Monday, May 15
We were in a Hampton Inn and so of course the breakfast and the sunny and spacious breakfast room was what you’d expect from a Hampton Inn, and we were soothed by that. We gritted our teeth for what we’d find outside though, packed up for the day (we were going to stay in that room two nights, so packing was easy), and headed out through the tourist town for the most visited National Park in the country, hoping that a Monday in a shoulder season (school in session still) would be fine.
National Parks need to get revenue from visitors and sometimes approach it differently. Some, like Acadia and Shenandoah, charge high entrance fees. This is partly because there are not a lot of ways to enter the Parks, and so the revenue stream can be controlled. Others, like Great Smoky Mountains National Park, have many entrances and have to get revenue from visitors in other ways. GSMNP charged parking fees: you had to get a pass each day (you could buy weekly and monthly ones) and this was not covered by my Parks pass. But whatever, we squeezed into one of the last parking places at the Sugarlands VC after somehow getting out of already happening downtown Gatlinburg, and were glad to buy a day parking pass at the kiosk. We support our Parks. The other visitors were mostly older couples from the South, very young families with pre-school kids, or groups from other countries.
I have to say that, though it was a crowd experience, I was thrilled to be in the main VC of the most popular National Park in the country, a place I’d wanted to visit for a long time. Though it was pretty packed, we didn’t have to wait in line to talk to a Ranger since most of the people there were after the restrooms or the gift shop. I told the guy, “We’ve read on your website about the most popular trails in the Park.” He nodded, perhaps weighing my Northern accent. “But what we want is a 3-5 mile trail that *isn’t* popular.” He nodded again.
As it turned out, we were visitors from Massachusetts and his mother was a Yankees fan who would give him a hard time for assisting the enemy. But we told him that actually we were Bruins fans, and that was ok. He was too and we commiserated. His first recommendation was the Laurel Falls Trail, but he got excited when he said what he really recommended was the Little River Trail, which told us what we wanted to know. He gave us directions to both.
I wanted to buy a hat at one of the Parks we hadn’t been to before, and I scored a nice one in their gift shop. We then went to the map kiosk and picked up the maps we needed for a few bucks. As I say, they needed to make revenue somehow.
Though we’d had some overcast weather the last few days and it was forecast to continue, it was a fine, partly cloudy day with some patches of brilliant sunshine. And the temperature was not bad. We’d packed for very hot days in Tennessee and the Carolinas, but with the elevation we were at the temperature stayed in the low 70s. And though there’d been rain recently, the humidity was no problem. We had brought bug spray, but this was nowhere near the bug level you get on a sunny Spring day in New England.
OK, we got out of the frantic Sugarlands VC (one of the circling cars grabbed our space right away) and headed Southwest on the Little River Road. After a few miles we were just able to snag a legal parking space in the Laurel Falls lot, and we geared up and headed up that trail.
We were so delighted to be in the Great Smoky Mountains and to see the laurel and other flowering plants blooming gloriously all around us! There were plenty of others on the trail and the Park maintenance guys had apparently tried to pave it in the distant past, though the pavement that was left after years of neglect and erosion was treacherous sometimes. We realized that the Ranger had steered us first to a well-used trail, which was fine with us because it was a good introduction to the Park. Many people on the trail were at their limit, climbing up the steep switchbacks but nevertheless enjoying themselves like you wouldn’t believe. It was a parade of families with strollers(!) and older couples with a very few fitter types, all climbing up the sharp incline towards the falls on a glorious day.
Didn’t see any wildlife on that trail (except a millipede), and didn’t expect to. But we saw lots of flora and some exposed cliffs. We also saw lots of people and kind of enjoyed watching them. As I say, a lot of the tourists were huffing and puffing but were mostly enjoying pushing themselves. On the way down, we saw a Search and Rescue crew going up the trail after a person who’d apparently sprained his/her ankle. This was apparently a routine day at the Park.
We reached the Laurel Falls and they were ok, not really worth the climb. But hordes of poorly-balanced people were trying to take pictures and that plateau on the rocks did not look like a good place to stop, so we kept moving up the trail. On the way down we saw one tourist slip at the base of the falls and crack his camera on the rock, at least he didn’t crack his head or slip down the couple-of-hundred feet to the chasm below. Signs warned us that people had died there and so we should restrain our kids.
Up past the falls the hordes disappeared and we kept on going for a while, hoping for a good vista of the surrounding mountains somewhere. But everything was mostly leafed out and though we were up high we were still in a jungle of trees and flowering shrubs. Got to a couple of places where we could barely peek out and see the valley, but then bagged and went back downhill. It was longer to the parking lot than we’d thought by this time.
