Alum Cave

Here's a trailhead with a fib in its name, and its lot is just ahead on your right. Alum Cave isn't a cave at all. It's a bluff eroded into a deep, cave-like overhang, at about four thousand nine hundred and seventy feet, on the flank of Mount LeConte. Walk under it on a dry day and your boots raise a dust that tastes bitter, like alum, from minerals weathering out of the rock. That taste gave the place its name. Want to see it? To the bluffs and back is four point six miles, about four hours, and the park rates the hike moderate to strenuous, with stairs, steep sections, rocks and roots. You'll walk through Arch Rock on the way. Past it the trail gets considerably steeper, so for a more moderate day, turn around at Arch Rock, two point eight miles round trip. In cold weather, watch for ice on the trail and falling icicles. This is a popular trail, and the park says to arrive early. The park has been lining these roadsides with boulders, split-rail fence and bollards to end unsafe roadside parking, so when the lot's full, it's full. Come with a parking tag displayed. There's a pit toilet here in season. After the hike, turn right out of the lot, toward Gatlinburg. That bitter dust was once a business. In eighteen thirty-seven, three Oconaluftee men, Ephraim Mingus, Robert Collins and George Hayes, filed a land grant that took in the bluffs. They formed an Epsom salts company and built log hoppers and water vats on the bluff itself. In the Civil War the company came back to life, digging saltpeter, the nitrate for gunpowder, for the Confederacy. After the war it never ran again. In eighteen seventy-two its remaining land sold for thirteen dollars in back taxes, and nothing of the mining remains on the trail today. There's a popular legend, too, that the Cherokee leader Yonaguska found the bluffs as a young man, tracking a bear. Nobody can prove it, so file it under legend.