Some Thoughts on the Great Smoky Mountains

“More like Great Vaping Mountains”

Hey, I’m back again for a week before I’m gone once more on another spurious trip! Just kidding, it isn’t spurious, it’s been planned for a while now. But I will actually be gone next week, again. But next week I won’t be at the Great Smoky Mountains, because I already went their last week! Except for this week, when I’m in Illinois again and have access to my computer. But what does it mean to have a first week/last week dichotomy, anyway? I was there, now I’m here, and next I’ll be somewhere else, but isn’t that true of anyone at any time? Isn’t time crazy?

Anyway, that’s enough of that. The point I’m trying to make is that last week I went to Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee (and also North Carolina, technically) on a road with my partner, Cheyenne, and my friends, Kenny and Eva. And it was a lot of fun! We were really only in the park for about two days, which is not nearly enough time to do everything, but it was still a great opportunity to spend time with each other. And it’s also the closest I get to a spring break this year, since UIUC did away with any sort of spring break. Let me tell you, I am feeling the COVID burnout and the senioritis pretty bad. It’s, uh, been a rough semester. And my future plans are entirely up in the air, too, so that doesn’t help either. But more on that some other time.

Basically, we drove up Friday, had all day Saturday and Sunday to explore the park, and then drove back home Monday, since we all either took days off or (in my case) didn’t have classes Monday or Friday. The drive from Champaign, IL, to Cosby, TN, where we were staying, is about ten hours one way, if you include stopping to pee, gas up, and get food along the way. Which is a bit of a haul to do in a weekend, but hey, our options were limited. As I’ve talked about before, road trips are a lot of driving, and this was no exception. But at least this time around the car we had was much bigger than a convertible Volkswagen, so we didn’t have to worry about space as much. Even though we were camping, and had to bring tents and camp chairs and coolers full of food.

Let me run down the timeline a little bit; like I said, we drove up Friday, stopping along the way in Indiana and Kentucky to snack and take pee breaks. We also stopped at a touristy distillery and got free samples of moonshine, which was kind of weird, before getting into the park later Friday evening. Oh, also, I had one of the most surreal experiences in a while that night; see, in order to get firewood, we had to buy it near the park since it’s illegal to transport firewood in most areas. So we stopped at a little private campground just outside the National Park campground (Cosby Campground) we were staying at. I walked into the store, and I expected to see some sort of regular camp store, like you might find at any private campground across the country; snacks, firewood, general camping supplies, booze, cheese curds, probably run by a middle-aged white couple in tank tops, the whole works. That is… not what we got.

I walked in and was immediately sniffed by a massive St. Bernard-looking dog, which threw me off my guard from the start. But then I noticed that, despite being a pretty long building, it was mostly empty; entirely one half of the building was shrouded in darkness, the only light source being a half-empty Pepsi fridge at the far end, containing only a shelf of Sprite and Dr. Pepper. The shelves were all empty, despite some scattered bags of chips and lighters. And then the other half of the building looked just like my grandma’s sitting room, if my grandma had been stuck in 1930’s Europe, with lace doilies and overstuffed couches. And the actual desk was manned by this little old lady with an Eastern European accent, who kept up a monologue about how she was a firewood merchant the entire time I was in the store. There was also the fluffiest cat I’ve ever seen in my life, and the firewood was stupid expensive. The whole experience was weird. My expectations had not only been exceeded, but absolutely dunked on.

That would have all been fine, perhaps a bit idiosyncratic, but it also sticks in my mine because the expensive-ass firewood was fucking moldy. I don’t mean like a splotch here or there, but literally covered in mold, from top to bottom, in a huge, weirdly-beautiful rainbow of greens, blues, and greys. We burned it anyway, of course, but I’m pretty sure the smoke from it made me sick because I’ve still got an ear infection from that trip. Huh. Come to think of it, I got some antibiotics for the infection when I got back, but they haven’t helped at all, and that would make total sense if it was a fungal infection. Hmm. I might need to see another doctor.

