Dispatch from the Smokies

Sometimes we need to explore beyond our home landscapes and learn about the world beyond.

Inspiration Point via the Alum Cave Trail

It’s late Thursday afternoon, March 14th, as I type this out. Down below my rental Airbnb cabin I can hear Webb Creek whooshing by, the kind of white noise sound I could use at my own house to sleep. In front of me is a magnificent view, one I also wish I could import home. It’s the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. More specifically, in front of me is a long ridge called Greenbrier Pinnacle and sneaking in just above the eastern slope of that ridge is what I think is Mt. Guyot. Named for Swiss geographer Arnold Guyot, the mountain stands as the 4th highest summit in the eastern US and second highest in the Smokies. I’ve been on Mt. Guyot before, somewhere around April 4th, 2010 on our Appalachian Trail thru-hike. Most of the trees are bare still, though a few hardwoods are starting to flower, and the only green dotting the sides of the mountains is provided by eastern hemlocks (Tsuga canadensis) or rhododendron thickets. I wish I was going to be here over the course of the next 4-6 weeks to see it all unfold from bare to shades of green.

Driving here late last week was enjoyable because I got to re-live early spring yet again via the blooms of the eastern redbuds. They had peaked in late February at home and driving east across Louisiana and then northeast across Mississippi and Alabama, a sliver of NW Georgia, and finally into Tennessee, it was both startling and delightful to get a re-play what I’d just enjoyed back at home. (Side note: lest you think this is some completely serene situation from which I’m writing, I just listened to the most obnoxious truck drive by, grunting down US 321. I’m definitely not in the backcountry.)

Remnant daffodils from settler days in Cades Cove.

I’ve been completely surprised by how many daffodils are blooming here, especially in lower elevations of the national park. Folks will plant a few sprigs of them here and there in southeast Texas but generally not the bright yellow ones because it is never cold enough for those to repeat bloom. The ones left in the park tell tales of former lives, ghosts of settlers who eked out a living in various hollows. Another surprise has been just how invasive Bradford pear is just outside the park. It’s like we got into northern Alabama and into Tennessee and the full breadth of how invasive they are is right there in your face, with snow-white blooming trees amidst a mostly still defoliated landscape. I mean, I had heard how bad they were, and while they do show up in landscaping in Texas, they haven’t really escaped to the point where you notice them being a problem. But wow, yeah, it’s a problem here.

I don’t want to leave. There are still so many more trails to hike. Though, my middle-aged flatlander body would take a few months to acclimate (hills kick my butt!), I’d love to check out every trail this park has to offer, especially the ones well off the beaten path. Part of what makes me sad is that I finally got to return to the Appalachian Trail after nearly 14 years away. My first white blazes since descending Katahdin in Maine in August 2010. It was hard not to choke up, hiding my weeping eyes behind my sunglasses as we retraced a few meager steps here on that nearly 2200 mile trail. I didn’t recognize everything or remember every turn on the tiny snippets we walked this week but I did remember feelings and emotions from the first time around. Maybe I’ll write more about that here later, though, it will probably reside on my blog.

Northbound (NOBO) on the AT at Newfound Gap. I can’t believe I walked from Georgia to Maine, once upon a time.

What I do want to write about today is The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of being a tourist in a national park. It has certainly made me appreciate my sweet, southern National Forests and smaller parks. And there’s certainly a place for National Parks, we absolutely need them, but it doesn’t help that I’ve been visiting the busiest National Park in the US to form these opinions.

The Good

Abrams Falls.

GSMNP is beautiful, of course. So. Many. Waterfalls! We were too early for most of the spring ephemerals but some are up and blooming and of course, I oohed and ahhed plenty of leaves! The most popular trails were fairly well maintained and we even spotted two trail maintainers hiking up the Alum Cave Trail with shovels and a giant pickaxe. We thanked them for their work, as you should do if you ever encounter trail maintainers, paid or volunteer. It takes an enormous amount of labor to keep trails safe and open for the public.

I mean, I could wax poetic about plants and views and the scenery—it’s the Smokies! It’s the most visited for a reason!

