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Pigeon Forge, TN → Great Smoky Mountains NP → Pigeon Forge, TN 136.0 mi (218.9 km) |
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Let’s beat the rush, everyone!
This morning, we were up and at ’em super early to maximize our chances of having a nice time in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Facing us were three challenges: 1) it was Labor Day Weekend, 2) this is the most visited of all national parks in the whole system, and 3) a landslide back on August 1st has cut off half of the park, meaning all these long weekend travelers would be vying for the spots we were wanting too! After a nice little breakfast, we were on our way in by 9:00!
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Given all those obstacles, and since Tyler and Marie had a wedding to attend at 4:00, we were going to see as much of this UNESCO World Heritage Site as we could! And boy, was it a mess from the start! The parking lot was full, the overflow lot was full, and there were already cars lined up along the narrow park road for at least half a mile! After circling once, we settled on a spot in front of a long line of cars and hoped no one would come a-ticketin’ while we were exploring the Rainbow Falls Trail!
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Rain was in the forecast today, so we kept our eyes on the sky, even though the clouds made the hiking conditions just perfect! We had 2.7 miles from parking lot to waterfall, and about half of it was gently meandering trail along Le Conte Creek. The other half had switchbacks with the sparsest views of the park’s namesake mountains, making up a part of the Blue Ridge part of the Appalachian Mountains! Given the high traffic of this area, there were only a few other groups of hikers in passing on the way up, and very little trash. However, someone had taken a poop right off the side of the trail and just left it there with a pile of toilet paper! Having all three of us spent a week leaving no trace in Katmai, this was downright appalling!
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Apart from that yucky bit, the forest was lush and healthy. After the last few adventures in West Coast berry country, the plant life here really felt like it was from a whole other world! Take these cute little partridge berries (Mitchella repens), for instance. The berries are technically edible, but they don’t taste like much. The leaves were much more valuable in Cherokee medicine as a tea taken against cramps, childbirth, and more!
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And you know how much I like finding cool mushrooms! I had to stop for a while to admire these scalycap mushrooms (Pholiota anomala) with their speckled caps looking like they’d been sprinkled with panko! I’m pretty good with knowing which berries you can eat, but not so much with mushrooms. Unless you’re an expert, I’d recommend appreciating their looks before considering a taste!
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From here, the trail got really neat with switchbacks and boulders through the cool forest, and a single-log bridge over the creek! Somewhere in the water below, there could have been salamanders, but we didn’t stop to flip stones—this can harm salamanders anyway. The Great Smoky Mountains are known as the “Salamander Capital of the World,” boasting no fewer than 31 different species from the tiny, 2-inch pygmy salamander (Desmognathus wrighti) to the massive, 2-foot Eastern hellbender (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis)! The rivers and streams of the Great Smoky Mountains contain more salamanders than any other place on Earth, one of many reasons this region is recognized by UNESCO!
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I hadn’t looked up any photos of Rainbow Falls before the hike, so when we came to our first waterfall, I was a little underwhelmed. It was pretty, and probably a great spot for meditating, but if this was going to be our main destination in the park, I’d hoped it would be a little… bigger? Luckily, Tyler was tracking our route and reminded us that we weren’t there yet!
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Now that’s how you know you’ve reached your destination: a warning sign! It shows that folks have confused natural features with a playground, and in fact, well below the falls, we watched a lady fall on her butt and get unceremoniously dragged off the boulder by her friend! It’s important to be careful when out in nature, because rocks are unforgiving!
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But she was an exception. There were plenty of groups of hikers camped out on the rocks beneath Rainbow Falls, and at least one social media influencer doing precarious yoga poses on a boulder. There was a group who decided to go up and sit under the falls, making it hard to photograph. I grouched about this with another furry hiker, Penelope the Opossum! She was much less grouchy than I, since she was just beginning to explore new places outside her native Texas and was enchanted by the beauty of this place, even with all the people around. There’s a lot to be learned from Penelope!
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And then I decided to take my turn up behind the waterfall. After all, the three of us had done quite a bit of wet rock scrambling in Katmai, and having the (maybe bad) example of those other hikers to inspire me, I decided there’d be no more immersive experience with a waterfall than feeling the water itself! Gosh, it was pretty behind Rainbow Falls! Loaded with lush ferns, it felt like I’d jumped into a tropical hideaway, more like Cambodia than Tennessee!
