Smoky Mountains in One Day

On Tuesday we drove into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  I'd been there the first time a couple years ago with my folks.  I really enjoy national parks and the Smokies are truly beautiful.  When I visited before we barely saw anything in North Carolina, so this time I was determined to explore the North Carolina side of the park.  The first thing we did in the morning was to drive past everything on the Tennessee side.

We drove on Newfound Gap Road (the only road to cross the park) until we came to the Mingus Mill.  The mill wasn't operating.  Apparently it broke down over a year ago.  Just the week before we arrived they'd turned everything back on (sending the water flowing to the mill, but the trough sprang another leak).  They were hoping that it would be truly fixed soon, but they were making no promises.

After the mill we headed on to the Oconaluftee Visitor's Center.  I wanted to be sure to get the stamp from there in my passport.  The passport books are great because you can get it stamped at National Parks, Monuments, and Historic Sites.  I now have all six stamps from the Smokies in my passport book (well I just read there is a visitor's center in Townsend that I missed).  We saw more information about how the CCC contributed to the creation of the park as well as the origins of the park itself.  Behind the Visitor's Center is a Mountain Farm Museum--which consists of relocated buildings from elsewhere in the park illustrating what a farm may have looked like at the time the park was formed.

After exploring these areas fully we drove back to Clingman's Dome.  There is an observation tower on top of this, the highest point in the park.  It is a hike of about half a mile, all steeply uphill.  The view is beautiful, but apparently not as nice as it used to be.  Many of the evergreens are dying due to a beetle introduced into the park years ago.  We actually also saw snow on the drive up and when we got to the tower itself we saw a good bit of snow right at the base of the ramp.  After enjoying the view, and taking some pictures (including several with my camera since I had cell signal and knew that they would be geo-tagged), we headed back down. Our next stop was only a short distance later once we got back to the main road.  Newfound Gap is the pass that the road goes through when going over the mountains that run through the middle of the park.  It was here that FDR had the ceremony to inaugurate the park.  You can also see the border between Tennessee and North Carolina, so I had both Amy and I pose for pictures at the sign:

Next we drove to Cade's Cove.  I'd honestly forgotten how far of a drive it was.  (You can see the park map at this link.)  It is a beautiful loop drive past several old houses and churches that were abandoned after the park was formed in the 30s.  Because of the time we only stopped at a couple places--one of the churches and then at the Visitor's Center and Cable's Mill.  Because it was late we got to see several animals.  Deer were visible feeding at several spots along the road and we even saw wild turkeys.  Then as we went to leave the park we saw many cars and people at the side of the road.  They were out of their cars looking at a bear and cubs up on the slope.  We didn't get out of the car, figuring it wasn't that smart to get too close to bears.  The light wasn't great either, so I didn't figure that zoomed in pictures would turn out too well.

All of the pictures I've posted are in an album here (along with others):


~Matt