Great Smoky Mountain National Park

On the southeastern border of Tennessee – half in Tennessee, half in North Carolina – is Smoky Mountain National Park. Great Smoky Mountain is by far the most visited park in the entire National Park system. While I know that nearby population has a lot to do with that, the numbers are still impressive. The 2^nd most visited park in the system is Grand Canyon National Park. Total visitors to the Grand Canyon were 4,756,771 in 2014. Making it look like a piker, Great Smoky Mountain National Park hosted 10,099,276 visitors in 2014, and trying to navigate the Park, we can easily confirm. On top of the sheer numbers, in Arizona you are pounding those 5 million visitors onto over 1.2 million acres – in Tennessee and North Carolina, you are pounding over double those visitors into about a third of the space – just over a half million acres!

The Great Smoky Mountain National Park is the largest remaining hardwood forest lying east of the Mississippi. As such, it does not have one or two truly unique geological features that attract visitors, just the immense forest, and of course the beautiful views of the iconic rolling mountain tops poking up through the nearly continuous mist for which the mountain chain gained its name. So mostly folk are here to commune with nature and a lot of that comes through hiking.

We decided most of our hiking would be what I think of as reward hiking. We read about three hikes well inside the park that lead to beautiful waterfalls. Today’s destination was to hit them both. Grotto Falls was about a 3 mile round trip hike and was billed as easy and mostly flat. Many hikes we find listed in National Park literature are, in our opinion, suggested to be an easier hike than we find them to be. We don’t know if that is done on purpose to encourage folk to give it a go, or if we are just weenies – we assume it is the later.

Regardless, Grotto Falls was a nice hike – at least 95% shaded from the sun by tall trees on both sides of the trail. However, those same trees also prevented much air movement along the trail, so it was pretty hot and sweaty. But the reward at the end made it well worth the investment.

Rainbow Falls took a bit more of an investment – nearly 6 miles round trip, and it was rated as strenuous. The good news is that this rating was accurate in our opinion – the hike was very similar in both terrain and elevation gain to the Grotto Falls hike, so something we could readily handle.

Again we were rewarded with a nice falls at the halfway point. However, the true rewards were all along the trail. The trail followed the mountain stream that created the falls themselves, and so all the way along the hike you heard the comforting sounds of cascading waters. Not only that, but about every 400 yards or so there was a clear view of the cascading waters, so in a way we were actually continuously seeing waterfalls as we hiked. It really was a very nice hike.

Laurel Falls had the most cars parked in the congested parking area, and all along the roadway in both directions. We assume that is because it the only waterfall in the park that has a paved trail to it and the trail is only about a mile and a half long. However, to claim this was paved is a bit generous – it may have been paved long ago, but its current state of disrepair makes navigating a stroller a challenge at best. We did see one young girl somehow get a powered wheel chair all the way to the falls, but I would have been scared to death to have tried to manage that – glad she made it!

There were people everywhere once we actually arrived at Laurel Falls. Of course, as I said before, there are people everywhere in Great Smoky Mountain National Park. But we learned at the falls that just the existence of a huge crowd would not guarantee that a local resident might not make an appearance.

Despite all the people, we were treated with a glimpse of this local resident. He suddenly appeared at the base of the falls, and then quickly climbed up the hillside and disappeared into the dense foliage. What more could you ask for? A nice hike with two rewards at the end – both a falls and a bear!

 

Talk to you soon!