Graveyard Fields

Here in western North Carolina, more than 150,000 acres of roadless land are protected in the Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests.

That includes forests around beloved places like Graveyard Fields, Craggy Mountain, and South Mills River, just to name a few.

Mountain True is urging people who oppose the repeal to take action and submit public comments on the proposal before the comment period closes on September 21, 2026.

You can learn more about that in our show notes or at mountaintrue.org. And I can attest that it only takes a few minutes of your time.

Absolutely.

I mean, some of these places are, are some of the most well-known and beloved places on our whole landscape.

You mentioned like Sam Knob, Black Balsam, uh, Graveyard Fields.

These are all, uh, roadless areas.

Yeah.

And there's this beautiful waterfall at Graveyard Fields, which is a horrible name for a wa- waterfall-

[laughs]

...

There was another bad one in nineteen forty-two that went back through and finished most of what the first had missed.

Just south of there, outside the wilderness proper, there's a spot they call Graveyard Fields, and it's not called that because anybody's buried in it.

The story goes that a great windstorm laid the old spruce forest over, or maybe it was just the logging, depending on which old-timer you asked, and the stumps that got left behind sat out on that flat for years, growing moss until the whole place looked like acres and acres of sunken gravestones.

Then the fires came through and burned the gravestones too.