Coyote!

We just returned from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Park has pretty much been buried in snow for weeks. They kept having to shut down most of the roads in the Park which kept me maddeningly away from all of the trailheads I wanted to use. So I got almost no hiking done, at all, and didn't get to hike to any of the spots I'd picked out to strike off my to-do list. Alas.

But here are a few shots I took in the Park. I'll post details tomorrow when I return from work.

Not all of the Park is about the natural beauty. Some of it is devoted to the European presence in the area. This is Cable Mill in Cades Cove, a still operating grist mill.

While I had to have seen this waterfall before, I don't recall it. It's visible from the Little River Road on the way to Cades Cove. Not a bad waterfall. Maybe fifteen feet in height.

Carole and I at the Park entrance sign (the Gatlinburg entrance).

This was a coyote I saw in Cades Cove. When I showed the photos that I took of him to a ranger at Cable Mill, he told me that the coyotes had interbred with the Red wolves that the Park Service tried to reintroduce to the ecosystem some years back. Initially, he said, there were a number of coyotes that had a lot of Red wolf genetics in them, but that they'd mostly been bred out. He said that this individual was the last one in the pack there that looks like a Red wolf. (And, yes, I acknowledge that a lot of my learned friends argue persuasively that coyotes and Red wolves are actually the same animal. I don't feel that way, but concede that they may be correct.)

Cades Cove on a warm day in the deep snow.