By Michael Lanza
Late-afternoon sunlight tilts golden beams through the low canopy of spruce and fir trees as I hike alone up the Welch Ridge Trail, at around 5,000 feet deep in the backcountry of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I haven’t seen another person since I hit the trail early this morning. Solitude in the mountains exerts many effects, small and large, on us; but one is that we instinctively listen more attentively. Our rational minds cannot erase from their primal memory cards the instinctive knowledge that, in the primitive brains of some woodland creatures, we are nothing more than a boatload of calories.
I stop abruptly in the trail and stand perfectly still—listening intently, waiting. And then I hear it.
Nothing, that is—well, nothing at first, anyway, because that’s how a quiet forest sounds to ears calibrated to the noisescape of civilization. But as the seconds of standing still expand into a minute and more, my ears stitch together the melodies of birdsong overlaid on the trickle of a breeze sifting through the trees, their leaves shivering and glowing in the sunlight. I hear the crackling of a small animal dashing across dry leaves on the ground that amplify its footsteps. Listen closely enough and this soundtrack builds into a kind of subdued symphony.
I eventually move on—hoping to reach my shelter before night draws the curtain on this short autumn day. But the little happiness high induced by forest silence proves habit forming: I will stop just to listen a couple more times on this trail.
Forney Creek, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, N.C.
It’s the first afternoon of a solo overnight hike I’m making on the east side of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the culmination of a week of exploring the mountains of western North Carolina. My 34-mile loop from the end of Lakeview Drive East, outside the nice little gateway town of Bryson City, N.C., began this morning, hiking uphill in a chilly fog—and not even breaking a sweat (I love this time of year). Within an hour, the fog burned off, unveiling a bluebird, mid-October day in the Southern Appalachian Mountains.
Wrapping up my trip with this hike in the Smokies didn’t happen by design; shelter availability when I reserved a backcountry permit dictated my schedule. But now it feels right to conclude my tour of North Carolina trails here, amid more than a half-million acres of the best-protected and most biodiverse wild lands in the East—and by at least one measure, the most biodiverse of all U.S. national parks.
Hiking up the Welch Ridge Trail, I walk face first into nearly invisible spider webs spanning the trail, suggesting I’m the first animal walking upright on this path today. The sound of my boots crunching through dry leaves startles three large birds; they launch noisily from a tree and flap away. Wild turkeys. I’ll see a couple dozen or more of them out here over these two days.
Around 5:30 p.m., I walk up to the stone and wood Silers Bald shelter on the Appalachian Trail, where 10 or more backpackers have already settled in, including one southbound AT thru-hiker and one school-age girl with her dad. In a national park famous for its huge visitation—more than 11 million people a year—they are the only people I’ve seen all day; but the AT draws much of the backpacker traffic in the Smokies, so it’s no shock to find the shelter full after having spent my day in complete solitude on trails other than the AT. The shelter conversations ring with that familiar excitement tinged with weariness that follows a good day on the trail.
A few hours later, before curling up in my sleeping bag for the night, I stand outside the shelter, gazing quietly up a sky shot full of stars.
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The Appalachian Trail
Great Smoky Mountains gets a crazy number of visitors annually, over 11.3 million—more than twice the number of visitors to Yosemite, and almost twice as many as the Grand Canyon. Think about it: That’s almost three million more people than live in New York City and nearly equals the population of Ohio. But the vast majority of those people are windshield tourists. Walk a few hours into the backcountry and you’ll see a very different park, where nature’s abundance far overshadows humanity’s footprint.
Exactly none of those visitors are anywhere within sight as I depart the dark and quiet Silers Bald shelter at 6:30 a.m., an hour before daylight on my second morning, hiking by headlamp north on the Appalachian Trail. It’s breezy and in the 40s Fahrenheit, not as cold as I’d expected. I like hiking at this time of day: I can have one of the busiest trails in the United States, the AT through the Great Smokies, all to myself.
And again, I’m hardly breaking a sweat. I’ve learned that knocking off trail mileage in cool temps rather than heat goes a long way in reducing fatigue, which is one reason I enjoy hiking early. But mostly it’s just really pleasant to walk through mountains at this time of day.
