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The view from the Oconaluftee River Overlook, the last scenic view before the Blue Ridge Parkway ends at U.S. Highway 441 and less than a mile from the Oconaluftee Visitor Center, where elk range.

BRYSON CITY / SWAIN COUNTY NC CHAMBER OF COMMERCE TRAVEL

The Mountains Under Cover

In the shadow of COVID, western North Carolina dons masks and keeps distances (or doesn’t)

BY GREG LACOUR

THE TENTS LOOK LIKE OVERSIZED TOADSTOOLS. It’s as if they sprouted overnight a er a heavy rain on the campus of Western Carolina University in the town of Cullowhee, about an hour’s drive southwest of Asheville. They’re the kind of white, peaked tents commonly used for outdoor gatherings, and the university has scattered six of them throughout the 589-acre campus, with plastic folding chairs spaced 6 feet apart beneath them.

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They’ve been open for study, shelter, and relaxation since the rst day of classes a week ago as a way to keep too many students from congregating indoors. Now, in late August, it’s about 10:30 on a Monday morning that threatens rain, and it doesn’t appear that anyone’s using them. It’s quiet on what normally is a campus alive with new-academic-year energy and preparation for football season. But Whitmire Stadium is silent, too. Across Catamount Road in the intramural elds rests a makeshi arrangement of free weights and exercise equipment on the wet grass, overseen by campus trainers.

A few people go through their paces. I walk by on the track that surrounds the elds. I introduce myself and ask one of the trainers about the setup. His supervisor advises me, adamantly, to consult university public a airs. I thank them and walk on.

THIS IS THE TIME OF YEAR when the western mountains usually ll with tourists, who occupy resorts and Airbnbs and ply the Blue Ridge Parkway to marvel at the autumn foliage. As I write this, at the beginning of the season, it appears that some of those visitors will still make day and weekend treks from the Charlotte area; if you’re going to leave the house and minimize the risk of contracting COVID, you could do worse than hike mountain trails and take in multihued landscapes from your car.

But of course, the virus has cut into the number of visitors and the money that businesses and employees depend on. North Carolina tourism spending

Kristiana Fuller, a 20-year-old Bryson City native shown here at work at her parents’ ice cream shop, says the initial lockdown nearly put them out of business.

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dropped 58 percent from March to the beginning of August, a reduction of $6.8 billion in spending and $871 million in related tax revenue, according to the U.S. Travel Association. (Visit North Carolina, the state’s travel and tourism agency, does not track those numbers by region.)

The timing could hardly have been worse in the mountains, where spring tourism season arrived with the virus. Je and Paula Fuller, who own BoxCar Café & Cones in Bryson City, barely hung on with takeout orders from midMarch to early May, says their daughter Kristiana, 20; she works as a server at BoxCar and at the front desk of the Swain County Heritage Museum downtown. “Right when it should have picked up,” Kristiana says, “is when everything had to shut down.”

The museum, housed in a former courthouse built in 1908, is closed under Phase 2 of the state’s COVID response plan, although the visitor center remains open. Kristiana speaks to me, masked, from behind clear plastic. She was born and bred in Bryson City, describing herself as “ninth-generation Swain County.” Once the statewide shelter-in-place order li ed in May, she says, business picked up, and most people in the visitor center and the restaurant observe the indoor mask requirement—though not everyone.

THAT MATCHES MY EXPERIENCE. On a gray Sunday a ernoon, I pull up to the Oconalu ee Visitor Center at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where I’m mildly surprised to see the parking lot nearly full—not over owing, as it’d ordinarily be, but close. Some visitors wear masks as they emerge from the main building and detached restroom

structure. Some don’t. A few wear them as chin straps. I estimate about 60 percent of the people I see bother to wear masks.

It starts to drizzle—these are the Smokies—and, under a small shelter that displays a trail map, I encounter Kelly and Michelle vanDellen, a 40-year-old husbandwife team fresh o a monthlong trek in their Subaru Forester to hike in an assortment of national parks out west: Badlands in South Dakota, Grand Teton in Wyoming, Black Canyon of the Gunnison in Colorado. Adherence to health restrictions and recommendations varied from state to state, park to park, and sometimes person to person, they tell me.

