Chris Irwin has a vision. He looks at the North Cumberland Plateau, a mix of timberland and abandoned strip mines currently operated as a Tennessee Wildlife Management Area, and sees a national park.
“Yes, there are some bad former mining sites in the area. Honestly, the area represents steep slope mining at its worst, and has the landslides to prove it,” Irwin says. “But it’s also a rugged, forested plateau that serves as an important watershed for the New River. In many ways, it’s as majestic and beautiful as the Smokies. The land just looks like a national park.”
Irwin, the staff attorney for the United Mountain Defense, has begun a grassroots campaign to drum up support for turning much of the North Cumberland Wildlife Management Area into the New River National Park. The North Cumberland is actually a complex of wildlife management areas—Sudquist, Royal Blue, New River—that covers 146,000 acres of the Cumberland Plateau between Knoxville and Nashville. This portion of the plateau has been a hot spot for strip mining and logging, but is beginning to rebound. Some of the former mountaintop removal sites are now grassy balds with 360-degree views. Elk were reintroduced to the area in 2000. Today, the land is a rugged and remote playground used predominantly by hunters and offroad vehicle enthusiasts. But the land is also ripe for backpacking and hiking. Bookended by two popular state parks, Frozen Head and Cove Lake, the Cumberland Trail Conference is on the verge of completing a 35-mile segment of Tennessee’s long trail that runs right through the middle of the wildlife management area.
Thirty miles of the Cumberland Trail is already on the ground and open for hiking, trail running, and backpacking. The Cumberland Trail Conference calls this section of trail the New River segment, and describes it as some of the wildest, most remote terrain in Tennessee.
“Right now, you could spend three days backpacking the New River segment of the Cumberland Trail and not see another person the entire time,” says Tony Hook, executive director of the Cumberland Trail Conference. Hook has been leading week-long trail building retreats in the area in an attempt to complete the trail from Cove Lake State Park to Frozen Head State Park. Even though this section of trail and the Cumberland Plateau it traverses sits only 30 minutes west of Knoxville, it doesn’t receive a lot of foot traffic, largely because Great Smoky Mountains National Park is such an attraction for Knoxville hikers and backpackers.
“Once we get the trail completed into Frozen Head State Park, which is already popular with backpackers, the New River segment will start to see some boots,” Hook says.
The New River segment of the 300-mile Cumberland Trail holds the high point along the trail, Cross Mountain, at 3,000 feet. Here, the terrain is more rolling and mountainous than what you’d find on the southern end of the Cumberland Plateau. Instead of the dramatic escarpment that defines the plateau near Chattanooga, you have mountains that build into a crescendo, much like in the Smokies.
And backpacking is just the crown jewel of the North Cumberland’s recreation portfolio. The North Cumberland has hundreds of miles of former logging roads that Knoxville mountain bikers are beginning to explore. The section of the New River that curls around the plateau is ripe for canoeing, and the seasonal creeks that drop to the valley offer similar creek boating to what you’ll find on the southern end of the plateau near Chattanooga.
“There’s opportunity to expand the recreation significantly,” Hook says. “The key is to get private organizations behind that sort of development. Bike clubs, paddling clubs, outfitters, nonprofits…they need to be involved.”
Building that sort of broad recreation coalition and infrastructure is also key to the United Mountain Defense’s national park proposal. Irwin sees the New River National Park as a potential “twin economic engine” for the region, a compliment to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. According to the National Park Service, the Smokies bring in more than $700 million annually to surrounding communities. While the proposed New River National Park is just as accessible to a large population as the Smokies, it’s far more realistic to estimate that the new park would likely be on par economically with the Big South Fork National Recreation Area in nearby Oneida, Tennessee, which brings in an estimated $16 million annually to local communities, according to a park service study.
Economics and recreation aside, the most legitimate argument for creating a national park on the North Cumberland plateau is ecological. According to the Nature Conservancy, the Cumberland Plateau is the largest hardwood-forested plateau in the world (450 miles from Alabama to West Virginia) and home to the highest concentration of endangered species on the continent. An elk herd 300-strong is currently thriving on the plateau, which is also home to the cerulean warbler, a species of special concern, and a host of freshwater mussels. The Nature Conservancy and the state of Tennessee made the North Cumberland Plateau a priority, joining forces in 2007 to protect 127,000 acres of the plateau. It was the largest land protection deal in Tennessee since Great Smoky Mountains National Park, connecting and opening a massive expanse of land for the public.