The Bad

Great Smoky Mountains National Park needs a tram system. Badly. We’ve used the tram system at Bandelier National Monument and at Denali National Park and Preserve and both work really well. GSMNP needs one, too. It doesn’t even need to be obligatory like some other parks for all of the roads, especially through Newfound Gap Rd/US 441, but it would be really useful for the scenic drives like Cades Cove or even for Newfound Gap Rd because…

let’s talk about trailheads! Holy cow are they packed. We learned the first day how quickly the parking spaces fill up and that we would be having really early days in order to get a spot to park so we could get on the trail. There’s plainly not enough parking to go around, and I don’t necessarily think we need to destroy more parts of the park just to put up more gravel for parking, but a tram system would alleviate some of this without needing to build extra pullouts or parking in places it really doesn’t belong. Why they haven’t implemented this is beyond me. It would also help with thru-hikers at Newfound Gap, instead of needing to get a hitch into town for bad weather or a resupply, they could take shuttles down to town or the visitors centers.

I suspect part of the reason they don’t have a tram system is that this park doesn’t have an entrance fee like many other national parks, hence they may not be able to fund a tram. The lack of an entrance fee is, of course, good and bad. It makes it more accessible to the public, allowing people who may only be driving through to quickly see the park or even keeping families on vacation from adding an extra expense to their trip. Though most national park entrance fees are weekly based and in the grand scheme of things, especially nowadays, the fee is nominal. There is a parking fee, however, which we found many, many, many people just decided to avoid doing. The parking fee can be paid at any visitors center or at one of the automated kiosks, it wasn’t hard, but so many cars at trailheads just skipped that altogether. We finally saw park officials ticketing said cars on our last day. If they missed cars any other time that’s just missed revenue the park wouldn’t get, which makes it all the more difficult to fund the park appropriately.

Don’t be a jerk, pay the parking fee.

The Ugly

First, let’s talk about the carnival that is Gatlinburg. Yikes. On our AT hike, Gatlinburg was one of the places in the Smokies that many AT hikers would get off trail, at Newfound Gap, and hitch a ride into town for a resupply. We avoided it, knowing and hearing how gaudy the place was. Boy, we weren’t wrong. It’s a destination aside from the real destination…or at least my interpretation of the real destination…the park itself. I know full well that for many people Gatlinburg is the It Place and not the massive national park it resides next to. I mean, I get it. It’s 100 years ago, and you live in rural Tennessee and a new national park is created, of course you are going to build up a tourism industry to cater to the stream of tourists coming through. But did it have to be so tacky? Wow. I kept trying to figure out what it reminded me of and the closest thing was those strips of town you go to when you disembark from a cruise ship in port. It made me think a lot about consumption and overproduction of nonsense junk.

If you do visit, drive down US 321 east a few miles and you’ll find the Great Smoky Mountains Arts and Crafts Community tucked off the road in various clusters of small shops. Much more my speed! And you’re much more likely to be supporting local artisans than you will be getting some cheap trinket in town.

OMG, stop throwing your orange peels out on highly trafficked trails in Bear Country! They don’t decompose quickly and the last thing you need are bears frequenting busy trails.

Second, I didn’t think I could ever hate orange peels more. In general, the trash situation was not too terrible along the trails, though I did pick up microtrash pieces here and there when I found them or if it was easy to grab. I was glad to see most people were responsible with their trash. BUT, orange peels stood out like a sore thumb on the side of the trail. Now, I can’t say I’ve never thrown an orange or banana peel out into the woods but it was usually in Florida where you can find wild citrus in natural areas, or here in Texas where I’m far from a trail and I know leaf litter and the humidity and moisture will decompose it in a season. That said, I don’t really even do that anymore—pack it in, pack it out. So it’s quite surprising and even disorienting to see bright orange orbs tossed alongside several of the trails we hiked on. What are people thinking? There are signs everywhere about staying back safe distances from wildlife (which we also saw people not doing) and signs about litter and food. I know people think that food is ok to leave on the ground, even in cities, but it only encourages animals to become accustomed to being fed human food and it is littering. My husband even ran a chipmunk off at Alum Cave Bluffs because a group of 20-somethings, who knew better, were feeding it. He even told them they knew better—sometimes public shaming is necessary. Don’t feed wildlife and don’t leave your food discards on trails.

Ladies…we need to talk.

