Great Smokey Mountains National Park (April 2 – 9): We spent a week camped outside the town of Cherokee, NC, where the Blue Ridge Parkway ends at the east end of the Great Smokey Mountains.
This area is also where the Trail of Tears transverses, which remembers and commemorates the survival of the Cherokee people, forcefully removed from their homelands in Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee to live in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma. They traveled by foot, horse, wagon, or steamboat in 1838-1839. I was wondering why we were actually staying on a Cherokee Reservation based on the story behind the Trail of Tears, but a small group of the Cherokee somehow were excluded from the original treaty that forced the rest of the Cherokee in the nearby states to move to Oklahoma and were established in a reservation on the SE side of the Great Smokey’s in the town of Cherokee.
Great Smokey Mountains, Clingmans Dome and drive through Gatlinburg and around the north end of the park:
We got up early to a brisk morning and beat the crowds to the newly opened for the season, Clingmans Dome, off the Newfound Gap road that bisects the park. Clingmans Dome is the highest point in the Great Smokey Mountains and the walk/hike up to the dome finishes with a walk up a spiral ramp to a tower overlooking both North Carolina and Tennessee. This structure was built in the 1960’s replacing a wooden structure from the 30’s.
We stopped by the Oconaluftee Visitor Center and took the drive over Newfound Gap Road quite a few times. Elk are commonly seen, especially in the morning.
Cades Cove Area on the Tennessee side of the Great Smokey NP was an area that has been inhabited both by Native Americans for hundreds of years and then settlers from the 1820s to the 1940s. The National Park service maintains many of the cabins, churches and even a working grist mill from the settlers time period. We also took a hike up to Abrams Falls.
We also visited waterfalls on the North Carolina side of the park. Mingo Falls was less than a mile from our campground in Cherokee and Juney Whank Falls and Indian Creek Falls were on the very south end of the park near Deep Creek.
The Traveling Lounsburys 