But Irwin is concerned that protection isn’t strong enough. While the state currently owns the surface rights to the North Cumberland plateau, coal companies have retained the mineral rights and timber companies have been grandfathered in to allow for continued logging. There’s no current pressure to mine the area, but the mining rights were recently transferred to a multinational coal corporation based in China, and Irwin fears there will be renewed interest in mining the plateau in the future.
“Mining has always been a boom and bust economy,” Irwin says. “Right now it’s bust in this portion of Tennessee, but you never know if China is going to want to step in and pull coal out of those mountains.”
Mining the North Cumberland Plateau is of particular concern because the ridge drains into the New River and the Cumberland River, which provides water for Nashville. Flash flooding has always been associated with strip mining and logging, and Nashville received $1.2 billion in damage from the last flash flood in 2010. Some sort of permanent protection of the North Cumberland plateau needs to be enacted, according to Irwin. The state of Tennessee agrees. Governor Phil Bredsen has recently petitioned the Office of Surface Mining for an order that would prohibit MTR on 67,000 acres of the North Cumberland Plateau. Commenting on the petition, Don Barger, Southeast director of the National Parks Conservation Association, called the 67,000 acres highlighted in the request, “the best of the best” in terms of Cumberland’s landscape.
“The landscape on this Northern section of the Cumberland Plateau is more like the Smokies,” says Alex Wyss, director of conservation for The Nature Conservancy in East Tennessee. “It’s very mountainous, very striking. It’s a beautiful place. Elk have been reintroduced, bear are coming back on their own. It’s not strictly Wilderness, but it has that big wilderness feel. On the higher peaks, you can see for long distances, and what you see, by and large, is contiguous forest.”
At this point, any talk of establishing a New River National Park is theoretical. The park discussion is currently in its infancy. The United Mountain Defense has researched the proposal, written representatives and placed editorials in local newspapers, but there’s no legislative support for the idea as of yet. And there’s no guarantee the North Cumberland plateau would meet the National Park Service’s standards, given the strip mine scars. The hurdles that would have to be surmounted are daunting. The private property rights that the coal companies and timber companies retain would have to be addressed. ATVs and hunting are the most popular recreational uses of the area, so any park plan would have to address those user groups as well. Creating a new national park is a lofty goal in the best economic times, and an even steeper uphill battle in today’s budget-crisis climate when public lands are getting slashed across the board.
The first step toward the park, according to Irwin, is forming a broad coalition of organizations and citizens to ensure the national park proposal has legs.
“We’re just a little nonprofit,” Irwin says. “We need bigger groups to get involved. We’re in the process of forming a Friends of the New River National Park organization. We’ve done the research. We know it took 16 years to get the Smokies turned into a park. We’re looking at this as a long-term project.”
National park status or not, the North Cumberland plateau is worth exploring. Currently, the best way to dig into the plateau is to hike the 27-mile section of the Cumberland Trail that’s open for business. Here’s your guide to this perfect weekend backpacking trip.
Access There are only two long-term parking options for this section of the C.T. One at Cove Lake State Park, another on Norma Road where the trail crosses the road.
The Hike “This is more of a wilderness, ‘get away from people’ kind of hike,” says Tony Hook of the Cumberland Trail Conference. So expect solitude. Start at Cove Lake and hike south, with a shuttle vehicle waiting at Norma Road. The first climb is the toughest, with 2,000 feet of gain in five miles to reach Cross Mountain, the high point on the trail. You’re moving in and out of creek gorges as you hike south, which are packed with seasonal waterfalls (some of the waterfalls still lack names), popping out occasionally on mountaintops with expansive views.
Camping Dispersed, Leave No Trace camping is allowed off the trail. There are also two designated backcountry campsites, one at mile seven, and another at mile 22. HIGHLIGHTS
Anderson Mountain and Lawson Mountain are former mountaintop removal sites that have become grasslands. What you’ll find now are open balds with 360-degree views.
Adkins Branch Falls is a 20-foot drop and pool falls you’ll pass early in your hike. Duncan Falls comes later and is a bit more impressive, as it drops 20 feet over a cliff.
Montgomery Fork is a broad, flat meadow where the elk were originally released. You can still find the large animals here, particularly in the early morning and evenings. Go in the fall, and you could experience the elk rut mating ritual.
Want to run the C.T. instead? Sign up for the Cumberland Trail 50K, which covers the New River Segment of the C.T. as an out and back. The race starts at Cove Lake State Park, goes nine miles up the C.T., then veers onto ATV trails, before coming back down to the park. cumberlandtrailraces.com