THE MAN WHOSE JOB IT IS to enforce safe distance between humans and elk offers advice: The best way for me and my dog to avoid the 1,000-pound bull elk that reclines peacefully in trailside brush some 100 feet ahead is to detour to the riverbank on my right, hug the river as we creep upstream, then cut through the brush beyond the elk and back to the trail.
“Or,” says Ted Rowe, “we could just hotfoot it right past him.”
“Let’s do that.”
I DID NOT EXPECT ELK. My goal here, near the Oconaluftee Visitor Center in the southeastern corner of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is to see how people, businesses, and tourist destinations in the North Carolina mountains cope as we approach six months of life under COVID. I discover a decidedly mixed bag (see companion story). But the bag happens to contain a herd of elk and a nearly 20-year conservation project.
Until Europeans showed up, more than 10 million elk ranged through most of North America. But overhunting east of the Mississippi River killed millions—to the point, around 1900, at which conservationists feared their extinction; the last known elk in North Carolina until recently was shot and killed in the late 18th century. The current elk population is roughly one million, most of them in or near the Rockies. In 2001, the Montana-based Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation contacted the National Park Service with a proposal: Can we reintroduce elk to the Smokies?
This story is from the November 2020 edition of Charlotte Magazine.
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This story is from the November 2020 edition of Charlotte Magazine.
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