All that aside, we set up camp and cooked dinner, and the next day we finally started exploring the park. I’d been the Great Smoky Mountains before, when I was like six or something, so I don’t really remember anything besides rain and tons of leaves, but we actually got neither of those things on this trip. It was sunny and clear the entire time we were there, which, from what I’ve heard, is really fucking lucky, but we were also there early enough in the season, apparently, that almost no trees had begun to bud yet. So everything was a little bit brown from a distance, what with the only parts of the trees available to us being the bark. Though there’s plenty of moss and lichens to liven things up along the rivers and valleys and trails! But even looking out from places high up, like the Newfound Gap (which was our first major stop), the park is still gorgeous. The mountains are massive and rolling and stretch for as far as you can see, and the curves and dips of the valleys are worth watching for ages, even without as much green. And I’m glad we got to see it with us and our ten thousand closest friends.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot to mention, the park is apparently always fucking crowded as hell. Perhaps you’ve heard of Gatlinburg, the tourist town in the park (we didn’t spend any time there at all because fuck that but also it’s expensive), and perhaps you’ve also heard of the hour-long traffic jams that get stuck in it. Yeah, traffic was kind of a running theme of the trip. I guess that makes sense, though, because the Great Smoky Mountains is the most visited National Park in the country, with around 12 million annual visitors. That’s a crazy number. That’s three times as many visitors as fucking Yellowstone, which is (in my opinion) the better park. The only properties in the National Park Service to beat out the Smokies in visitation numbers are Blue Ridge Parkway, which is a highway leading into the Smokies, and Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which is the fucking Golden Gate Bridge. But yeah, point is that the Smokies are crowded as hell until you get a mile or two from the parking lots. That’s gonna be relevant in a minute.

After taking a brief hike around Newfound Gap, we headed on south to Clingmans Dome, which is also kind of a surreal experience. Clingmans Dome itself is the tallest and most accessible mountain top in the park, and therefore also one of the most popular. There’s a parking lot a half-mile from the summit and the trail up is paved and constantly maintained, so it doesn’t really count as hiking, but more of a casual walk up to the top (though it is pretty damn steep). But since it’s so popular, it’s also crowded as hell. When we got there, we saw people parking their cars a mile from the parking lot because everything was full between here and there. I could feel my stomach knotting; oh man, we were going to have to park pretty far out. But we took a risk and kept driving up to see if we could get a space in the actual parking lot. Just getting there probably took half an hour; at one point, we sat for a good ten minutes next to the bathrooms because the line of cars just stopped moving. We were looking to see if any cars were leaving as we were passing by, and I wasn’t holding my breath. But by the grace of Henry Ford, we somehow managed a parking spot right next to the trailhead. It was the luckiest moment perhaps in my entire life; I cannot describe to you the sheer adrenaline of knowing that you’re going to have to go all the way back down the mountain to find parking, and then all of a sudden, like the parting of the Red Sea, a minivan starts to back out in front of you and leaves the perfect parking space open, just for you. You would have thought we won the lottery, the way we literally screamed out of sheer surprise and joy. Some random dad walking past our car heard us shouting and chuckled, knowing full well how damn lucky we were. Miracles do happen every day.

So we got out, still on a parking spot high, and had lunch before climbing up to the top of the mountain to see the observation tower. And that observation tower is the real weird part of the mountain, besides the batshit parking situation. See, I thought that the observation tower was Clingmans Dome, but it turns out that the mountain is Clingmans Dome, and the tower itself is just a tower. But either way, it’s the highest point in the park, and it takes you above the treeline to get a 360-degree view of the Smoky Mountains. It’s definitely one of the best views in the park, and it’s worth the hassle getting there, but the tower itself is deeply weird. The Clingmans Dome observation tower, built in the 50’s, is this weird, brutalist, concrete pillar with a ramp winding up to it. It’s so very out of place, having this ugly concrete monstrosity on the top of a mountain in the middle of the woods, and then having almost no explanation whatsoever for its appearance or placement. It’s like some Soviet watchtower got plopped in the middle of a national park, for the singular purpose of providing tourists a way to see the other mountains. It’d be kind of creepy if it wasn’t crawling with tourists. In ten thousand years, aliens will find the remains of the tower and assume it was for human sacrifice or something.

Anyway, that was basically Saturday. After Clingmans Dome, we got dinner at this cute local restaurant on an apple orchard, and that was pretty cool. The next day we spent a lot of our time over on the other end of the park from the day before, in the Cades Cove area, which is in the west end of the park and is way different than pretty much the entire rest of the area. Where Saturday was a lot of driving through mountains on twisty turny roads, going up and down valleys and hills, Cades Cove is this relatively flat valley area that’s full of old historic cabins and churches and stuff; it’s kind of like a big field in the middle of the mountains. It was honestly maybe my favorite part of the park that we saw, because it was just so peaceful and calm and still very crowded but at least we didn’t have to worry about driving off a cliff this time. There’s some old cabins to poke around in, and a couple old cemeteries and a big grist mill. When we got to lunch time, we just parked on the side of the road, got out, and plopped ourselves down in the middle of a field and just stared out the mountains for a bit while we ate. It was beautiful. What a meal.

