Next Up!

Our next mini-vacation has been booked. We're going to Gatlinburg for a few days next month. It's one of the few tourist towns that I can tolerate, mainly because it's one of the gateways to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. If the town begins to get on my nerves I can escape quickly to the Park and lose myself in the forests.

The last time we visited we took our travel trailer and stayed at the Elkmont Campground in the Park. This time we've booked a nice room in town and I'll be taking day-hikes to see some places that are still on my list. I never get tired of the Smokies, and I have very nice memories of visiting Gatlinburg when I was a kid, and in the days of my early 20s. I think that's why I have a soft spot for the town, even though it's very much like tourist destinations that I generally avoid.

Downtown Gatlinburg. It was pre-Christmas...early November. The Christmas decorations were up. We had a great time cruising the main drag.

Autumn was still creating vast colors on the mountains.

Then...on a ride up to Newfound Gap, Mr. Winter smashes in! The Gap ended up getting about five inches of snow in just a few hours. They had to close the highway!

The next day I escaped into the back country, climbing to the top of Dripping Spring Mountain where I found this view.

This was our campsite. Carole, Andy, and I stayed at this spot. We took our bikes and used those to ride around the vast Elkmont Campground.

Altitude

Here in the South the mountains are as high as they get in the eastern half of the nation. None of our peaks is high enough to have a snowline (where snow never melts) or even a treeline (where arctic tundra prevails). But we do have mountains that are tall enough to exhibit a great degree of environmental changes between the base and summit. Nowhere is this more on display than in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and no mountain shows this better than Mount LeConte.

LeConte looms above the city of Gatlinburg. It dominates the skyline in a way no other summit can in the eastern USA. For it is the only place here that rises so abruptly above its base to such heights. A person can begin hiking at the city limits of Gatlinburg, walk into the Park and end the hike one vertical mile higher on the very top of the peak. LeConte, rising as it does to 6,593 feet above sea level, is one of the highest peaks in the eastern USA. And it is certainly the "tallest", marking probably the only mile-high wall on this half of the country.

When you start your hike at the base of LeConte, you are traveling in typical southern hardwood and pine forests. It gets about as hot in Gatlinburg as it does anywhere else in the South with summer temperatures routinely hitting the 90s. But by the time you reach the summit of that tallest of eastern peaks, the forests are the same as one encounters in southern Canada, and the temperatures never top 80 degrees on even the hottest of days in the valleys below.

LeConte: the mile-high wall above Gatlinburg.

Just a thousand feet or so above Gatlinburg I moved into a dusting of snow and a different forest type (then dominated by hemlocks seen here, but which are pretty much all dead now from hwa infestation).

About 2/3 of the way up the forests become dominated by spruce trees and the snow is getting deeper with every foot I climbed.

At over 5,000 feet the snow was getting seriously deep.

Just before the top of the mountain. It was still snowing as I got there.

Yours truly, on the snow-covered summit of Mount LeConte, March of 2005.

And then it was time to head down, slogging through 17 inches of fresh snowfall until the mountain's varying climates slowly took it all away from me.

Icy Hike from 2005

I'm busy on a writing project so I can't post much this week. I'll run some photos from old hikes.

In March 2005 I hiked to the summit of Mount LeConte in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with Sam Baucom. When we started the hike we were not much higher than Gatlinburg. Of course over the duration of the hike you gain almost a vertical mile. At the start the temperatures were in the high 50s and there was no snow on the ground, and there was no threat of snow. By the time we hit the summit at 6,593 feet above sea level, there was well over a foot of just-fallen snow on the ground. And it was cold as hell up there. Well below freezing.

They don't call the heights of the Smokies "the Canadian Zone" for nothing.

Sam took this one of me as we were leaving the summit. I enjoy hiking in fresh snow. It was still snowing just a tad as we left the peak.

I took this one as we approached the top of the mountain. Not far from this point you break out in the area where LeConte Lodge is located.

I'm pretty sure that this is the highest outhouse in the eastern USA. It's at around 6,400 feet above sea level or so. Maybe a little higher.

Part of the LeConte Lodge complex. You can only get here via hiking. Still, there aren't many places like this in the eastern USA, so it's very popular and hard to get a room. I've been trying for years but I can never find a vacancy when I have a day off.

Good ol' Bob at Myrtle Point near the top of LeConte. It was dreadful cold up there, but I took off my jacket and cap for this quick photo before I could freeze.

The view from where I was standing.

All of that freshly fallen snow was nothing but eye candy.