Albright Grove

Old growth, just beyond the neon glitz

Welcome to the first “pin drop” edition of Southlands—a section in which I’ll be highlighting bits of the nonhuman world worth a visit. This week: one of the oldest patches of forest left on the East Coast.

The Great Smoky Mountains are accessible to nearly half the U.S. population with just one day in the car. No surprise, then, that this is the site of the country’s busiest national park.

But when I drove through the Smokies a few years ago—amid that first pandemic winter—I felt like it was not always the park that was reason for the trips.

I had come to Tennessee with a singular purpose: to see an old-growth forest. To reach the trail from the cabin where we were staying, Liz and I had to drive through Pigeon Forge. It’s an epicenter of road-trip Americana: a town of 6,000 with a two-mile strip of traffic lights and warehouses devoted to mini golf and go-kart racing and water slides and trampolines. (Dollywood lies just off this strip.) Given the ongoing pandemic, the number of cars i…