Hiking in cool temps is one of my “10 Tricks for Making Hiking and Backpacking Easier.”
Before long, bands of red, orange, and yellow begin to glow over the eastern horizon. The sun’s appearance casts light and shadows over the rolling, green mountains to either side of me. The AT follows the narrow crest of the Great Smokies, arching like a crooked spine into the sky. At rocky ledges jutting above the trees, I gaze down on a tortured landscape sculpted by the forces of moving water and erosion working patiently across unfathomable breadths of time, and a forest nurtured by the same moisture. To my left, Tennessee; to my right, North Carolina. The perspective gives me a powerful visual representation of the park’s considerable elevation gradient, which spans more than a vertical mile, from 876 feet to over 6,600 feet.
Hiking in the Appalachian woods, without having to think much about what you’re doing, is surprisingly calming; it feels like all of your concerns have been flushed from your brain. That and the stripped-down simplicity of one’s day-to-day existence—wake, eat, pack, walk, eat, unpack, eat, sleep—must explain much of the appeal of thru-hiking the AT, a trail that resides mostly in ubiquitous forest with little change of scenery.
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Backpacking up the Welch Ridge Trail, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, N.C.
Like many parts of the East, where the geography bears the weight of extensive and intensive human intrusion, places names densely cover my map of the Smokies. And as with any other region, these names record indelibly the people who, in one way or another, left some pieces of personal history on the regional history. But names on the Smokies map also speak to the early settlers’ experience with the natural world here. Bearwallow Bald. Rattlesnake Ridge. Hawk Knob. Panther Den Ridge. Bear Creek. Chestnut Ridge. Turkey Flyup. Assemble all the stories behind those names and I suspect you’d have a local history book.
The lights of towns far below flicker off. I pass the shelter at Double Spring Gap, where backpackers are firing up stoves for breakfast. I glance over but none of them appear to notice me.
Humans have lived in the Great Smokies for thousands of years, going back to prehistoric Paleo Indians; a stone projectile point estimated at 9,000 years old was found in the park. The Cherokee Indians lived throughout what’s now the Southeast United States, including in the river valleys of the Great Smokies, until President Andrew Jackson instigated the series of horrible injustices against the Cherokee that led to the infamous “Trail of Tears,” when nearly 14,000 Cherokee, forced to relocate to Arkansas and Oklahoma, undertook a six-month journey there through the winter of 1838-1839. More than 4,000 people died from hunger, cold, and disease.
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The idea of creating a national park in the Southern Appalachians emerged as early as 1885, credited to a Dr. Chase Ambler of Asheville, N.C. Supporters longed for an Eastern equivalent of Yellowstone National Park, America’s and the world’s first national park, which had been designated only 13 years earlier. Almost four decades later, in 1923, Tennessean Ann Davis returned from a trip with her husband to several Western national parks and began campaigning in earnest for creating a national park in the Great Smoky Mountains. Davis—who became known as the “mother of the park”—and her husband, Willis Davis, co-founded the Great Smoky Mountains Conservation Association, one of the most influential organizations supporting the park concept. One of the first women elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives, she sponsored the legislation that resulted in the first large land purchase set aside for the park.
Great Smoky Mountains became a national park in 1934, cobbled together from 6,600 separate tracts of private land.
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Clingmans Dome to Andrews Bald
After two-and-a-half hours of enjoying my own private Appalachian Trail, I reach the crown of the Great Smokies: Clingmans Dome. It’s mid-morning, and all traces of solitude evaporate the moment I step out of the woods onto the wide, paved, half-mile-long sidewalk leading to the summit from the parking area at the end of the Clingmans Dome Road. Wearing my pack and my eau de backpacker, I join a parade of dozens of people trudging toward the top of the Smokies.
A bracing wind pounds the observation tower at the 6,643-foot summit of Clingmans, highest point in the park and in Tennessee and on the AT, and only 41 feet shorter than the highest peak east of the Mississippi, North Carolina’s 6,684-foot Mount Mitchell.
