Wow, that was a much needed 8 days of camping, hiking, and whitewater rafting in the Smoky Mountains National Park. Much needed to say the least. I've spend more time than I care to admit walking through and around National Parks, but the first time I've made it to the Smokies.
A whole bunch of pics and a little narrative about the trip after the jump.
Generally speaking the trip could not have been more perfect. We had 2-3 days of thunderstorms in the afternoon forecasted, we got nothing, although it was a little overcast most days so pics were tough. We spend most of our time in the Park on weekdays, so we avoided the weekend traffic, and maybe best of all we didn't have TV, an Internet connection, nor newspapers so I didn't have to endure what I expect was 24/7 coverage of the death of Michael Jackson.
Now on with the pics .....
For the first four days we stayed in a National Park Service (NPS) camp site outside of Crosby, TN. Isolated. Wonderful facilities. Friendly and helpful PS employees and tons of hiking trails in just about every direction.
Right across from our camp site, a headway to four trails, which I hiked each morning ranging from 1.7 to 5.5 miles round trip. Alas, there might have been a couple of adult beverages consumed, and I walked by myself each day :).
The little stream at the rear of our site.
Ferns ran for miles along the stream on one of the hikes. I know they are just ferns, but for some reason they seemed pretty darn beautiful at 6:30 AM.
You can try to take the "geek" out of a "geek" when you have no computers much less cell phone access, but there were "geeks" long before there were computers. Night one featured an epic Axis & Allies battle.
One of the main focuses of the trip was whitewater rafting. I'd never been before, but spent a lot of time in a canoe and I feel about as safe in water as I do on land. Two of the guys with me had more than 100 trips total. And the fourth guy, well he was scared of water.
We spend two days on the Ocoee River and one day on the Nantahala River. The above is a "hydro" (see I now speak whitewater rafting slang) at the end of the Ocoee River which features 3 and 4 level rapids (5 is the highest).
This is the ending section of the Ocoee River, which was used in during the Olympics in Atlanta for whitewater events. I really wish I had more pics, but as you might expect you can't really bing a non-water proof digital camera with you.
I might also add I really loved the whitewater rafting, but not sure I'll be doing it again anytime soon. The rapids just rock, I mean when you go to paddle and you look to your right and see a ten foot hole where a river used to be, followed by being in the hole (I was in the front) with several feet of water coming in over your head .... well that is pretty freaking cool!
But the long time that can pass between rapids, as somebody with a short attention span, that kind of dulled the overall "fun" of the trip.
Cades Cove, located in the Northwest of the Park, was just awesome, but overcrowded (went on Saturday). For lack of a more "accurate" geographic description it is a huge, open plain nested in the heart of the Park and surrounded by mountains on all sides. For hundreds, if not thousands of years the Cherokee Indians would camp there for weeks and months to hunt.
Later Europeans moved here in the early 1800s and live there, in almost complete isolation for decades, cause they lived in the middle of a mountain range and roads were not easy to come by.
Not even sure where this pic is from exactly, and I wish the day was clearer, but it was just off the side of the road as we moved from the North of the park to the South to our second camp sit near Deep Creek.
I let the two whitewater rafting guys plan most of the trip, but the one thing I said we had to see was Clingman's Dome, the second highest mountain East of the Mississippi (6,643 feet). The views were amazing, of five different states, alas it was overcast.
At the top of Clingman's Dome you have this wonderful outlook tower.
As a funny aside, the second to our last day in the Park three ladies in their mid-20s pulled into the camp site next to us. Other then it being funny that they asked us where they could plug in their hair dryers, all three sleep in this tent.
When I lived in DC I hiked at least 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail. Got in about a dozen in NC, but plan to head back next year and attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail the entire length of the Great Smoky Mountain Park (around 87.5 miles.
And since this is a political site, I will end with this pic of a sign at the bottom of Clingman's Dome. Been to dozens of parks, and never seen a sign like this before.