Dendromania at Pilot Mountain (Surry & Yadkin Counties, North Carolina)

One Sunday morning, a number of years ago—when my husband and I were still new to North Carolina and dedicated to seeing its natural wonders one by one—we ventured forth to visit the widely esteemed Pilot Mountain, about 25 miles northwest of Winston-Salem. Our mission was to see for ourselves this place of legend about which stories abound: Was it an extinct volcano? Mount Ararat, where Noah and his ark landed? Would we find evidence of Saura Indians, or the fearless Daniel Boone, 2,400 feet above sea level?

If nothing else, Mark and I hoped to walk around the Big Pinnacle, admiring its hard layers of quartzite—stone that resisted millennia of erosion while watching glaciers advance and retreat and continents collide and separate. Maybe we’d catch a glimpse of a common raven, that intelligent sooty bird known to nest on the Big Pinnacle, or spot a pileated woodpecker with its bright red crest gliding among chestnut oaks and Table Mountain pines.

With hopes high, we pulled into the parking lot, ready to embark on an eye-opening hike down the well-worn Jomeokee Trail.

Instead, we barely made it past the edge of the parking lot.

There is something you should know about me and my husband: we are both prone to recurrent bouts of “dendromania,” an obsession with tree identification that can spark trailside spats about scientific names and bud scales. This illness is considerably more severe than ordinary “dendrophilia,” whose symptoms include frequent commentary on the beauty of dried American beech leaves trembling in the winter wind and occasional illegal leaf collection.

At Pilot Mountain, that fine Sunday morning, our dendromania was triggered by a small tree with toothed, bristle-tipped leaves, roughly three to five inches long. The underside was velvety white; the upper surface a plain, medium green. What was this tree? My heart thumped. Could it be—perhaps—maybe—an American chestnut that had somehow escaped blight?

No, no, no, Mark said, shaking his head at the sad, deluded child before him (i.e., me). The leaves are too small. Darn—he was right. American chestnut leaves are usually longer than six inches. It was much more likely a chinkapin oak, he insisted, with those oddly elongated leaves young trees sometimes produce in full sun.

“No way,” I nearly shouted, earning a few uncomfortable stares from a family headed toward the main attraction. “Chinkapin oaks don’t have bristle tips!”

We ran around the parking lot and up the Jomeokee Trail a short way, moving from tree to tree, examining leaves like detectives. After a while, uncertain and nearly stumped, we almost gave up. We were visiting at a bad time of year, we rationalized—no flowers, no fruits. No one could identify this, I said contemptuously.

And then it struck me.

I looked at Mark and saw the same wide-eyed expression on his face—recognition landing at the same moment.

“Chinkapin,” we whispered, reverently.

It fit: the fuzzy undersides, the shorter leaf length, even the woolly twigs and bantam buds.

We had identified our tree. The Allegheny chinkapin (Castanea pumila) is a diminutive tree—sometimes a clumpy shrub—well known for its small, sweet, dark brown nuts favored by deer, chipmunks, squirrels, and wild turkeys. And although some individuals are affected by the blight that nearly wiped out its congener, the American chestnut, this species is largely resistant to that fungus.

We were ecstatic. Exhausted.

We hiked around the Big Pinnacle mostly to catch our breath. If ravens soared overhead, we missed them. If a piece of Daniel Boone’s buckskin or a Saura artifact lay tucked into a rocky crevice, we missed that too. We didn’t find Noah’s footprints or offer proper veneration to the ancient quartzite mountain—but we did take in an extraordinary view of our new home state. And, most importantly, together we had valiantly fought through another episode of dendromania.

References
Halls, L. K. 1977. Southern fruit producing wood plants used by wildlife. United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service General Technical Report SO-16, New Orleans.
Little, E. L. 1980. National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
Payne, J. A., G. P. Johnson, and G. Miller. 1993. Chinkapin: potential new crop for the South, p. 500–505. In J. Janick and J. E. Simon (eds.), New Crops. Wiley, New York.
Petrides, G. A. 1988. A Field Guide to Eastern Trees. Houghton Mifflin, New York.
Radford, A. E., H. E. Ahles, and C. R. Bell. 1983. Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.
Stewart, K. G., and Roberson, M. 2007. Exploring the Geology of the Carolinas. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

Dendromania at Pilot Mountain (Surry & Yadkin Counties, North Carolina)

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