Rising above the stunted trees, the tower offers a 360-degree panorama of the park and the Southern Appalachians stretching for dozens of miles. Blue ridges fade one after another into the distance. It’s easy to imagine being an AT thru-hiker heading northbound, facing the bulk of a five-month journey still ahead of you, finding inspiration and strength in this view to keep on walking.
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If you live within about a 500-mile radius, the Great Smokies comprise one of the prime destinations for a multi-day hike. The park has over 800 miles of trails and marks the confluence of three long-distance trails. Besides the 2,190-mile AT surfing the crest of the Smokies, the 1,175-mile Mountains to the Sea Trail begins—or ends, if you will—at Clingmans Dome and crosses North Carolina to the Outer Banks. The nearly 300-mile Benton MacKaye Trail, which, like the AT, begins at Springer Mountain in Georgia, but does not completely overlap the AT, traverses the park to the trail’s northern terminus at Big Creek Campground in the park’s northeast corner. At various times on my loop hike, I’ll walk on all three of those trails.\
About an hour beyond Clingmans, I stroll onto the sprawling, grassy meadow at 5,920 feet known as Andrews Bald. The highest bald in the park, named for a herder named Andres Thompson who grazed cattle up here in the 1840s, it looks out over a sweeping array of mountains and valleys to the east.
Maybe a dozen other hikers sit around the meadow. I linger for a bit. But now I’m eager to move on—to descend back to where I’ve already decided the quiet soul of the Great Smokies resides.
Great Smokies Biodiversity
As with most mountain areas, in the Smokies, backpackers and dayhikers naturally seek out the high peaks and balds for those classic panoramas of endless blue ridges. And they’re beautiful. When you come here, don’t miss them. But don’t presume, either, that the show’s over once you leave them behind, or you will miss out on some of the most special and unique natural features of the Smokies.
Within its huge elevation range, Great Smoky Mountains National Park supports 100 native tree species and more than 100 native shrub species across five major forest types. Deciduous forest covers about 80 percent of the park, including the biologically rich cove hardwood forests—sheltered little valleys that support somewhere between 40 and 60 tree and shrub species—and the highest-elevation deciduous forests in the East, where maples, yellow birch, American beech and other trees grow between 3,500 and 5,000 feet. Upstairs from them sit the spruce-fir forests, made up mainly of red spruce and Fraser fir, occupying the park’s highest elevations above 4,500 feet.
Eastern hemlock trees, nicknamed the “redwood of the East” because they can reach 150 feet tall with trunks six feet in diameter, live to over 500 years in age. Tragically, Eastern hemlocks are dying across the Southeast and the Great Smokies, victim of a non-native insect, the hemlock woolly adelgid. Most of the old-growth Eastern hemlocks in the Smokies—which cover over 800 acres, more than any other national park—are expected to die.
The park is a world-renowned preserve of wildflower diversity with more than 1,500 kinds of flowering plants, more than in any other North American national park. About 1,500 black bears live in the Smokies, the males growing to 250 pounds, and between 150 and 200 elk roam inside and outside park boundaries since being reintroduced in 2001; they are two among 65 mammal species. About 240 species of birds have been sighted in the park; almost 120 species breed here.
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View from the Appalachian Trail, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, N.C.
When planning this trip, like many backpackers coming here, I considered a traverse of the AT, but was dissuaded by the time-consuming shuttle. Lucky me. Instead, I’m hiking this loop from the park’s bottom to its top and back down, giving me a full Great Smokies experience, as well as a lot more solitude than one gets on the AT (except very early in the morning on the AT). After leaving Andrews Bald, I’ll see no more people until shortly before reaching the road. And while solitude certainly makes my ears more sensitive to the little sounds in the forest’s subdued symphony, it also expands my sense of the wilderness enveloping me, like a hot-air balloon slowly filling. Solitude makes the wilderness vaster.
The long descent from Clingmans Dome to Lakeview Drive East, about 5,500 vertical feet, takes a toll on my legs and back. But the long downhill slog returns me to the elevations in the Smokies where, to my mind, much of the magic of these mountains dwells: in the streams and cascades.