“In Grand Teton, people were paying more attention and wearing masks more o en, like covering their faces when they were on trails,” says Michelle vanDellen, a psychology professor at the University of Georgia; she and Kelly drove up from Athens. “But what I saw was, the bigger the group people were in, the less seriously they took anything. You could tell, if it was a small family, people were being careful and respectful of other people’s space. But the more people weren’t with their families or in small groups, they would crowd us or not wear face coverings.”

A few minutes later, as if to drive home the point, two men separately walk ahead of me into the men’s room. Neither wears a mask.

COMPLIANCE SEEMS MORE CONSISTENT, or more enforceable, at Western Carolina. I walk farther up the on-campus walking track, which runs parallel to Cullowhee Creek toward the main administrative building, and hear something I don’t expect, especially having just passed the open-air weight “room.” Is that … a tuba?

It’s not, says the student playing it at the edge of one of the multipurpose tents. It’s a euphonium. “It’s basically a tenor tuba,” he explains. It’s obviously impossible to play a brass instrument while masked, but his music teacher wears a covering and sits a safe distance away—at least 8 feet, by my mark.

I don’t want to cut into their tent time, so I head on. “Thanks for coming by,” the teacher says through his mask, as the moan of the tenor tuba dri s over the violets and black-eyed Susans that line the creek here in the Smokies.

The National Park Service, which runs the Oconaluftee Visitor Center at Great Smoky Mountains National Park, maintains a 30-acre meadow next to the center where elk can graze and congregate.

Big Boy Rules

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a safe space for about 200 elk, including a 1,000-pound bull who prefers his trailside naps undisturbed

BY GREG LACOUR

THE MAN WHOSE JOB IT IS to enforce safe distance between humans and elk o ers advice: The best way for me and my dog to avoid the 1,000-pound bull elk that reclines peacefully in trailside brush some 100 feet ahead is to detour to the riverbank on my right, hug the river as we creep upstream, then cut through the brush beyond the elk and back to the trail.

“Or,” says Ted Rowe, “we could just hotfoot it right past him.”

“Let’s do that.”

I DID NOT EXPECT ELK. My goal here, near the Oconalu ee Visitor Center in the southeastern corner of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is to see how people, businesses, and tourist destinations in the North Carolina mountains cope as we approach six months of life under COVID. I discover a decidedly mixed bag (see companion story). But the bag happens to contain a herd of elk and a nearly 20-year conservation project.

Until Europeans showed up, more than 10 million elk ranged through most of North America. But overhunting east of the Mississippi River killed millions—to the point, around 1900, at which conservationists feared their extinction; the last known elk in North Carolina until recently was shot and killed in the late 18th century. The current elk population is roughly one million, most of them in or near the Rockies. In 2001, the Montana-based Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation contacted the National Park Service with a proposal: Can we reintroduce elk to the Smokies?

The Park Service released a herd of 25 that year and another 27 in 2002. The population now numbers 200 or so, maybe more, and the elk have thrived under a no-hunting order as they spread throughout the park and into the mountains and forests around it. Elk mainly eat grasses, and the Park Service has reserved a 30-acre meadow next to the Oconalu ee Visitor Center where the animals can graze and people can watch—from a mandatory 50-yard distance. That’s why Ted Rowe and his fellow elk-bu er volunteers, called “Lu ee Rovers,” lend their services, which matter especially when fall breeding season begins.

Walkers along the Oconaluftee River Trail can often see elk crossing the river toward the meadow, especially in early morning and just before sundown during fall rutting season—so often and so many that rangers sometimes have to close the trail to protect people.

“Especially during the rut, these bulls can get pretty aggressive,” Joe Yarkovich, the NPS wildlife biologist who’s monitored and tended the Great Smoky Mountains herd since 2006—he’s known informally as “the Elk Guy”—tells me later. “We’ve had a couple of cars get windows busted out. So you de nitely want to keep your distance.”

