Great Smoky Mountains National Park

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park was not the first National Park I ever visited, but it has been the National Park that has had the biggest influence on me. I've visited it more often than any of our nation's Parks, and I have journeyed more deeply into it than any other of them.

Over the years I have been able to travel more widely across the USA and visit many of our big Parks; but the Smokies remains the one with which I am most intimate. I've hiked hundreds of miles of its back-country trails, and I have camped deep in the wilderness areas within it. I have also driven most of its (too many) roads and shared views with obnoxious crowds of idiot tourists who rarely fail to annoy me in their numbers and vile attitudes.

But, I keep going back. My wife and son get a kick out of the Park for reasons different from my own. While I dig plunging as deep into the almost supernaturally diverse forests and climbing the lung-bursting slopes, they like the gentler aspects of the Smokies and the easy access of tourist traps we call Gatlinburg and Pigeon's Forge. Generally, while I'm hiking they will take the 75-cent tram from the campground into Gatlinburg to nosh on comfort food and search for tchotchke.

I'll be there for just shy of a week. Heading out very soon. I'm still considering my options for hiking. It has been a very long time since I've seen the views from Charlie's Bunion, so I may do that hike. I just don't know. Or maybe I'll pick out some trails I've never experienced and see what they have to offer.

I'll let you know.

A field in Cataloochee Valley where we likely won't go this trip.

Years ago when I was running around trying to see all of the hemlock groves before they died. I saw most of the old ones, and now they're all dead.

A 2005 view of the massive wall of LeConte before this plot of land was covered in hotels and shops.

Bull elk and cow (also in Cataloochee) in October 2018.

YouTube.

I use YouTube as a tool and a pastime. A few years ago I began to create videos to promote my novels. Later, I decided to play around with making travelogs of my many hiking, backpacking, kayaking, and camping trips. This eventually expanded to the point where I branched out and started to make some money selling (and leasing) photos of the great outdoors.

And this, of course, got me into browsing through the many thousands of YouTube channels. So many channels. I wonder how many there are, but have never been curious enough to research it. Over the past few years I often stumble upon little independently produced channels that I find interesting or charming or informative and subscribe to them. A few of the channels I subscribed to early on I continue to follow.

But not many of them.

One thing that I find happens with a lot of these little shows is that they eventually become bogged down with soap opera style drama centering on the creators' lives. And, frankly, I don't need that freaking drama. I'm not interested in it. It's not the personal details of their lives that got me following them in the first place, beyond their desire to show how they create things or explore the great world. As soon as they start to whine about their health or their dead dog or how they are being stalked by mean people I lose interest and cancel my subscription.

And other things can happen.

One channel I used to view was created by a married 30-something couple who had once been physically active but who had become lazy and complacent and really, really fat. To help themselves get rid of the vast accumulations of lard on their asses they began to hike. You could tell that at some point the husband had been fit, and that sometime in the last few years the wife had been quite the looker (she still had a pretty face trying to peek out from behind a sheath of pink-skinned blubber). And over the course of their videos they did, indeed, lose the lard. It at first came off slowly, and then more rapidly fell from both. Over the course of a couple of years or so the husband became the muscular athlete he'd once been, and his wife transformed back into what I can only describe as "a ten". She was hot.

But then, the videos slowly became less and less about the adventures of the interesting and beautiful places they discovered where they challenged their rediscovered athletic abilities, and more about posing and preening in front of the camera wearing tank tops and yoga pants. I got sick of it and erased them from my subscription list and haven't been back to look at what they've been creating in about three years. Maybe they stopped with the channel, or came down with terminal cancer and died, or were hit by a Mack truck, perhaps eaten by a pack of rabid raccoons. I wouldn't know.

Because of this tendency to fade into personal subjectivity I end up getting rid of about three-fourths of the channels I follow. They become tedious and maudlin. I suppose it works for them, though, because by the time I end up ignoring these productions I generally find that they have accumulated tens of thousands of subscribers and have become semi-famous and are actually making money from their little videos.

Just without me in their audience.

