Bald Knob

nce you reach the top you may catch a glimpse through the trees of Cheat River winding its way along its lofty course. There, too, you will travel a portion of that huge area where the rough loggers toiled for fifty-eight years to strip away the timber. From Bald Knob you will gaze out upon a scene so large and beautiful that you will surely feel it could only be created by God, the master craftsman of all.

W. E. Blackhurst / Your Train Ride Through History / 1968

Bald Knob, the upper terminus of the Cass Scenic Railroad, is a strange, although not uncommon, name to be applied to a peak in the mid-Appalachians. Further south, in the Great Smokies, bald areas on or near mountain tops are common and have attracted the attention of ecologists for more than 100 years. But in the latitude of West Virginia, the original forest covered practically everything except wet, glady areas such as that found in Canaan Valley and Cranberry Glades.

Small wonder that first settlers of Arbovale in 1770 gazed westward to the forbidding summit of Cheat Mountain and applied the name Bald Knob to its highest peak.

On the side of Bald Knob, a short distance from the top, a grassy area of considerable extent glistened in the morning sun. Above it, the dark green of red spruce reached to the horizon and beyond; below it giant hardwoods clung to the steep mountainside. The bald spot seemed to be separating two antagonists struggling for control of the slope. There it stayed, serene and mysterious, through the next 150 years until cut by lumbermen, and fire swept through. The bald slowly became invaded by bracken ferns and by weedy species until today it is scarcely discernible. Yet the name and the enigma of the origin and persistence of the bald remains.

Roy B. Clarkson / "Flower Garden of the East" / from Natural History of the Cass Scenic Railroad - 1967

photo Bald Knob, WV / Jun 2013 / RWH

fter skirting the head of Big Run just below ridgeline, the final ascent to Bald Knob involves the geared power ascending a 9% grade (built in 1967 as 11% and later reduced). Reaching rail's end you have climbed 2,257 feet in 11 miles to an elevation of 4,702 feet. En route to the highest point reached east of the Rockies by a non-cog railroad, you pass through three different kinds of forests: along the Greenbrier and lower Leatherbark the eastern deciduous; then a band of northern hardwoods; and finally, northern evergreens — slowly maturing third-growth red spruce in the elevations above 4,000 feet. The last few miles to rail's end are aptly called a "piece of Canada gone astray."

Philip V. Bagdon / Essential Cass: An Overview of Cass Scenic Railroad State Park

Cheat [Mountain] still stands as before in all its awesome bulk. Civilization has made no inroads into it. It is wilderness now as it was then. The black bear still lumbers through its woods. The wildcat still hunts the snowshoe hare and the big owls still glide on silent wings to and fro. Cheat River still chuckles over the stones and still holds the brightly colored trout. New spruce forests blanket the land and furnish a home for deer, turkeys and other creatures of the wild.

Cheat, rising 4,500 feet and more, is still as one logger said, "a piece of Canada gone astray." The high forest assumes all the characteristics of the far northern woods. Here thrive the spruce, beech, white birch, and other trees of the northland. Down under the trees the forest floor is true Canadian. The mosses, weeds, flowers and shrubs are those of the colder land. Here the visitor can find himself in a new world of nature with a two-hour climb. By that climb he may leave the central hardwood region with its oak, maple, poplar, walnut and other deciduous trees and find himself treading the deep moss floor of the big evergreen northern forest. The change is so complete as to give one the feeling of being in another world.

Warren E. Blackhurst - "Until the Hills" - from Natural History of the Cass Scenic Railroad - 1967