I KNOW NONE OF THIS as I stroll past the meadow, where a pair of elk pick placidly at the grass a safe distance away. It’s about 5:30 on a Sunday a ernoon in late August, around the time when the animals start to congregate before sundown. I gure I’ll walk my dog on a mile-and-a-half-long trail that runs along the Oconalu ee River, a clear, inches-deep mountain stream that babbles over rocks. A er a half-mile or so, I see an inviting at rock at the water’s edge and decide to have a seat and soak in the scenery on a 72-degree day.

About 300 yards upstream and on the opposite bank, something nut-brown catches my eye. It’s a bull elk, crowned with at least a four-point rack and looking as broad as a boxcar. He crosses the river slowly, stopping occasionally for a drink. Then, about halfway between the bull and me, a rustle across the water: an elk cow and calf. They ford the river quickly, not bothering to glance at me or my dog. I grin broadly—until I look directly across the river, perhaps 75 feet away, and take in the sight of three adolescent bulls near the bank. Two spar with each other. The third decides he wants to cross. He appears to aim for a spot very near me, in agrant violation of the human-elk bu er requirement.

I freeze. The young bull approaches, stepping gingerly. My dog, a pit bull, rarely barks, but she’s a city canine who’s never seen anything like this. She strains at the leash and woofs, which startles the elk. He doesn’t charge, though, thank heavens; he just stops and gives us a WTF look. He reaches the bank roughly 25 feet from us. Then he’s on his way, and so are we.

We’re headed back when a Lu ee Rover, facing me on the trail, yells, “Sir!” and begins waving her arms toward me in a “back up” motion. I gure they’re stopping walkers to let an elk, maybe the big bull I saw earlier, cross to the meadow. But I don’t see an elk. A group of about 10 adults and children, in the brush and trees to my right, near the river, tiptoes onto the trail. They’re clearly avoiding something. I still don’t see anything.

My dog and I wait for about 15 minutes. I take a few steps toward Ted, who’s made his way toward me. “Hey, Ted,” I call. “What should I do? What’s going on, exactly?”

“Well,” he says, pointing ahead and to the right, “there’s a ...” And I see him. HE’S ON HIS BELLY, in a sphinx posture maybe 15 feet from the trail, amid vegetation in waning light on an overcast day and partially concealed by a tulip poplar: a bull. A big bull. Bigger than the one I saw before. Ted knows him. The sta and volunteers at the center have dubbed him “Big Boy.” He’s at least a decade old, and he was once the stud of the herd; many of the elk I see today are probably his progeny. He’s getting old, Ted explains, but he still commands respect—the patriarch in winter. “He’s been lord of the roost here for a long time,” Ted tells me. “A little bit ago, before he laid down, he urinated all over himself. He’s perfuming up to go visit the ladies in the meadow.”

Big Boy is nothing I want to disturb, especially with my pit bull. But some of my fellow walkers—imitating, or re ecting, the indi erence so many these days exhibit toward another potentially mortal threat—seem determined to pretend Big Boy is a nonentity or just another installation to enhance their experience. An older gentleman power-walks by us. “Sir. Sir!” yells the woman volunteer. The man doesn’t break stride. A woman in pink tie-dye asks Ted what’s up. He tells her, advising her to wait or, if she has to go, to walk quickly. She creeps past Big Boy. “Ma’am,” Ted calls, “you’re going to have to walk faster.” She does—a er she’s pulled out her smartphone and snapped a photo of the massive elk, which remains motionless.

I’m not that obtuse. But it occurs to me that Big Boy might hang out here for a while, and I need to get going. I ask Ted for counsel, and he o ers the river-or-hotfoot deal. Hotfoot it is, and he accompanies us. As we stalk past the old bull, Ted discovers why he hasn’t moved. “Ah, he’s just taking a nap,” Ted remarks. “His eyes are closed.” Still walking, I turn to glance at Big Boy, who barely li s an eyelid and regards us with fully justi ed irritation. He is, a er all, an old man trying to take a nap.

“He’s watching you,” the other Lu ee Rover says as we hustle toward the parking lot. This is Big Boy’s turf. I won’t forget it.

The Oconalu ee Visitor Center in Great Smoky Mountains National Park is at 1194 Newfound Gap Rd. (U.S. Highway 441), near the town of Cherokee. For information on the park’s elk, see nps.gov/grsm/learn/ nature/elk.