No, thanks, on the drama. Just give me the views.

On Sitting Bear Mountain.

Well, I bagged Sitting Bear Mountain in Linville Gorge. It was the only major peak in the Gorge that I had not hiked. I think it's also the highest summit in the wilderness. I timed the hike well, being first at the trailhead and managed to have the footpath completely to myself for several hours. I did encounter a hiker and his dog near the summit cliffs--nice guy. Then, later, on the way down, I bumped into a tight-lipped shitheel who wouldn't even return a polite "hello". I'm all for solitude and such, but there's a point where misanthropy reaches the level of pathology.

At any rate, it was a good hike. The trail is very, very steep as you approach the summit. It hits the mountain head-on with no switchbacks. It's roughly as steep as the Woody Ridge Trail in the Black Mountains, but doesn't hold that steepness for as long as the Woody Ridge path manages. Still, I had to very carefully pick my way down as I headed back. A fall there would be dangerous.

Oddly, the rims of the Gorge held onto huge cloud formations with some tenacity, making for difficulty in grabbing good photos. I did manage a few decent shots, but it wasn't easy.

After the hike I went over to the Linville Falls picnic area on the Parkway and had lunch. Then I drove over to Beacon Rock and took a few shots there, but again Grandfather Mountain (aka Tanawha) was socked in by clouds lingering over the summits.

After that I headed home. It was a good day.

 I tried an experiment with time lapse photography with the GoPro camera. I'd played around with it before, but while I was walking or kayaking to show sped up motion progress. In this one I kept the camera static and let the landscape do the moving. I want to do more of these.

I was the only one at the trailhead. Parking is at a premium at this trailhead. Maybe four spots.

View from the first set of cliffs.

From closer to the Sitting Bear summit looking back on the spot where I took the time lapse video.

Now and again the clouds would break. Right after this it got really dark and misty and made photography difficult.

The Linville Falls Picnic Area is amazing. Right by the Linville River.

Then I drove over to Beacon Rock below Grandfather Mountain. Most people don't know there's a GrandMOTHER Mountain. This is it, as seen from the exposed surface of Beacon Rock. It has a horrible radio tower, which is hear mainly hidden by clouds.

Tanawha was a tease. She played with the clouds and refused to reveal all of her beauty. At 5,964 feet she is technically the highest summit in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Less than 40 feet shy of 6,000 feet.

Heading Back.

Well, since I was frustrated in my attempt to bag Sitting Bear Mountain a few days ago, I'm heading back to Linville Gorge in the morning to try again. It's the only major peak in the wilderness that I haven't hiked, so I want to strike it off my list before it becomes a frustrated obsession. In the coming years I'll be hiking and camping and backpacking so much that I doubt it would rank very high on my list, so best to do it now while I still think about it.

I've heard the views from the top are pretty good. I'm always curious if I'll find a grandstand in the Gorge as good as the Hawksbill summit. So far, I have not found a view to surpass with that one.

From a recent visit to the Gorge. Not far from Table Rock.

Taken at The Amphitheater. A grand location.

I took this selfie on Hawksbill. So far, it's my favorite view in and of the Gorge. I doubt it can be topped, but you never know.

Retirement Hiking Trips.

Now that I'm retired I work my part-time job anywhere from zero days to four days per week. It is weird not having to go and punch a clock every day, (sometimes six days a week when I was a letter carrier, and seven days a week when I was self-employed). I sit there and realize that I don't have to rise before the sun to go to a drudge labor job. Yes, I sometimes still get up before the dawn, but that's only because sometimes I want to hit the road early to go hiking or kayaking. Big difference.

I'm still having a hard time dealing with that.

Saturday I drove up to the mountains and did a little bit of hiking before the rainstorms scoured the peaks. I had two hikes planned but only did one, down into Linville Gorge to see the base of Linville Falls which I had not visited in many, many years. The hike was a whole lot easier than I recalled. But after I climbed out of the gorge the rains hit.

At any rate, here are some photos and a video of the hike.

The Little Creatures.

