On
your hike across the state, start at the top-in a spruce-fir forest over
5,500 feet above sea level. Red spruce and Fraser fir evergreen trees
dominate the view. During the last ice age over 10,000 years ago, these
hardy trees grew across much of North Carolina. As the ice age ended,
warm-climate communities replaced the spruce-fir forests. Only on North
Carolina's highest peaks was the environment still cold enough for the
plants and animals in the spruce-fir forest. These "islands in the sky"
are home to many rare and endemic (found nowhere else) species including
Blue Ridge goldenrod, Weller's salamander, and the spruce-fir moss spider.
Zig-zag your way down the steep slope of a mountain and enter a lush green forest-the mountain cove. Step around big boulders, splash across small creeks and branches, and examine the moist moss-covered logs and stumps on the forest floor. Under the canopy of giant hemlock, oak, hickory, and tulip poplar trees grows an amazing variety of ferns and wildflowers-trilliums, violets, mayapple, foamflower, and Dutchman's breeches. Try to penetrate the dense thickets of shrubby mountain laurel and rhododendrons and you may understand why some mountain travelers named them "laurel hells."
Mountain
coves provide homes for a great many songbirds, reptiles, and amphibians
(especially salamanders). Bobcats, chipmunks, and mink live here, as do
the caddisflies, stoneflies, and mayflies that feed the brook trout and
other fish of the mountain streams.
[Mountains] [Piedmont] [Sandhills] [Upper
Coastal Plain] [Lower Coastal Plain] [Barrier Islands]
[North Carolina's Natural Treasures Home]
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