Abstract:
In this continuing series on the best walks to take in North Carolina, Setzer describes a walk among the towering trees of the mountains' primeval timberland, the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest. A two-mile, figure-eight loop takes walkers past some of the country's oldest and largest trees east of the Mississippi, 450-year-old poplars, some measuring twenty feet in circumference. The forest was dedicated in 1936 to the soldier-poet Joyce Kilmer, author of “Trees,†who was killed on July 30, 1918, near the close of World War I.