Cades Cove Weekened - Day One Continued - Bear Photos

Jim and I began the gradual but long descent of Gregory Ridge Trail. Five miles is a long distance with no way to mark your progress, no intersections, no artifacts, no GPS (okay, okay, I'll learn how to use it by next time!), just a watch that seemed to have stopped. Jim is always faster than me on the uphills with those cyclist thighs, but I am actually slightly faster on the downhill. We were trucking along, heads down to watch our footing, and I was about 20 paces ahead when Jim called my name. When I turned around, he was looking up the steep slope near the ridge and he whispered, "Bears!" I snuck back to stand beside him (to protect him, of course). He had seen a small bear climbing a dead tree trunk. I didn't see the small bear, but I saw a large black shape turn, take a couple of steps, and then Mama spotted us and gave us a good stare for three hundred hours, three seconds in real time. Then she moved out of sight and we heard a very strange, loud sound, something between a growl and a shriek and a snuffle that every human and animal child since time began understands to mean, "Get over here RIGHT NOW!" Then some crashing steps and silence. Were they still there or had they gone over the ridge?

Here is my photo of the bear: (pretend...)

Oh well...best I could do in the heat of the moment. I think I actually took a picture of the inside of my pocket. I'll get one next time!
Seeing the bears was not scary, but it taught us a valuable lesson where to look - up! From then on we scanned the slopes and stumbled a lot. Our feet were grateful to reach the car.

Forgot to mention - at the lower elevations the white rhododendrons were blooming profusely near the ground, overhead, absolutely everywhere. (This would prove to be the case on all three hiking days.) Along Parson Branch Road the bushes bloomed three stories high. The buds are a gorgeous pink and then fully open to beautiful white with a pink tinge. It was difficult not to take a photo of every single bloom! (Click on photos to see full screen.)

We headed back up Parson Branch Road, stopped at the Cades Cove Visitor Center with the multitudes, and got in line on the merry-go-round one-lane loop road to go back to our campsite. Patience was required in amounts larger than I possessed, as cars do stop in the middle of the road when they see something interesting, people leaning out of car windows to take photos. Often they stop in front of the friendly signs that say, "Please be courteous and pull over."

Back at camp we cooked a fabulous noodles-and-canned-chicken extravaganza and walked to the little camp store for soft-serve ice cream. This is a great family campground, kids riding bikes everywhere, burgers cooking, campground TV going (i.e. campfires), and it makes for great people-watching. Makes you feel good that some folks still take their kids outside. I guarantee you those kids will always remember their family camping trips. Jim and I gave our feet the rest of the day off, sat and read our books until it got dark, and then got packs ready for another adventure tomorrow. Another happy hiking tip: earplugs!

Cades Cove Weekend - Day One - Fire On The Mountain

Gregory Bald Trail/Gregory Ridge Trail Plus a Road Walk and a Side Trip - 15.7 Miles

Up at 6:05 AM (every minute of sleep helps) because we wanted a very early start on the fabulous hike we had planned. One of our secrets to happy hiking is we each have a customized food bag filled with our favorite hiking-friendly foods for the weekend and we just grab a few things for the day and go. We don't eat lunch but we snack all day, sometimes at every trail junction. Boots on and packs ready, we took off along the Cades Cove loop road to the far end and Parson Branch Road, a gravel road that is two-way to a parking area, then one-way continuing out of the park on the North Carolina side. If you get on the one-way part you face a multi-hour drive back around the western edge of the Park to Cades Cove

Today's hike was in the "Day Hiker's Guide" again, Hike #1 in the Twentymile/Fontana section (even though we were camping in Cades Cove). Jim and I wanted to hike up the Gregory Bald Trail and down the Gregory Ridge Trail, but there are four miles of walking between the trailheads at the bottom of the mountain - the one-way Parson Branch Road. We had only one car, so our brilliant scheme was to park at the end of the two-way portion and start walking along the one-way, hoping to hitch a ride (no, I would NEVER do this alone.) Soon a car approached....and passed us by without a glance. Now, keep in mind, there is no reason to be on this road at all except to get to the trailhead we are walking towards. I guess the half-eaten bagel in my hand looked dangerous.

