The Smoky Mountain stop was our first “real adventure”. It followed two weeks in Myrtle Beach that was more like a vacation. The RV park we stayed at was only for RVs – no bathrooms, waterslides, mini-golf and the like. After the site compression, volume of golf carts, and sheer magnitude of human activity in Ocean Lakes in Myrtle Beach it was a welcome respite.
Smoky Mountain National Park is allegedly the most visited national park in the US. While it was pretty busy, it wasn’t too bad as this was clearly the off-season – the leaves weren’t yet on the trees. The Park is beautiful, huge, and chocked full of things to see. It has a lot of trails of varying difficulties. We did a lot of hiking – roughly 10 trails of easy to moderate difficulty. The “moderates” were still tough – usually a couple of miles uphill (and back downhill) with lots of roots and rocks.
On our 2nd day, a huge and extended storm came through and dumped a lot of water on the area. There was a small babbling creek behind our RV that made the campsite quite scenic. After the storm, the creek flooded and contined to rise over the next 24 hours. Although we weren’t in any danger, it was a bit uncomfortable as we didn’t know if it would flood our site. The campground owner assured us that “if it went that high, we’d have other bigger problems”. Yeah…. that really relieved the tension. Most of the park hiking trails follow the drainage creeks up the mountain sides, and nearly every creek turned into raging mini-rivers. This was cool from the scenery perspective, but a bit terrifying from the crossing-the-footbridges-on-hiking-trails point of view. If you happened to fall off, you would likely perish as force of the water over the rocks in the creeks was overwhelming. Think of it as “raising the stakes” of hiking.
In addition to the hiking trails, we went to the key park sights including Cades Cove and Clingmans Dome. Cades Cove was great – we did a full day there – we stopped at all the buildings, saw a lot of wildlife (including a few bears), and even did a couple of short hikes.
We stayed in Pigeon Forge on the northwest side of the park. The whole area is a combination of mountains, meadows, and stunning vistas. However, it also includes Dollywood and a large contingent of commercial tourist enterprises – kind of a Orlando or supersized Myrtle Beach. It’s not our thing, so we didn’t spend any time there. We did spend some time in Gatlinburg, which is also very “touristy”. But it’s also kind of cool – it reminded me of some of the little mountain towns in the Rocky Mountains. There were some good restaurants and shops. A year ago, the National Park had major forest fires. As we toured the park, there were many areas with extensive charred trees and underbrush. Some trails hadn’t reopened due to fire damage. Significant parts of Gatlinburg also were damaged by the fires and there was a lot of demolition and rebuilding going on as we drove through the town.
On a day that it rained the entire day we went to the Great Smoky Mountain Arts and Crafts Community. This was not your “street vendors at the mall” affair. It’s a 8 mile loop road that has more than 100 craftsman and artist businesses making and selling everything from oil paintings to hand-carved walking sticks. We made several stops and ended up in lengthy conversations with a few of the locals. One woman, in her mid-70s, lived in the park with her family until they were thrown out when the park was formed. She told us quite a bit of unpublished history of the park and described many of the trails we hadn’t yet tried. She had hiked every one of the 80+ trails and still hikes some of the most difficult. This conversation, like others, is one of the reasons we’re living this lifestyle.
It’s hard not to say more good things about Smoky Mountain NP. Go there if you can.