Great Smoky Mountains

After several great days in Asheville, it was time to visit my first national park. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) is 814 square miles in the southern tip of the Appalachians along the border between Tennessee and North Carolina. While many of the national parks are known for their iconic geographic features, the GSMNP has a biodiversity of global significance. There is no place of the same size on the planet outside the tropics that can match the Great Smoky Mountains for its biodiversity. In fact, the park was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site for is vast biodiversity.

The park is beautiful with mountains covered in lush green foliage, over 2,900 miles of streams, an abundant wildlife, and many historical structures. Its natural beauty and close proximity to major population areas of the South bring over 12 million visitors a year to Great Smoky Mountains National Park making it the most visited of all the national parks in the country. Visiting during the spring is a great way to avoid the large crowds of summer and fall. After many raised concerns about the over logging of the area, FDR declared the Great Smoky Mountains a national park in 1934. The CCC immediately set work building the infrastructure of the park we know today: hundreds of miles of highway, bridges, picnic grounds, and campgrounds.

I entered the park through Townsend, TN and stayed in the historic valley of Cades Cove. Before the Civil War, the valley of Cades Cove was a thriving community of more than 680 people. The community was really torn apart by the war with residents supporting different sides of the conflict and constant harassment by Confederate raiders. Today an eleven-mile auto road loops its way through the Cades Cove valley offering opportunities to pause and visit the numerous homesteads, churches, and cemeteries. About halfway through the auto loop is the Cades Cove Visitor Center which has many historical buildings including a grist mill with a really cool water flume diverting waterpower to the mill. While I was at visitor center, I watched two coyotes hunting some wild turkeys in the fields adjacent to the parking lot: they went home hungry.

Many animals call the Great Smoky Mountains home including 31 species of salamanders and over 250 species of birds. The habitat is ideal for many mammal species as well most notably deer, coyotes, elk, foxes, and of course the iconic North American black bear. The park service has food storage notices everywhere regarding bears, but I was skeptical that I would actually see a bear in such a heavily visited park. On my first venture out to explore the park in Cades Cove I saw not one, not two but five black bears! The first four were a mom and three cubs in a meadow near the tree line. I’ve always had luck finding bears in openings near tree lines so that is my hot tip of the day. The final bear was a healthy juvenile that was perched on a rock in a stream just adjacent to the road. I snapped the picture below through Rosie’s passenger window, he was that close!

I think the one thing that makes Great Smoky Mountains National Park so popular is how accessible it is by vehicle. Unlike most national parks that I’ve visited, GSMNP does not have entrance gates to pay an admission fee. Major points of entry to the park are cities with well developed highways flowing right into the park. Whether you enter from Tennessee through Townsend or Gatlinburg or perhaps from Cherokee in North Carolina, you can drive through the entire park and never pay a fee. The only caveat to that is that the national park does require a parking pass if you park for longer than 15 minutes. I found all the roads very easy to navigate even in a motorhome with numerous pullouts to stop and take in the scenery. There were a few occasions when I did find it difficult to find parking for an oversized vehicle like at Laurel Falls, but that was the exception and not the norm.

The Appalachian Club was chartered in the early 1900s by some of the most prominent men in Knoxville. These men were soon leasing land from the logging companies and between 1910 and 1935 as many as 80 cabins were built in a community they called Daisy Town. Families would arrive by lumber company trains often arriving with trunks and servants to spend the entire summer. Daisy Town was the birth of tourism in the Great Smoky Mountains. It was not long until these influential men were lobbying Washington to help preserve the Great Smoky Mountains with a national park designation. Today the national park service and dedicated volunteers have restored several of the cabins in Daisy Town for visitors to tour.

Highway US-441 heads southeast out of Gatlinburg, TN and crosses over the Smoky Mountains on its way to Cherokee, NC. The highest point of this crossing is known as Newfound Gap (“gap” is the term locals use to refer to a mountain pass). At 5,046 feet, the drive up to Newfound Gap offers some of the most breathtaking views of the Great Smoky Mountains. I found the drive, even in a motorhome, to be quite easy and nothing like the switchback mountain roads of the West. The Appalachian Trail also intersects Newfound Gap and the parking lot at the summit is frequented by hikers who are heading out on the trail: only 1,900 miles to Maine!

I stayed five nights in the Cades Cove Campground which has about 160 sites all under the canopy of beautiful hardwoods and evergreens. The campsites are well spaced out and all the RV sites have a concrete pad which is great. There is no cellular service in Cades Cove and unfortunately the beautiful canopy prevented use of Starlink so I missed several nights of the Stanley Cup playoffs. I found the campground to be very peaceful and I met some very nice fellow campers: a couple from New Zealand and another couple in the site next to me from North Carolina. For the most part, the weather in the Great Smoky Mountains was very nice with mid-60 days and cool nights. There were a few mornings with rain, but that didn’t hamper the fun exploring the park. I had a wonderful time in the Great Smoky Mountains, but it is on to the next destination: Pigeon Forge, Tennessee home of Dollywood!