Yesterday morning, not very far into my hike, I made my first streamside stop at Forney Creek. Dropping my pack, I set up my camera on my tripod beside a small cascade plunging into a pool. Sunshine backlighting the trees reflected in the pool, turning the water’s rippled surface several hues of green. Across the park’s lower and middle elevations, I found myself mesmerized by one cascade after another on these tiny, rock-strewn streams.
Now, not far from my vehicle and the end of my week of hiking in North Carolina, I stop beside Noland Creek at a spot where it bumps up against a cluster of leaf- and moss-covered rocks the size of sea turtles, rocks worn marble-smooth by untold days rolled up into years and centuries. Delayed briefly by this constriction of stone, the creek pools calmly behind the rocks before slipping through slots between the ones that rise above water level, and pouring in ghostly white braids over the lip of one long rock in center stream.
For my minutes beside Noland Creek, the rushing water dominates the forest’s subdued symphony. But once I move on, the subtler sounds return, the birds and slight breeze in this Eastern Eden.
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See all my stories about Great Smoky Mountains National Park and hiking and backpacking in western North Carolina, including “The 12 Best Dayhikes Along North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Parkway” and “Roof of the East: Hiking North Carolina’s Mount Mitchell,” and all of my stories about adventures in national parks at The Big Outside.
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THIS TRIP IS GOOD FOR all backpackers, including beginners. While the route covers a large elevation range, trails are generally not very steep, and are well-maintained and well-marked. An extensive trail system and variety of backcountry campsite and shelter options allowing for customizing the daily mileage and total distance.
Make It Happen
Season The best season for hiking in the Great Smokies is September through mid-November, with mild temperatures and the driest weather of the year, as well as foliage color usually in the second half of October (but varying with elevation). April and May have comfortable temperatures, but those are wet months, too. Summers bring high heat and humidity and hazy conditions. Snow falls in the mountains from late November through February and into March.
The Itinerary
I backpacked overnight a 34.3-mile loop from the end of Lakeview Drive East (at about 2,100 feet) out of Bryson City. On day one, I hiked the Lakeshore/Benton MacKaye Trail, Forney Creek Trail, Bear Creek Trail, went out-and-back to High Rocks (either 1.2 or 1.4 miles round-trip, depending on whether you believe the map or trail signs), up Welch Ridge Trail, and then west on the Appalachian Trail 0.4 mile to the Silers Bald shelter at 5,607 feet, which was 17 miles and more than 3,500 vertical feet uphill.
On day two, I hiked east on AT to 6,643-foot Clingmans Dome, and then down Forney Ridge Trail over Andrews Bald to Springhouse Branch Trail and Noland Creek Trail to Lakeview Drive, where I hitched a ride the 0.7 mile back to my car, walking 17.3 miles that second day with about 1,200 feet of uphill and 4,500 feet of downhill. It may be worth descending the Forney Creek Trail instead of the Forney Ridge Trail to see more cascades and waterfalls.
Getting There From Bryson City, N.C., on the south side of the park, drive Everett Street north, which becomes Fontana Road. At the park boundary, that becomes East Lakeview Drive. Drive to the parking area at the end of the road. Walk through the tunnel beyond the parking area to reach the trail.
Shuttle Service Numerous trailhead shuttle services operate in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Find them with an online search.
Permit A permit is required for camping overnight in the backcountry of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Reservations may be made up to 30 days in advance of the first night of your trip, and there’s a fee per person per night. See more information at http://ift.tt/2xs4tDR.
Map Trails Illustrated Great Smoky Mountains National Park trail map, $11.95, rei.com.
Concerns
• Severe storms can occur in spring and summer, including tornadoes, and afternoon thunderstorms are common in summer.
• Higher elevations receive up to 85 inches of rain a year, more than anywhere else in the contiguous United States except parts of the Pacific Northwest, qualifying these areas as temperate rainforests.
Contact Great Smoky Mountains National Park, (865) 436-1200, nps.gov/grsm. Backcountry Information Office, (865) 436-1297. Visit North Carolina, visitnc.com.
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