The hike to the Alum Cave Bluff in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

These are some pictures that I took on my hike to the Alum Cave Bluff. The trail starts out by going along the river styx for a while through an area called Huggins Hell. It's a terribly close knit bunch of Mountain Laurel that extends for a considerable distance in all directions from the trail. After following the styx for a while, you come to a feature called the Arch Rock. This is a very interesting feature that is part of an Anakeesta formation which was made when the northern African tectonic plate slammed into what' now the North Americam plate to help form the super-continent Pangea about 300 million years ago. You can see what used to be layers of sedimentary sea floor bent over to nearly vertical. It's like a snap-shot of the birth of the mountain, with the lower layers being something like 800 million years old. There is a distinct line that runs along the formation that separates the ancient seafloor rock from what is continental rock, which is running at about 90 degrees from the seafloor rock. Fascinating when you stop to actually look at it. The trail then starts a steep ascent to the Alum cave Bluff, which is not a cave at all. It's another part of that same Anakeesta formation, and is very unique. The area that looks all dusty is a desert. The microbes living in that dust are only found in the most arrid regions of the earth. It hasn't rained on it for thousands of years. And yet. if take a few steps away from the bluff, I'm in a continental forest that gets plenty of rainfall. There's usually water running off of the top edge of the bluff, but none makes it inside. Weird. The trail then continues upward to the top of Mt. LeConte. The last picture is of the Alum Cave Bluff from about a mile further up the trail towards the top.

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