Through the Mountains

In Through the Mountains: The French Broad River and Time, John E. Ross updates Wilma Dykeman’s seminal environmental history The French Broad, published in 1955. Since then, geologists have learned that the Great Smokies are not among the world’s oldest mountains, climatologists and archaeologists have traced the dramatic effects of global warming and cooling on flora and fauna nurturing human habitation in the watershed, and historians have deepened understanding of how enslaved peoples lived and worked on the lands along the French Broad.

The devastating passage of Hurricane Helene over the French Broad watershed in October 2024 was directly responsible for 125 deaths, thousands of injuries, and property damage worth billions of dollars, much of it in North Carolina. The village of Chimney Rock was all but washed away. Ugly, reddish-orange floodwaters lapped at second-story windows as they raged through downtown Marshall. In this new edition of Through the Mountains, Ross shows how floods and landslides from hurricanes in 1916, 2004, and 2024 remind us of the fragility of our beautiful Southern Appalachians and their bucolic river valleys.

Ross also documents how industrialists polluted the river, and how MountainTrue, RiverLink, and other environmental nonprofits are cleaning up the mess. Readers will find themselves yearning to visit secret places such as the mound just inside the Biltmore Estate, where Native Americans celebrated solstices fifteen hundred years ago, and the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute, where the US once eavesdropped on Russian satellites. Through it all, Ross shows us how the natural environment crafts the lands and waters we so enjoy.