Cohutta: a wilderness-to-order.

Harriett Digioia is a Forestry Technician and William Black is the Ranger on the Cohutta Ranger District, Chattahoochee National Forest. Howard Burnett, now Special Projects Forester at AFA, spent four years as Cohutta District Ranger back in his salad days.

To experience the Cohutta Wilderness derness Area is to feel solitude wash over you, to hear' the silence as civilization fades. behind you, to sense freedom in an unfettered waterfall, to comprehend the natural interplay of many species of fauna and flora, and to be one with your surroundings.

But the Cohutta is different from other Wildernesses. There are no big, old trees to be seen. Only in your mind's eye can you see yellow poplars four feet or more in diameter, white pines over 100 feet tall, huge hemlocks, and wildlife the way it was when Native Americans relied on it as a major food source. In the Cohutta, those trappings of traditional wilderness are only imagined scenes from days long past-or days yet to come. For the Cohutta is a wilderness evolving.

The Cohutta Wilderness Area is some 37,000 acres straddling the Georgia-Tennessee border. It is a mountain area of steep slopes and narrow valleys, and is one of the largest Forest Service Wildernesses in the East. It's a beautiful place of peaceful vistas, beckoning trails, and the serenity that the Wilderness Act of 1964 intended to preserve for the benefit of man and his soul.

Finding such a large tract of land in the National Forests of the East-with no roads, no houses or other buildings, no timber cutting, no other traces of man-seemed impossible. In fact, it was impossible. But thanks to nature's ability to renew herself, the Cohutta Mountains could be made to fill the bill. This area illustrates the resiliency of the eastern hardwood forests. Early in this century, the Cohutta area was about three-fourths clearcut, then burned. But today it is a regenerated jewel-a once-domesticated forest that is wild again.

Seventy years ago, the Cohutta Mountains were alive with activity. Timber crews, trains and their crews, horses, houses, stores, switches, boarding houses, lumber camps, barns, blacksmiths-all were there. And maybe a few stills, too.

Although some cutting had been done previously, intensive timber cutting started in 1919. In the 1920s and 1930s, a standard-guage railroad was built up the Conasauga and Jack's Rivers-the main drainages of what is today's Wilderness Area. Horsedrawn scrapes (metal bucketlike devices used to level the earth) and men wielding pick axes created the railroad grades, and they were replaced in 1925 by a steam shovel.

Many trestles were built to cross the rivers. One was reported to have been 120 feet high, another to have cost a half million dollars to build. Sawyers sawed, filers filed, blacksmiths shod horses and oxen, engineers ran their trains, and firemen shoveled coal. It was a busy time ! Problems were many. Trestles washed away in flash floods that came roaring down these steep gorges from the denuded hills. Trains were derailed. Engines or cars broke through trestles. Cables snapped and winches malfunctioned. And fires burned unchecked, started by human accident or deliberately set.

The Great Depression interrupted the logging, and finally, in 1937, the railroad rails were taken up. Employment for about 450 men in the woods came to an end. Much of today's Wilderness was purchased in the 1930S by the Forest Service for as little as $2 or $3 per acre.

Silence came to the Cohutta Mountains, and forest regeneration got under way. Forest Service fire protection allowed the new growth to advance.

A setback occurred in the 1957 to 1963 period when elm spanworms invaded the area, killing many oaks, especially on the high ridges. Some salvage was carried out, where existing roads permitted. Generally, though, the forest quietly continued maturing. Foresters and forest users were sometimes rewarded with a fleeting glimpse of a bobcat, a new fawn hidden in the ferns, the flash of a feeding rainbow trout, the dramatic "broken-wing" act of a whippoorwill protecting her off spring, or the sound of a wild turkey gobbler in the spring.

In 1975, Congress brought the Cohutta Wilderness Area into being. In time, cabins were removed and roads obliterated or turned into hiking trails. The scars of man are still disappearing, and the area today is approaching the way it was when only Native Americans used the area.

Gone is Georgia State Highway 2, a gravel and dirt road that once traversed the area. Gone are the last of the hunting cabins. Gone are the few hardscrabble farm fields that once existed in the coves.

Few of the many visitors who enjoy the Cohutta Wilderness each year realize its history of logging. They do not see the Wilderness as a second-growth forest, or appreciate nature's healing process. Most simply enjoy the wildness.

Reminders of bygone days can still be seen by those who can read them. Ripples in some trails reveal the locations of long-rotted railroad ties. An actual tie itself can occasionally be found. Could that ring of rocks once have supported a moonshine still? Once in a while visitors find spikes, pieces of rail or cable, cinders, old building foundations, horse shoes, or even the unique half-moon shoe of the cloven-footed ox.

It is hard to comprehend that this area, now a serene green forest, was so heavily logged. But this is wilderness, southeastern style. The forest is becoming what we have decided we want to value. A wilderness- to-order is evolving from within the forest's great capacity to regenerate itself and erase man's intrusions.

Someday the great yellow poplars, hemlocks, oaks, and white pines will once again exist for all who visit the Cohutta Wilderness. AF