OK, now for the Little River Trail, and hopefully a good wilderness experience in the Nation’s most visited Park, and it sure was! To get there you go by Elkmont, one of the major campsites in the Park. The Ranger had told us that if the first parking lot was full (which it was), go on to the second. This meant that the trailhead we were at was for a different trail than he had recommended, but we looked at the map and realized we could start off on the Jakes Creek Trail and then loop over to the Little River Trail on the Cucumber Gap Trail. Hah! Sounds easier than it actually was.
We geared up and then started up a good slope alongside raging Jakes Creek. There were deserted campsites on the way, a whole series of wilderness cabins that had burned down and only the masonry remained. We turned even more uphill onto the Cucumber Gap Trail after a steep half mile or so, and followed that for several miles. It soon left the forest road we’d started on and wound uphill through a magic forest.
All along, we’d been seeing trees we couldn’t identify, as well as plenty that looked familiar, such as the ashes and beeches. There were conifers too, but not on this uphill slope. The tree that predominated there was the Tuliptree, that made wonderful, complicated flowers and dropped them on the trail. We were climbing uphill through a vast forest of them, tall sentinels surrounding us, as well as thickets of rhododendrons and thick vines. The trail, and we, wove in and out through creases in the hillside, always going up and up. Several times I could see daylight on the tops of the ridges and thought we might crest them, but we kept switching back and forth and going up and up.
We finally crested a last, high ridge and then were going down and down, towards the sounds of rushing water. We forded across a branch of the Little River, where we met a group of young people going the other way, with a Bluetooth speaker giving them the beats. We saw only six or seven other groups on that trail, which was amazingly deserted for that huge and crowded National Park. Eventually we made it to the end of the Cucumber Gap Trail (didn’t see any cucumbers, must have been the wrong season) at a big intersection, and we took a break for water and granola bars. We then kept downhill, down the Little River Trail and back towards the Elkmont camping area. We were deep in the forest and there was a wilderness camp off to our right. There was a passing shower during our break, but the sky soon cleared up again, though we could barely see it in the tunnel of trees down the raging river.
The Little River was just incredible. We were hiking down and down on a steady slope, and the river crashed along to our right, sometimes going away and then coming back. It was the opposite of gentle, always totally serious about getting that water downhill over those boulders and around those logs and those sand banks as fast as it could. Several cascades rushed down the steep banks to our left and joined the raging river, while we stood there and gaped. I can’t describe how beautiful it was. We’d already done 900’ of elevation(?) on that loop as well as some serious elevation that morning, and my knees and hips were beginning to complain. But we were going downhill and the river right next to us was untamed and there just for us (and a few others who were enjoying the hike as much as we were).
Eventually the abandoned, burnt-out-except-for-masonry huts started up again and we knew we were getting near the camping area. We got to the first parking lot and still had a bit of a trek uphill to the second one, where we hugged our car and had a great PB&J lunch on the tailgate, late in the afternoon. That was a fun hike.
Decompressed for a while there and then I washed my hands in the cold creek while Sarah toured another group of abandoned camping huts called Daisy Town. Got saddled up eventually and made our way back past the VC and into Gatlinburg, which was rocking. We made it back to our aerie on the fifth floor of the Hampton Inn, overlooking mountains, and debated about whether we wanted to go out again.
Though we’d had a late lunch, we were starving and actually considered going back to the Brewhouse or to somewhere like Bubba Gump’s. Sarah was looking for alternatives, but there weren’t a great number of Jon&Sarah-friendly places. She eventually found The Peddler Steakhouse, which had pretty high prices but might have acceptable beers. Drove over there and of course the parking lot was full and the place was packed, perhaps with your more deep-pocketed hillbillys.
Snark aside, we got a very nice table in the “lounge” area (as opposed to the “dining room”), I got an acceptable beer, and they had a great salad bar. You had to order a high-cholesterol meal after that, and Sarah got the prime rib while I got the portobello chicken. How long will it be until I realize, if you go to a steakhouse, order the steak (or prime rib)?? Anyway, my chicken was acceptable and I didn’t have too much of an upset stomach that night from the richness of the food.
The people on the streets of Gatlinburg were looking more and more zombie-ish, but we safely got back to the hotel at last. We played the Parks game in their nice breakfast room. A guy we’d met on the trail was there too and wanted to talk, but we didn’t stay long and soon got to bed.
We’d done about 1300’ of elevation that day, in addition to a lot of mileage on the two trails. The odometer showed 314.9 miles, but most if it was actually from the day before on the way down from West Virginia.
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