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I didn’t spend too much time up here, to give more folks an unobstructed view of the falls, but also because the time was drawing near for Tyler and Marie to get back to the hotel and get gussied up for the wedding. We hustled back to the start of the trail, pausing to watch a young black bear hunt for salamanders in the creek, and then gosh, what a sight awaited us back at the trailhead: not only were there tons of parking violation notices on all the cars by the side of the road, but the line of cars waiting for a place to park stretched back at least two miles from the junction of the loop! We had really timed our hike well, all things considered!
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After dropping off Tyler and Marie for their friend’s wedding (they gave their Biber driver five stars!) I decided to return to the park and explore the remnants of its history. The perfect place to kick that off was the Little Greenbrier School, built in 1882 to educate kids within a 9-mile radius! Smoky Mountain kids learned here for 53 years, and even after this became a national park in 1934! From that point, this school was still used to teach park visitors about this beautiful area. Famously, “Miss Elsie” Burrell spent thirty years volunteering here as a post-school “schoolmarm,” teaching kids about their opportunities to learn in the great outdoors until she was 95 years old!
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I was ready to take advantage of my opportunities to learn, and so I headed toward one of the park’s most famous locations, Cades Cove, called Tsiya’hi (“Otter Place”) by the Cherokee, whose chief, Kade, is still represented in the modern name of this area. It’s the most visited part of the entire park, but most importantly for me, it was going to give me a chance to actually view the mountain range that gives this park its name! They were not very smoky today…
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After the American victory in the War of 1812, settlers began expanding west into territory that had previously been controlled by the British. Among those was John Oliver (the war veteran, not the Last Week Tonight host), who arrived here with his family in 1818. The cabin he built here—he hand-made all 3,000 shingles on the roof—is considered the oldest still standing in Cades Cove! The Olivers themselves kept this property in the family for over a hundred years!
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The Olivers only made it through their first winter with the help of their Cherokee neighbors in Tsiya’hi, but within a year, the Treaty of Calhoun had kicked the Cherokee out of the Great Smoky Mountains. In their place, Cades Cove filled up with new, Euro-American neighbors, who built permanent structures that were left in place long after the area became a national park. Now a wide open valley, it was pretty clear to see why folks love experiencing its picturesque history at a variety of paces! In fact, since 2022, this 11-mile loop road has closed to cars every Wednesday so bikers can enjoy the scenic ride with fresh air and no risk of being squished!
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From the Oliver cabin, I made my way to the center of the Cove, where the Primitive Baptist Church had once dominated local religion and politics, but only after much debate! In the 1830s, Baptist churches splintered over whether proselytizing missions were, in fact, authorized by the Bible, and the Oliver family’s Cades Cove Baptist Church wasn’t immune to that debate. By 1839, 13 pro-mission members left their church to go form their own, and the church founded by the Olivers rebranded in 1841 to the Primitive Baptist Church. By “Primitive,” they meant their interpretation of the Bible would be as strict and literal as possible, that the church was perfect from the beginning, and that it needed absolutely no changes or adjustments ever! Even today, it didn’t feel quite abandoned, as a girl was singing Amazing Grace inside while I was walking around!
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And even though there was so much of Cades Cove I wanted to see, I only got the scantest taste. You see, just ahead of the apex of the Cades Cove loop road, I hit a wall of cars just like on the way out of Rainbow Falls, chock full of Labor Day park-goers barely going. Inching along at the speed of a lazy glacier down this one-way, one-lane road, I knew I wasn’t going to have any time at all to stop and see Abrams Falls or the historic cable mill, because I needed to be back in Pigeon Forge to pick up Tyler and Marie from their party not long after dark! So I grouched behind cars stopping for bears and boars and selfies out the roofs of jeeps, until finally I was able to burst out of Cades Cove and careen like a mad beaver back up toward Pigeon Forge!
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And as luck would have it, I got to the venue just in time, brushed off my traffic frustrations, and offered up what I figured was another 5-star Biber ride back to the Wayback! Despite the obstacles presented today, I think we got pretty immersed in the natural beauty of the Great Smoky Mountains. Tomorrow, we’ll probably take it easy and see what sights there are to see in the carnival city of Gatlinburg before I send Tyler and Marie off to their next park adventure in New River Gorge National Park!
Tenne-see you then!
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Total Ground Covered: 172.9 mi (277.3 km) |
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