Bradley Fork Trail Hike 1/5/22

Some 20 hikers well provisioned with winter gear, poles, packs and lunch took on the brisk 37 degree January air alongside the Bradley Fork Trail. It eventually warmed into the upper 40's as the sun's winter heat began to penetrate the valley. The car pools left Poteet Park and regathered at Smokemont campground (GSMNP) for the trailhead around 2200 feet altitude. The goal was simply to get some distance up the trail, with some going the 5.1 mile distance to lunch at Cabin Flats (around 3,000 feet) and others lunching and heading back at earlier points to create 4 to 6 mile events. (Click to enlarge images.)

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Throughout this hike the Bradley Fork and other streams are almost always in full view and hearing. They were in their energetic glory this day with the snowmelt yielding heavy cascades of water spilling over nature's randomly fashioned rock tumbles, making an endless variety of creative falls and pools that beg for photographing.

Cabin flats (GSMNP camp site 49)

Over 1500 flowering plants live in the national park, but the leaves of some 99% of them disappear when freezing temperature come to play. However, in spite of the snow that lay all around, numerous plants have adapted to winter with sufficient antifreeze proteins in their systems to allow leaves to take advantage of the absence of tree canopy. They convert sunlight into energy for making plant parts with their chlorophyll through the coldest parts of winter. Though just a few of their photos are below, Scott and Bob identified the following 20 "evergreen" ground plants whose leaves have found ways to stay active: seersucker sedge, Fraser sedge, white avens, fancy fern, southern grape fern, Christmas fern; partridge berry, toothwort, Adam and Eve orchid, rattlesnake plantain, hepatica, pipsissewa, foam flower, galax, cinquefoil, sweet sicily, Ontario rhodobryum moss, snakewort (a kind of liverwort), rhododendron and dog hobble. It is perhaps useful to note that though we did not see club moss, crane fly orchid, tree skirt moss, brocade moss, tree moss or star moss, these too are evergreen in our mountains.

Fraser sedge

white avens, in winter rosette form

Hepatica

Foam flower

cinquefoil?

Ontario rhodobryum moss

snakewort (a kind of liverwort) 

Saturday, January 8

Two of us slow walked the first mile of the trail a few days later and IDed a few more plants. It was a bit colder on the second trip, with some leaves in the seeps embalmed in ice.

A couple of examples are below. We caught some of the plants missed earlier and added a few more: old man’s beard moss, carpet pelt lichen, club moss, hairy wood rush, ebony spleenwort, ginger, Robin's plantain, stone crop sedum, crane fly orchid, broadleaf tooth wart, running cedar, wild strawberry and clover.

Appalachian Rock Cap Fern (Polypodium appalachianum)

 (top, then underside view)

It was the kind of day that makes us all look forward to next Wednesday and the next hike.

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