Take a drive along the backroads of western North Carolina, especially through Ashe, Watauga, and Avery Counties, and you will find the birthplace of all those Christmas trees that show up in roadside stands the week before Thanksgiving. To many people, the neat rows of carefully pruned Fraser fir, Abies fraseri, trees create a picturesque scene, but for raw, natural scenic beauty, you need to climb a little higher in the mountains and visit the true origin of all those trees. The natural Fraser fir forests that blanket our highest peaks are cool, dark, hauntingly beautiful places.
Or, at least, they used to be.
Only a few decades ago, the Fraser fir natural community—generally found above 6,000 feet in elevation—was a seemingly healthy ecosystem, with a tight canopy of fir trees, an understory of American ash and a few shrubs, and a thick ground cover of moss, ferns, and herbs. Today, that ecosystem no longer exists. In its place is a jungle of skeletons, with dead gray boles lying scattered about like so many pick-up sticks. Many of the dead trees still stand as sentinels to something gone wrong. The resultant opened canopy has completely altered the ecosystem, allowing plants that don't belong here to become established. Where you once needed snowshoes to walk over the luxuriant moss without sinking in, today you need leather chaps to wade through the thick blackberries and other weeds....
...In the mid 1980s, Dr. Robert Bruck of N.C. State University studied the forests on Mount Mitchell, and although he suspected that air pollution was a contributing factor to the forest decline, he had no hard evidence. But one day in 1987 "serendipity struck" as Bruck recalls. "We were up on the mountain on a beautiful June day taking pictures of bud break. That night, a heavy cloud came in and sat on top of the mountain. It stayed there for the next 15 hours, through the next day...We sampled continuously and found the cloud had an average pH of 2.71. That's 940 times more acidic than clear rain water-almost the acidity of vinegar. The next afternoon, the sun came out again, and these young needles all over the mountain started to turn brown."
Dr. Bruck collected bushel baskets of the needles and took them to the EPA lab in Raleigh, where tests showed the brown areas had 17 times more sulfur than the healthy areas. The sulfur was in the form of sulfate, for which there are only two airborne sources: volcanic eruption and the combustion of fossil fuels. "And there weren't any volcanoes erupting", Bruck recollects....
