After a hearty breakfast at my go-to restaurant in Gatlinburg, Crockett’s Breakfast Camp, we headed out on the Newfound Gap Road, up into the park. We were headed to the Alum Cave Trailhead, which is one of the more popular hikes in the Smokies, so I was not terribly surprised when I found that the parking lot full – it was about 10:00, and my guess is that the serious hikers were on the trail by 7:00. We turned around and found a spot in a small lot about three quarters of a mile down the hill, and we hiked back.

Alum Cave Trail is a gem. The first mile of the hike is along a very pretty small river, and the river and trail are lined by trees and thick rhododendrons. The light in the park is always somehow magic, and it plays with water and leaves and even some kinds of branches in a gleaming way. I love it. After a mile, the trail starts seriously upwards, and there are some rough rocky parts, but nothing too extended. I let Mer take the lead so she could see the views without my being in the way, and we took our time. The trail was busy with hikers in both directions, but we still had lots of pockets of solitude.

We got to Alum Cave, which is less of a cave and more of a seriously impressive overhang, and we hung out enjoying the sunshine and the views. We munched a little trail mix I had brought along, and generally had a mellow time of it before heading back down.

The hike back down is easier, especially since we both used hiking poles (I think poles shine on downward slopes since they help take weight off the knees). And…wait for it…in Tennessee, in the middle of the woods, two miles from the trailhead, over five hundred miles from home, Meredith ran into one of her students. While he was not actively hostile, it wasn’t clear to me that he was thrilled to meet a teacher in the middle of his vacation. His dad was more animated. We continued on and got back to the trailhead and on to the car with no more close encounters of the student kind.

We drove back toward Gatlinburg, stopping once at a pullout to look at a great view of the mountains. Mer pointed out that the trees below us were starting to leaf out, while the ones higher up were not, making for a green line across the terrain.

Back in our temporary home, we regrouped and then walked down to the Skylift so we could explore it during the day. Mer did the Skybridge again while I sat in a glider chair looking out at the mountains. She came back, and we did the Skytrail (seeing a theme?), which is a trail that runs along the rim of the two small mountains, coming out at the end of the Skybridge. The walkway had several pictures and stories from the devastating fires of late 2016 – they completely destroyed the Skylift and its buildings, which had to be rebuilt. The pictures were sobering – they showed fire all over the mountain.

We rode back down into town and found a place to eat. We sat outside next to a small stream, which was a great way to relax. By the time we were done with supper, Mer wanted to see things from the mountain at night again, so we went up the Skylift for the third time. We got our money’s worth! She did the bridge again, and collected a now-fairly-cold me. We sat near a firepit so I could warm up, and went off to our hotel.

Today (Thursday) was an inefficient day. We got up at 7:30, but it took some time to get out into town, so we had a wait at Crockett’s. Then we had to go back to the room before heading in to the park, where I wanted to hike a trail leading from the visitors’ center, which was a madhouse. We got stuck there in not-moving traffic for ten minutes or more before I managed to get out of the parking lot, leaving the hike unexplored.

As such, we finally got into the woods on a “quiet walkway” hike around 11:00 am. It was peaceful, and after a steep climb up a side trail, we found an old cemetery. Most of the gravestones were eroded away, but a couple from the late 1800s were still legible, and there was a stone from 2019. It seems if you have a family plot in a cemetery, you can still be buried in the park. We continued our hike for a bit and turned at a stream that I didn’t have the shoes to cross.

That took us to our next hike, to the Little River Trail. We’ve both done this trail before, but we had to park in the overflow parking, which put us right next to the small main street of what used to be the vacation cabins of wealthy families. They are all owned by the park now (which acquired the deeds in the 1930s), but families were allowed to stay on for some time. The last cabin in use was used all the way until 2001. We had explored these cabins before with my sister and her family back in 2017, but we poked around a few of the cabins and spent a good amount of time talking to the volunteers on site.

One downside to hiking in shoulder season is that some things are closed. Like bathrooms. The ones in the cabin area were closed, so we hiked the half mile out to the nearest open ones, and then back again. We finally got going on Little River around 1:00.

The trail isn’t flashy. It’s a wide gravel road next to the Little River, and there are no sweeping vistas. But it’s a serenity-inducing trail with the sound of the river and the pretty of the many small waterfalls. We only hiked in about forty-five minutes because it was so late when we started, but it was a fine hike.