Lastly, the bathroom situation on trails for the masses not accustomed to ducking behind a bush when nature calls needs to be addressed. Many of the trailheads have pit toilets at them but some do not or some were not open or working. This was the case at the Alum Cave trailhead and my poor bladder was not happy about that. Luckily, those of you who stand and pee can easily find a place to turn around and do your businesses without much of a fuss, but those of us who need to bare a significant portion of our bottom halves are in a bigger predicament, especially on busy trails with little place to hide. I was really missing slower or totally quiet trails when my bladder started rebelling during this trip. The Alum Cave trailhead area was the worst place for toilet paper “flowers” because of the closed pit toilet situation, though I saw them on other trails, too, away from the trailhead.

If you need to squat to pee or do #2, pack out or bury your toilet paper and associated solid waste. Familiarize yourself with Leave No Trace principles and practice digging catholes 6-8” deep. You can learn to do this with even your boot or shoe or carry a lightweight, plastic shovel just for this purpose. I know most people who don’t hike or go outdoors often can be afraid of the outdoors, and especially about using the “bathroom” out of doors. If you need to squat to pee you can either learn to drip dry, carry something like a Kula Cloth, or put a bandana in a baggy and use that. You can also just use toilet paper and put the toilet paper in a baggy and carry it out in your pack. Use hand sanitizer after all of these for cleanliness. There’s no reason to leave toilet paper litter in the woods, visible for everyone to see. Stop being afraid of your own bodily processes and clean up after yourselves. Yeah, it isn’t the most appetizing thing to think about but it’s better than leaving a pile of toilet paper behind for the park staff to pick up later. Learn some basic LNT and you’ll be fine.

Adjacent to all of this, we picked up an AT thru-hiker at Newfound Gap and gave her a ride into Gatlinburg to resupply. During our trip down to town we got to chatting, comparing our hikes and talking about this and that. The lack of composting toilets, or privies as we called them on the AT, through the Smokies is still apparently a big thing. It was a problem 14 years ago, and decades before that, but I guess I somehow thought maybe they would have figured out how to put a couple in at a few of the shelters along the AT in the Smokies. Apparently not, because our new hiker friend “Scar” (trail name) told us the situation was still awful. Even if thru-hikers were digging appropriate catholes and not leaving TP flowers everywhere, it sounded like some weren’t or enough day hikers weren’t behaving properly either. I’m not sure what the solution is to that other than meandering further away from the shelters to keep these areas from getting too bad. It’s what happens when you have use high density use in a relatively small area.

Sharp-lobed hepatica, Hepatica acutiloba

There were a few other minor bad-to-ugly items, like people graffitiing on trees or rocks, and even quite a lot of not well-prepared day hikers. I also realized how bad erosion had gotten on some of the trails when I saw the trail was 6+ inches or sometimes a foot below grade of the sides of the trail. The graffiti issue is both an education and discipline problem that we just have to drum into people’s heads constantly that they don’t need to leave their mark on nature in that way. The erosion issue is one of an overabundance of people concentrated in certain areas at the busiest National Park in the US. It would help if we worked to spread the word that people can also visit other National Forests or other parks, too. That National Parks aren’t our only recreational opportunities. And yeah, my family contributed to a little bit of that, I can’t discount that. We did drive over to Pisgah National Forest to visit Max Patch Bald and I was instantly relaxed driving the forest service roads—few people were on them. There’s a reason we have National Parks, because they preserve some real gems that deserve the protection. But it just highlighted the need to promote other places as alternatives, that we have many other places worthy of recreating that are less busy and less tourism driven. I think you could easily translate this situation into busiest state parks in Texas or your own state. There are always alternatives and sometimes we need to spread the impacts out a bit. Or, even better, set aside more public lands so we have even more opportunities to recreate.

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Finishing this draft up, I’m home now. We made it back Saturday evening and even as we drove south from Tennessee and finally emerged back onto the coastal plain I felt like I was home. I knew the plants I saw out the window and spring was really getting into a roar, especially here in southeast Texas. It’s green! Lots of green! Bluebonnets are blooming, too. Part of me does want to find a cabin in the woods in some hollow in TN or NC and move. And even as touristy as Gatlinburg was, it doesn’t hold a candle to the noise and sprawl of the suburbs. I just might take that chaos over this chaos if given the chance.

I’ll be back next week, possibly later this week, with a Texas environmental news round-up. There’s been a few things that have happened over the last couple of weeks that should be shared here. And of course, more Texas nature essays on the horizon, too. Stay tuned!

Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and In the Weeds. She hosts one podcast, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and recently retired The Garden Path Podcast.