Old Bald

OLD BALD

"Our encampment was on Old Bald; not the famous shaking mountain, but of the Balsams, eight miles south of Waynesville....We ascended Old Bald by a trail termed the "winds." It was icy underfoot, and some of the party [eight men] had severe falls before we issued from the dwarf beeches, upon the bare backbone of the range. Although no breeze was stirring that morning on the north side of the mountain, a bitter, winter blast was sweeping the summit. It cut through our clothing like wizard, sharp-edged knives that left no traces except the tingling skin. This blast had chased off every cloud, leaving clear, indigo-blue depths for the sun, just lifting over Cold Spring mountain, to ride through. As we reached the bare, culminating point of the narrow ridge between Old Bald and Lone Balsam, the sun had cleared himself from the mountain tops; and red and round, doubly increased in size, he saw shedding his splendor on a scene unsurpassed in beauty and wild sublimity. The night rain, turning to sleet on the summits of the mountains, had encased the black balsam forests, covering the Spruce Ridge and Great Divide, in armors of ice. They glistened like hills and pinnacles of silver in the sunlight. Below the edges of these ice forests, stood the deciduous trees of the mountains, brown and bare. No traces of the storm clung to them. The hemlocks along the head-prongs of the Richland were green and dark under the shadows of the steep declivities. No clouds were clinging to the streams through the valleys, and visible in all the glory of the frosty morn, lay the vale of the Richland, with its stream winding through it like an endless silver ribbon. The white houses of Waynesville were shining in the sunlight pouring through the gap toward the Pigeon [river]. No smoke was circling above their roofs. The quiet of night apparently still pervaded the street. High, and far behind it, rose the mystic, purple heights of the Newfound." (Zeigler, Wilbur and Ben Grosscup. The Heart of the Alleghanies, pp. 48, 54-55.)