more walk less talk

Apparently this was a favorite line of George Masa, sometimes known as the Ansel Adams of the Smokies. I'm getting pretty excited for my trip to the mountains in a week. I decided to go eventhough my elbow is not 100%. But I think it will be ok.

Here are some pictures taken during the early part of the 1900s of the Smokies.

All of the pictures except the last two were taken by amateur photographer Albert 'Dutch' Roth. What's cool about Roth is that he took a SHIT TON of pictures and they have all been digitized and put online here. There are thousands of pictures. I suggest checking them out. The site is a little slow. The ones below are just some of them that caught my eye.

He wasn't a gifted photographer. But some of his stuff is pretty cool. Even though he was photographing the mountains, I tend to like his pictures of people A LOT more than his pictures of the mountains.

He apparently accompanied some folks who were trying to find and document all the biggest trees in the Smokies. This is a big CHESTNUT. The American Chestnut used to be a co-dominant species in the Appalachian Oak Forests. It shared dominance with several species of Oak. There were a lot of Chestnuts. Then the Chestnut blight, a pathogenic fungus, was introduced and it killed virtually every single Chestnut in the US. Sad. But the Chestnuts are tough and you will often see "stump sprouts", small chestut trees that grown from old, dead chestnut stumps. These stumps must be at least 70 or 80 years old now. Unfortunately, the young trees are killed by the fungus typically withing a few years, but sometimes they last longer.



CLICK FOR A BIGGER VERSION:



I really like this picture a lot. CLICK FOR BIGGER.



This Mr. Joe Green standing where his house used to be. It was washed away in a flash flood.



Really like this one too.









This is a picture of Whiteside, a really big cliff just north of the South Carolina border. It is well south of the Smokies.



The Chimney Tops.



Here are two George Masa photos for contrast. The first is also of Chimney Tops. It's kind of cool that one of the Chimney Top pics was taken in the morning and one in the afternoon.