Sometimes when I go hiking I don't find the wildlife that I hope to see and photograph. I've noticed that even the birds I used to depend upon as subjects are fewer in number. These are things that I have noted, so it's not a huge surprise to me to have recently learned that the base populations of birds have died off in North America over the last thirty years, to the tune of three billion less. I used to be able to go to various places to see birds that have vanished; and this has been over just the last ten years.

Mother Nature is dying. There is no doubt of that.

At any rate, I love photographing wildlife. And so what I find I sometimes have to do is look down at my feet or at the vegetation around me to search for insects, arachnids, terrestrial molluscs, and other such little critters if I want to get any photographs of animals at all.

And, once again, I am reminded that I really do need a couple of new lenses for my camera. I can do okay with the lenses I have, but they don't have the qualities I need to record the finer details as I labor to grab some memorable shots. To that end I will be purchasing (I hope) two more lenses next month. We'll see.

In the meantime, I've been reading journals warning that even the planet's insect populations are plummeting.

Yellowjacket, taken on Roan Mountain, Tennessee.

Butterly, Rock Creek Recreation Area. Erwin, TN.

Butterfly. Cataloochee Valley, North Carolina.

New Shoes, Air Pollution.

Carole and I drove up to Asheville on Sunday so that I could find a pair of new hiking shoes. My old reliable Merrell shoes finally gave up the ghost. The treads were worn down to the point where I had begun to feel the stab of rock edges as I hiked. They were a great pair of shoes, but they had to go.

I had done a bit of shopping online to find a new pair of boots and did a lot of reading for some good shoes that would give me what I need in that type of footwear. I ended up settling--at least in theory--on the Oboz Firebrand2. I could have ordered them online, but I opted to go shopping and find a place where I could try them on to see what the fit was like and get the feel of them before committing to a purchase. The only place I know of that carries that brand is the Mast General Store.

Since we generally enjoy trips to Asheville we decided on the Mast store there rather than going to one of the other branches. As usual, we arrived in Asheville to massive crowds. There is always one sort of festival or march or demonstration going on there, and Sunday was no exception. I think the heavy burst of population was due to some kind of gay rights push, but we weren't sure. It made parking a tad more difficult (but not by much) and didn't have any effect at all on our shopping, nor any kind of wait at our favorite pizza restaurant there.

After we made some purchases, got lunch, and returned to Carole's car, we decided to head over to the Black Mountain Campground (National Forest facility) by way of the Blue Ridge Parkway. The views from the Parkway and nearby peaks were hampered considerably by resurgent air pollution--courtesy of our current Mother Nature-raping administration. The weather was warm, but not nearly as hellish as in Huntersville. Still, the high country was a good 10-15 degrees above normal for this time of year.

My intention was to catch the South Toe River Road (Forest Service) down to the campground. But it is still closed due to flooding damage from well over a year ago. Our government can find money to piss down the Pentagon rathole, but not for repairing our parks and National Forests. Instead I went over to the intersection of the Blue Ridge Parkway and NC 80 and took that down to the campground. After checking it out we then headed over to Old Fort NC and to the Curtis Creek Campground which is also a National Forest facility, but which is not blocked by gates due to road damage. We want to plan camping trips to both of these places so we needed to look at them to decide roughly where we'd want to park our Casita travel trailer when we go.

After that we called it a day and went back to the Interstate to drive home. All in all, we accomplished most of what we wanted to do, but the diminishing air quality that we witnessed was yet another reminder that global warming and mass extinction loom over everything. If you like our wild places, my suggestion is to do as we do and see as much of it as possible before it's all dead.

At the hiking shoe department in the big Mast General Store in Asheville.

What I bought there. Not the most attractive hiking shoe, but functionally what I need.

 

The Mellow Mushroom. Our favorite pizza joint in Asheville.

The Blue Ridge Parkway at a point where I pulled off to get a few photos.

Colors starting to change for Autumn. I was able to mitigate the hazy air pollution via editing software.

A small tributary of Curtis Creek.

This little one was in the creek at my feet. Very tiny.