Among the Amphibolites | Elk Knob State Park

Protecting Elk Knob and other Amphibolites

Amphibolite sounds like a word from the Bible, or like an ancient word you should have always known. Until the year 2021 I couldn’t recall hearing it talked about even once. I learned that I’d actually hiked in the Amphibolite Mountains.

Just to dispel the myth (that never existed) right away, this unique mountain range is so named not from the Bible but because they’re composed of Amphibolite.

It’s a metamorphic rock containing large quantities of the mineral amphibole–a heavy, dark rock composed of various arrangements of sodium, calcium, iron and magnesium. Plants eat this stuff up (as it erodes over millions of years).

Elk Knob was almost turned into a high-end real estate development. Then the Nature Conservancy purchased the land and later deeded it to the state of North Carolina. Elk Knob State Park then became North Carolina’s newest state park.

There are at least seven prominences worth your attention in the Amphibolite Mountains. Here’s a list:

• Three Top Mountain
• Elk Knob
• Snake Mountain
• Bluff Mountain
• Paddy Mountain
• Phoenix Mountain
• Mount Jefferson

I’ve hiked Elk Knob a dozen times without realizing this, and learning it made me feel like a missing piece of me had been recovered.

All this time I could have written something like “Daniel Boone traipsed out of the Amphibolites.”

Which is true, of course.

Cratis Williams at Appalachian State University says there was an Old Buffalo Trail that Daniel Boone followed like so many hunters and pioneers before him “from the Yadkin River Valley through Deep Gap and into the mountains.”

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Meat Camp Road, which is what takes travelers past Elk Knob State Park and descends into Trade, Tennessee, was on the route of the Old Buffalo Trail. It was where hunters got their buffalo, elk, and other game meat processed for carrying home.

Trade, Tennessee also got its name from the role that community played in the Buffalo business. It was a trading post for hunters and other pioneers.

It’s Why Elk Knob Is Different

If you’ve hiked Elk Knob or others, you might have noticed a number of differences between this and other North Carolina trails. The starkest is this: zero rhododendron.

Other areas of the region have loads and loads of rhododendron groves that just love the acidic soil

The Ph balance of these Amphibolite hills provides hikers, bird watchers and plant enthusiasts with something different–because plants love the soil. Eroding Amphibolite produces a nutrient-rich, NON-acidic soil that’s apparently repulsive to rhododendron. That same soil, though, is obviously delicious to other trees, flowers and grasses. And of course the birds love a good tree to perch and nest in, so that explains the variety of bird you can see up on Elk Knob.

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As far as plant biodiversity, the orange Flame Azaleas and on occasion the Gray’s Lilly are visible on the mountain. App State Biology Professor Matt Estep says the mountain top isolation and nutrient-rich soil of the Amphibolites facilitates some species seen rarely anywhere else in the High Country.

Some of the most interesting plants (because of rarity elsewhere) include “Trailing Wolf’s Bane, Aconitum reclinatum Gray, Heller’s Blazing Star and Gray’s Lily, Lilium grayii Watson, and the only documentation of Campanula rotundifolia L. in North Carolina…within the Amphibolite Mountains Macrosite (AMM).”

The Audubon Society wrote a spectacular piece about the equally impressive bird (and other animal) species:

“These diverse habitats are home to mammals such as black bear and bobcat and rare creatures such as the bog turtle and northern flying squirrel,” cites the Audubon Society. On Elk Knob you might notice among the “dwarf beech trees” the “Chestnut-sided Warbler, Scarlet Tanager, and Black-throated Blue and Canada warblers. The drumming of Ruffed Grouse often resonates in the woods.”

The Amphibolite Mountains inspire poetry.