On the way back into town, we were slowed by traffic at one point as people stopped to take photos of a bear only a hundred yards from the road, so Mer got to have her second bear encounter in the park, even if only from our car.

In town, we showered and got ready. I wanted Mer to see the town in full, so we headed down the main drag. We found a restaurant at which to eat, and then explored all the nooks of the tourist trap section. We found a couple of little alleys down which I had never been before, alleys which were quiet and had some cute shops. We got to the end of the shopping gauntlet, and turned back, but took time to go into a surprisingly high-end clock store. It seemed odd to have a store with clocks costing upwards of eight thousand dollars next to t-shirt stores, but it was there.

That ended our evening for Thursday. We have one more full day in the park, and maybe a few hours on Saturday, depending on the weather. We’ll go back to our friend’s house in Louisville on Saturday, and get an early start for home (and kitties!) on Sunday.

Over the last few (non-Covid) years, we have tried to go to Europe over our spring break, and I had intended that we should do so again if we could find affordable tickets. Every time I would find a good fare online, I would go to check on it later (usually the next day), and it would have gone up by a hundred dollars or more. Happily, we had a backup.

In January, I went with a CVCA trip to Gatlinburg, my third such trip since 2017. I’d always call Meredith from Gatlinburg and tell her what a wonderful time I was having and how much I loved it in town after a day of hiking. This year, on one such call, she finally suggested I should bring her to the Smokies so she could experience it too. I had brought her here back in 2017, but only for a couple of days, and we had kids along in the form of my niece and nephew (and sister, but she’s a game soul). So, while we had fun with the family, we couldn’t do serious hiking and lots of tacky touristy stuff, especially when we were staying in a house outside of town. To experience the fun wonder of the main street of Gatlinburg, you really need to be within walking distance of everything.

So, given that Europe kept being fickle with prices, we decided to come to Gatlinburg. We decided to tag on a two-day stay with a friend in Louisville on the way. The weather all looked good, so on Sunday, after church, we drove to our friend Beverly’s house. Beverly is the epitome of hospitality – she took us out to eat on Sunday, made us breakfast Monday and Tuesday mornings, and took us to a cute college town, Berea, that is ninety minutes from Louisville. We had lunch at a swanky old tavern, and walked the college campus, and then looked around the art district, all in glorious sixty-five-degree sunshine. We hadn’t seen Beverly in seven years or so, so we had a very good time getting caught up.

On to Gatlinburg today. We got here and checked in to our downtown hotel, and drove over to the visitors’ center to pick up a new-this-year parking pass for the park (fifteen dollars a week). As we drove away from the crush of humanity at the center, it started to rain, so I modified my plan of hiking Laurel Falls Trail and changed over to driving an hour to Cades Cove, which is an old settlement area that still has eighteen buildings from the 1820s to 1930s. Both Beverly and my friend Jordan (a teacher at CVCA) recommended it, so that’s where we headed. The drive gave time for the rain to pass, so we were able to tour the site in good weather.

Cades Cove is an eleven-mile one-way circle, and we did the whole thing, although we missed a couple of buildings. Once you pass a building, your choice is to walk back, drive the whole circuit again (stuck behind people going eight miles per hour), or skip it. So we skipped a few. Our main take-away was that isolation is more important in the style of building than time frame. The houses in Colonial Williamsburg were built one hundred years earlier than Cades Cove, but looked more or less like modern homes. Cades was all log cabins until the 1860s, and even after that, some were still built. The Cove had had more people than I’d have thought, with about seven hundred residents in 1900. The national park bought up the area in the 1930s and 40s, and kept the buildings that are around today.

That put us back in town around 7:30. Trying to decide how to dress for the weather, Mer asked me if we’d be going up any mountains on the edge of town, and I assured her we would not. After a quick supper, we went up the Skylift chairlift to the top of a mountain on the edge of town. It was too good a deal to pass up – for two dollars above a normal ticket, we could get an additional day (tomorrow). That way, Mer could see the town at night tonight, and go up during the day tomorrow. Mer may have hinted that going up tomorrow night would be okay too. She had a blast walking a suspension bridge at the top. I got about a third of the way across before turning around from fear. I’m looking forward to the trail at the top tomorrow instead.

The plan for the rest of the week is to enjoy hiking in “the nature” and doing tourist tack stuff in town. I do love this place.