Eastern Canada & USA - 2001

July - August 2001
A camping trip to the Canadian Maritimes and Eastern United States.

Saturday, August 18, 2001 - In 1835, Dr. Elisha Mitchell, a science professor at the University of North Carolina, made an excursion to the area to measure the mountain elevations. Through the use of barometric pressure readings and mathematical formulas, Mitchell figured the highest elevation of the range to be 6,476 feet. Subsequent visits to the Black Mountains in 1838 and 1844 led Dr. Mitchell to calculate the height of the peak at 6,672 feet—amazingly, only a mere 12 feet in error of modern calculations. In the 1850s, controversy arose about which peak in the range was the highest. Thomas Clingman, a former student of Dr. Mitchell's, and a United States senator, set the elevation of the highest peak at 6,941 feet and insisted that Mitchell had measured another peak. In 1857, Dr. Mitchell returned to the Black Mountains to verify his measurements and to support his claim. While hiking across the mountain, he fell from a cliff above a 40-foot waterfall. Knocked unconscious by the fall, Dr. Mitchell drowned in the water below. In honor of his work, the highest peak in the Black Mountain range was given his name in 1858. Though originally buried in Asheville, Mitchell's body was fittingly reburied several years later atop Mount Mitchell.