[Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Oct 10, 2023]

Once upon a time the 6 of us lived in LA and ran every Saturday together to train for the LA marathon. Four of us knew each other from business school, and the other 2 were Olivia’s friends that eventually became ours, too. Over the years, a few of us have moved away, so when an opportunity to get together arises, we don’t pass it up! We planned a trip to Charlotte, NC, to see our friend Lena, who moved there a couple of years ago. It was just going to be a regular girls’ trip, but Lena decided to get married while we were there!

I was going to have to fly with a red-eye, so then I thought… why don’t I just arrive a few days before everyone else and hightail it over to Great Smoky National Park? Side trips are my jam, and because it was October, it was the perfect time to do some leaf peeping. And just like that, my 8th park for 2023 and 43rd overall was on the calendar!

I arrived at 6 am, and took an Uber to Lena’s house. This was the first time we were visiting her, and I was happy to see her new place. We didn’t spend much time there, though, as we had a 4-hour drive to the park.

The park straddles Tennessee and North Carolina. The trail we wanted to do was closer to the Tennessee side, so we went through Gatlinburg, TN, a major resort town. Even on weekday, it was pretty busy. I was happy we weren’t staying there.

We entered the park through the Foothills Parkway. Congress authorized it on February 22, 1944, but of the 73 miles that were originally planned, only 22.5 miles are completed and open to the public. Challenging terrain and funding starts and stops have challenged the completion of the parkway.

We got our first views of the mountains from one of the overlooks, and we were excited to see more.

We were expecting the views, but we didn’t expect the slowdown on the way to the trailhead. We were too far from it for it to be parking-related…. and then I saw it. There were bears right by the road! This was my very first bear sighting ever, and I was more than excited, as you can tell from this video. I was glad we were in the car and not on a trail though!

The Rainbow Falls trail was a great intro to the park. It was less than 5 miles round trip and it was beautiful in the afternoon sun. There were dabs of fall colors here and there and I couldn’t stop taking pictures.

Rainbow Falls itself was a little less impressive than I anticipated, but still pretty. The trail continued on past the waterfall all the way to Mt LeConte, which we were planning to get to tomorrow from a different trail. We did continue on for a little bit to try and see the waterfall from above, but no luck.

Our drive to the next destination in the park was gorgeous.

We stopped at Ben Morton Overlook. It’s named after Knoxville’s mayor in the 1920s. He was one of the huge supporters of building park roads to bring prosperity to the area with tourism. One of the easiest places to build a road through the mountains was at Newfound Gap, the road’s namesake. The road building began in the 1920s and it was completed in 1932. This overlook is one of the best on the road, and it’s a very popular sunset destination.

But our final destination for the day was also great at sunset. At an elevation of 6,643 feet (2,025 m), Clingman’s Dome is the highest mountain in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the highest point in the state of Tennessee, and the highest point along the 2,192-mile Appalachian Trail (a sign for which we saw).

The 45-foot (14 m) tall concrete observation tower on Clingmans Dome was built in 1959. It was part of the Mission 66 program, a decade-long endeavor to refresh and expand park facilities to accommodate the influx of visitors leading up to the Park Service’s 50th anniversary in 1966. It’s one of the most popular stops in the park both for the surreal view of the Smokies and for its midcentury design. It’s one of only nine Park Service observation towers built during the Mission 66 era.

Even though you can’t tell in the pics, it was cold and windy by then, which made me a little worried about the temps at the start of our hike the next day. We wanted to start early because we expected parking to fill up early at the trailhead.

Alas, it was the end of a very long day, and we still had to drive down the mountain to our little hotel on the North Carolina side of the park. Our hotel was in Cherokee, NC, which is on the Cherokee reservation. It’s a very small town so we didn’t have a lot of choices for dinner, but the food at Native Brews was excellent. We were so tired that we were in bed before 9 pm. And we needed all the rest we could get, because our hike the next day was anything but easy.