On Top of Old Smoky

When we departed on this journey, one of the places we really wanted to see was the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP).  After spending more than a week in the park both on the Tennessee and North Carolina sides, I can tell you that it was well worth it.  We were able to experience the Smokies as they likely were many years ago.  Uncrowded, beautiful, and inspiring.

If you want to see this park, the time to go is in the spring, before Memorial Day.  You can beat the crowds, the weather is excellent (for the most part), and you can drive into just about any campground in the park without a reservation and set up in a great site.  A word of advice we received from several Smokies veterans, enter the park through Townsend, TN, not through Gatlinburg, TN or Cherokee, NC.  The latter two towns are the gateway towns and they are zoos, with every kitschy tourist trap known to tourist-kind.  This particularly applies to Gatlinburg.  I know a local fisherman who once spent 3 hours going 14 miles between Pigeon Forge, TN and Gatlinburg.  That is NOT the way to see the park.  

GSMNP is different than many of the parks I am used to from the midwest and the west.  It is a park with a long and storied human history, in addition to its natural beauty.  While the park was dedicated in 1930, the human history of the area runs from the Cherokee tribes, through white settlement in the 1800s, to the early 20th century, when the park areas were severely threatened by logging and other development.  What makes this park different, and exciting, is that the Park Service has preserved much of this history.  In addition to

 sweeping vistas, beautiful rivers, and quiet trails through the woods, you can see great old homesteads, farms, mills, and settlements that preserve the unique way of life of Appalachia. 

During our first few days on the Tennessee side, we explored Cades Cove, an old settlement area with a working grist mill, old churches, and other buildings.  We also spent some time hiking and fishing various branches of the Little River.  The weather was beautiful, but know this.  On the Townsend side, the wind blows EVERY NIGHT in the spring.  The dramatic temperature changes between the mountain tops and the valleys creates a wind tunnel that starts after dark and continues, relatively unabated, until the sun begins warming the earth the next day.  Make sure you batten down the hatches on your campsite, or stuff will fly away.

After leaving the Tennessee side, we drove over the spine of the park and descended down to the Smokemount campground, on the eastern side. Being that it was preseason, we were able to drive right in to a beautiful camp spot, set up our camp, and begin exploring.  Smokemount has two beautiful rivers running right through the campground and numerous hiking trails all around.  Maggie is getting to be quite the hiker.  Her record so far is over 2 miles and she loves to see birds, bugs, insects, and animals.

In the Smokies, she was enthralled with bears and salamanders.  We saw a couple of bears briefly from the car one day and she talked about them nonstop.  One day when we were at the visitor's center, she informed us that she needed to discuss the bears with a Park Ranger.  So, Lisa set her up on the counter and she proceeded to have a 10 minute discussion with the ranger about the bears in the park.  From that day on, she would pick up her bear information and say: "Dad, for more information about these bears" and would proceed to regale us with facts about the bears, some true and some not so true.  Often times theses information sessions would end with "the bears have big muscles and big claws and if you get to close to them or bother them they just might swat you with their paw or bite you."  She didn't find that reaction scary, just the right thing for a bear to do if one was crowding its space.

Salamanders are another famous animal of the Smokies.  Apparently, there are 27 different species of salamanders in the park and Maggie knows about 12 of them by name.  Her favorite name is the Hellbender Salamander, which she says with a throaty roar similar to Alan Roach introducing "YOUR Colorado RRRRRRRRockies."  These salamanders are apparently 12-25 inches long and pretty rare.  I'm sure if we had seen one, we would hear about it until 2010.  On a hike in the rain one day, we saw several red cheeked salamanders, who Maggie was certain were racing the snails nearby.

We were also fortunate to experience migrations of both the Zebra Swallowtail butterfly

(which is the state butterfly of Tennessee), and the Red Spotted Purple butterflies.  The butterflies were floating about in clouds, diving, fluttering, weaving, and dancing.  There numbers were so great, it made driving treacherous in the mornings as the warm asphalt attracted them at their peril.

On our last day in the Smokies, we got up at 5:15 and made our way to the top of Clingman's Dome, which is the highest point in the Smokies.  We were hoping to get a glimpse of the sun rising through the famous smoky mist.  While we were stymied by the remnants of a powerful spring storm, which dropped more than 2 inches of rain and nickel sized hail on us the night before, we did experience an incredible morning.  We hiked through the clouds and mist, which sped around and through us on the cold, gusting wind.  We saw the shadowed figures of pines and hemlocks, emerging from the mist.  It was a memorable morning, which will always remain despite our not achieving our goal of seeing the sunrise, which maybe wasn't the goal anyway.

As we left the Smokies my lasting memories will be these.  First, by all accounts, this land was being destroyed by industry in the early 20th century when concerned citizens and their government stepped up and saved it.  It has recovered admirably into a truly spectacular and relatively wild place in the midst of a great

collection of nearby humanity.  While it still faces threats today, most notably from acid rain and from the introduction of exotic invasive insects that are attacking the pine and hemlock trees in the park, with our care it will remain a preserve for generations to come.  While that may sound corny, or reek of cliche, it is true.  It is true and it matters.  Just watch a young child play in those surroundings and you will believe.

Second, after seeing the beautiful old buildings, farms, and fields of the early settlers I was struck by the ingenuity, strength, and simplicity of their lives.  I am not trying to romanticize it, as I am sure it was often a hard life, but the simple beauty of the buildings, the well designed and built sheds, barns, and corrals, and the orderly layouts of the fields and gardens is inspiring.  These people did so much with so much less.  They used everything and everything had a purpose.  They grew gords in their gardens and then dried them, hollowed them, and turned them into birdhouses for sparrows, who then ate the insects trying to feed on those same gardens.  Necessity is the mother of invention, of that there is no doubt.  I wonder if those lessons are being lost on us in a time, even given the current blip on the economic continuum, when there isn't always all that much necessity around.