Twenty minutes of walking and we heard another vehicle approaching. I turned to walk backwards facing them, thumb out, smile on, and fell straight into a ditch.

My ploy worked! They stopped to see if we needed help and were glad to give us a ride. We were all going to the same place, Gregory Bald. Thanks, Jerry and Richard, for saving us three miles of road walking. Jim and I headed up the trail, and as karma always comes back around, on the way up we passed the two guys who had passed us by earlier, smiling and saying, "Great day for a hike, huh?"

Our holy grail today was Gregory Bald, one of several mountain balds in the Smokies and famous for its profusion of flame azeala bushes at their peak bloom in late June, and our visit did not disappoint. The day was a bit hazy and my photography skills are still lacking, but it was a huge area of meadow grasses and azaleas taller than a person ranging from white to yellow to pink to every shade of orange imaginable, with a backdrop of rows of blue mountains. This is a sight to visit over and over and over.

During our leisurely hour on the bald we chatted again with Jerry and Richard and discovered that we both knew an avid Smokies hiker (hi Wendell!) who has completed his Smokies map and keeps on going. Hopefully I will hike with their Wednesday group someday.

Interesting story from "100 Hikes in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park" by Russ Manning: The bald is named after Russell Gregory, who lived in Cades Cove but also had a stone cabin on the bald where he tended his own and others' cattle in the summertime. "During the Civil War, Gregory was loyal to the Union, though his son Charles had joined the Confederacy. With the young men gone to war, Gregory organized and led the women, children and old men to confront a band of Confederate raiders who had been pillaging the area during 1864. Unknown to Gregory, Charles was part of the raiding party. No one was killed in the confrontation in which the raiders were turned back, but some of them returned in the night and murdered Russell Gregory in retaliation."

Past the bald, Jim and I came to Rich Gap (where cattle were kept and their droppings made for great fertilizer, hence the name - I'm not making that up) and the intersection with the Gregory Ridge Trail, but here we turned right onto a faint trail in search of Moore Spring, where a hiker's shelter was located until it burned in the 1970's. (Hey, sometimes you've got to get off the interstate and check out the world's largest ball of string.) This was a .2-mile out-and-back just to see if we could find it. Click on the photo for full size and you can see the water bubbling from under the rock. I felt like Jed Clampet finding his bubbling crude!

Back to the main trail and making a right turn, we followed Gregory Bald Trail to its terminus at the Appalachian Trail. Actually, Gregory Bald was part of the AT until a re-route in the late 1940's. Then we backtracked to Rich Gap once again and turned right onto Gregory Ridge Trail to head down the mountain to our car. By now we were getting tired and our feet were not happy so we were not looking forward to 5 miles of downhill. Hikers out there, which is harder, uphill or downhill?

Well, Jim says that my posts are sometimes too long, so I will wait until tomorrow to tell you about the bears.

Destination: Cades Cove Is How Far?

Someday we will realize that a camping/hiking weekend requires more than ten minutes of preparation, but apparently we need a few more painful lessons. Jim had to work a full day on Thursday and I also had work to finish, then buy food, pack clothes, pack camping supplies, pack hiking supplies, pick up my car from a maintenance check, go to the bank, lose my mind a few times...so we were both in excellent frame of mind when I picked Jim up at the train station. But on the road we soon could see the mountains of western North Carolina in front of us and the day behind us disappeared. Our destination was Cades Cove, on the "quiet" Tennessee side of the Smokies. We have visited Cades Cove once in the past for a day and remembered it as crowded and congested. We expected it to be the same this time, but since we were staying a few days we hoped to get into the flow and enjoy the family atmosphere (which we did when we weren't in the car stuck behind truckloads of people in lawn chairs in the middle of the one-lane loop road looking at the wild turkey across the field...but I digress). As the navigator and family map reader, I chose the longer way to Cades Cove, not because I wanted to drive farther in the dark but because I was more familiar with the route. We drove through Maggie Valley, then across the Park on Newfound Gap Road, then over to Cades Cove and the campground, a total of 5 hours from Charlotte. Arriving at our reserved campsite at 10:30 PM, we quietly set up our tent and it was lights out. Hike preparations would have to wait until morning.