Jess's journal

Great Smoky Mountains: fireflies that flash as one, and Dad's blue-breathing mountains

Early summer, eight years ago

Dad used to tell me the Smoky Mountains breathe. Not like we do — the trees do it, he said, exhaling something invisible into the warm air until the whole range turns soft and blue. I thought he was telling me a bedtime story. Then, eight years ago, I stood at a roadside pullout with my college roommate Priya, watched ridge after ridge dissolve into that blue haze, and understood: Dad had been telling me science all along, dressed up as a story.

A lottery win at Elkmont

We had timed the whole trip around a two-week window in early June, and we had done something I have never done before or since for a bug: entered a government lottery. The synchronous fireflies of the Smokies — Photinus carolinus, the only firefly in North America that flashes in unison — perform for only a couple of weeks each year near Elkmont, and the park rations the parking passes. We won ours on the second try, and I may have screamed in the dorm hallway.

The evening itself was part pilgrimage, part school trip. The flashing ones are all males, a ranger told us — showing off for the females watching from the leaf litter below, who answer with their own faint glimmer if they like what they see. Then the last of the light died, and the forest did the thing. Thousands of males pulsing together — flash, flash, flash — then six to eight seconds of near-total darkness, as if someone had thrown a switch. Then again. I stood there with my hand over my mouth like an idiot, and Priya just whispered, ‘they're agreeing.’

The famous synchronous display — males flashing together in the dark woods near Elkmont. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Bears at breakfast, elk at dusk

We were up before dawn the next morning for Cades Cove, the broad valley where the 11-mile loop road threads past pioneer cabins, churches and a working gristmill. The mist was still sitting in the fields when a car ahead of us stopped dead — and there, maybe a hundred yards off across the meadow, a black bear sow was turning over logs with two cubs tumbling after her. Nobody honked. Nobody got out. A ranger later told us the park holds somewhere between 1,500 and 1,900 bears, about two per square mile, and that morning I believed every one of them lived in that valley.

That evening we drove the North Carolina side to the Oconaluftee Visitor Center, because Dad had told me something else: that the elk had come home. Hunted out of these mountains more than 150 years ago, elk were brought back in 2001 — 25 animals at first — and by the time I visited, a few hundred were grazing the big field by the river at dusk. A bull lifted his head and bugled, and it went through my chest like a cello string. I am a zookeeper. I work with hoofstock every week. I still stood there grinning like a kid, because a homecoming is a homecoming.

Elk back home in the Oconaluftee valley at dusk — reintroduced in 2001 after more than 150 years away. (Photo: NPS Photo)

The top of the Smokies, and the smallest residents

On our last day we drove up to what was then called Clingmans Dome — 6,643 feet, the highest point in Tennessee — and puffed our way up the steep half-mile paved trail to the concrete observation tower. The view ran on forever: ridge, haze, ridge, haze. (The mountain has since been given back its Cherokee name, Kuwohi, meaning ‘mulberry place’ — I like knowing the old name is home again.)

But my favourite animal moment of the whole trip was the smallest. On a damp trail near a creek, Priya lifted a fallen leaf and there it was: a salamander the colour of a traffic cone, sitting on the moss like it owned the place. The Smokies hold around 30 salamander species — more than anywhere else — and the zookeeper in me, already forming back then, crouched there for ten full minutes just watching it breathe through its skin. Dad would have loved that. He always said the little ones are the whole story.

A red salamander on the moss — one of around 30 salamander species in the park. (Photo: NPS Photo)

Animals spotted

Black bear sow with two cubs (Cades Cove, at a proper distance); a herd of elk at Oconaluftee at dusk; one very orange salamander; thousands of synchronous fireflies; white-tailed deer; wild turkeys strutting the loop road like they owned it. We scanned the creeks for bigger salamanders and never found one — the forest keeps some secrets, and that is exactly as it should be.

↑ Back to the guide