ethic; seek your own “balanced life” by experiencing the wilderness on our trails. For more information see hcltnc.org and follow us on Instagram and Facebook.