We also saw a bear that day! Strange as it was (though perhaps not so strange, considering how crowded everything is), we didn’t see really any wildlife on the trip. Some crows here and there, a couple smaller birds, a handful of deer, maybe some elk (?), and one black bear. But damn if that black bear wasn’t the coolest thing to see; my friend Kenny had said that all he wanted to see on this entire trip was a bear, and we somehow managed to pull it off. It was at some random point on the highway towards Cades Cove, and there were people looking at something across the river, and Kenny just kind of shouted “There’s a bear!” and we slammed on the brakes and pulled off the side of the road. We spent the next fifteen minutes or so just watching this little black bear sit on a fallen log and watch us, just as we watched it. I wasn’t honestly sure if we’d see a bear this early in the season (though my dad also went to the Smokies the week before and saw two bears), but I’m very glad that we managed to pull it off and find a bear.

So that was exciting! We spent the rest of the day poking around waterfalls on the roads around there, and I stuck my feet in the snowmelt water and there was a film of sweat and dirt that came off my feet. It was like an oily sheen on the water and I immediately felt bad for polluting such crystal-clear streams. But none of us fell in the river, thankfully, and we were able to get some cool picture of the different mountain streams as they cascaded down the rocks, and I really wish we had had more time to go hiking. We didn’t really have almost any time to hike, and only got maybe a half-mile to a mile in of actual hiking for each of the days. If/when I go back to the Smokies, I’m going to be sure to cut out more time to actually hike the trails, because there’s so many of them! It’s ridiculous!

Oh, and that reminds me of another thing we did. In my memory of the first time we went to the Smokies, when I was a kid, we hiked through the woods on a rainy day. It was foggy and wet and there were huge, lush leaves everywhere, and I felt like we were in a jungle. At the end of the hike, we suddenly found ourselves at an old wooden church, abandoned to time. We stopped there to eat, and then hiked back. It’s this incredibly vivid memory, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out which church or building it was that we had hiked to. In doing my research, I heard about the Elkmont Ghost Town, and thought maybe that was what I had seen in my younger years. So I convinced my travel buddies to go find the ghost town with me, to try and jog my memory. Long story short; it wasn’t the right ghost town. Elkmont wasn’t even a ghost town.

That link up there in the last paragraph shows some picture of old brick walls and fireplaces, but as far as we could tell, those weren’t anywhere to be seen. Instead, to get to the Elkmont Ghost Town, we had to go to a different campground off the main road, called Elkmont. Except we were lost at that point, because the actual “ghost town” isn’t really labeled on any maps. So we tried to track down some park staff, and ended up stalking a random park ranger vehicle through the campground like a bunch of weirdos, trying in vain to wave them down. No matter how many variations of hand waving I tried, we just couldn’t get their attention. Eventually, though, we found some other dude on a golf cart, who directed us up a side road to the “actual ghost town.” I expected old log cabins and such. Instead, what we found was a weird resort built in the 1920’s, with a street lined with luxury cottages that had been emptied of personal belongings and fallen into disrepair. It actually would have been pretty damn creepy, in a Shining sort of way, if half the buildings weren’t being actively remodeled to be safe for park-goers to explore, and if there wasn’t a parking lot right next to it. As it was, they were just kind of these weird houses, built by the super-rich to escape the city, that had been lost to time and were now reclaimed as public lands. There’s some message there about the decay of capital and the ruling class, but it’s hard to say anything about that when it’s also next to a public campground full of luxury RVs and expensive trailers. All in all, neat from a bygone architecture standpoint, disappointing from a “ghost town” standpoint.

And that was pretty much our trip. We cooked hot dogs and s’mores over the fire that night, and the next day we broke camp and got back on the road for the ten-ish hour drive home. But other than the limited time there, constant and crowded driving, unending threat of rocky death if you missed a turn in the road, and Elkmont, there were no real downsides to the trip. It was a really great experience, a wonderful opportunity to spend time with friends and loved ones out in nature, to explore new places and have new experiences in the National Park. We saw a ton of cool stuff, and I’d love to take a trip like that again. We listened to music and sang along together to the inimitable (and vulgar) songs of Wheeler Walker Jr., and joked and shot the shit around the campfires in the evening. It was a great time, and even though we were traveling under COVID and things were a little rough in terms of compliance in certain places, we were still able to be safe and have fun and live our lives the best we can. I’m glad that we had this chance, especially since Kenny and Eva are probably going to be leaving Illinois soon, and the future only knows where the hell I’ll be. The coming weeks and months and years are going to be some weird ones for everybody our age, I reckon, so it’s important that we get in the time to do stuff like this while we can, and manage not to let us lose all the youth of our college years to COVID. Though there are much worse things that can be lost.

It was a rare weekend, a trip that I hope not to forget, and something that I’m glad to say I did with my friends. Finally, a college road trip, the likes of one that Kenny and I have been talking about since we met freshman year. And for that, I’m grateful the way things ended up turning out, even if it wasn’t quite like what I expected. Thanks, you guys, and thanks to the Great Smoky Mountains. I’m glad we all exist.

Anyway, here’s some final pictures before I go. Thanks for reading!