Moon Shadow Mania

An astronomical number of visitors will descend on the Smoky Mountains for the Great American Eclipse—an out-of-this-world, thank-your-lucky-star, universally spectacular event.

But Nick Breedlove can sum it up in just three words.

Bring. It. On.

“My perspective is you can always be over-prepared but you should never be under-prepared,” said Breedlove, the tourism director in Jackson County, North Carolina.

When Breedlove realized Jackson County would be ground zero for throngs of eclipse pilgrims, he sounded the alarm bell. The eclipse was still 18 months away then, but to Breedlove, there wasn’t a moment to spare. 

Police officers needed traffic models, ambulance drivers needed contingency routes, and tourism leaders needed festival plans. 

“We brought everyone to the table who might be impacted in some way,” said Breedlove. 

But as monthly stakeholder meetings progressed, the to-do list only seemed to grow longer. 

They needed park-and-ride lots with shuttles and legions of porta potties. There were bands to schedule, web sites to design and roadside signage to coordinate.

As luck would have it, move-in at Western Carolina University coincides with eclipse weekend, creating a traffic vortex of its own. Even the public school system was in a quandary, since kids are typically boarding afternoon buses right around the time of totality.

The worst-case scenario: a milieu on par with a Bristol NASCAR race and University of Tennessee football game at the same time.

“We just don’t know what is going to happen,” said Enrique Gomez, astronomy professor at WCU. “So much of this will be contingent on human factors.”

Gomez has had the eclipse on his own calendar for a decade or more.

“I started talking to my classes about it back in 2010,” Gomez said. “It is kind of a weird feeling right now because what I’ve been talking about to my students for years is finally here.”

Last year, he started sending emails to county officials.

“I just wanted to give them a heads up and make sure we would have the resources on the ground to handle large amounts of traffic and people,” Gomez said. 

Gomez is a scientist, not a traffic engineer or emergency manager. But he plotted a few back-of-the-envelope scenarios to convey the import.

“They needed to have a sense of the scale,” Gomez said.

Powers that be have taken it to heart. The N.C. Department of Transportation has done high-level traffic modeling and created ingress-and-egress patterns. Jackson County officials have conducted tabletop exercises to simulate how they’d respond to potential emergencies in the thick of the eclipse.

Meanwhile, Clark Lovelace was moving the chains in nearby Brevard, North Carolina.

“We called everyone together and said ‘Let’s huddle up,’” recalled Lovelace, tourism director for Transylvania County. “Step one was making sure the community knew how big this thing is. And then start that ball rolling to create a unique package of events.”

From local breweries like Oscar Blues to Brevard College to Gorges State Park, Lovelace encouraged everyone to celebrate the eclipse somehow, in a way that fits them.

Breedlove’s biggest message to the traveling public is to plan ahead.

“People will be stuck in traffic for a long time if they decide Monday morning to go drive and view the eclipse. We are encouraging people to come early,” Breedlove said. “My goal is to manage expectations.”

Breedlove has also been prepping lodging owners and merchants to gear up.

Luckily, the mountains are used to scaling up during peak tourist times.

“Everyone has some familiarity with the mode of ‘OK man, things are going to be crazy,’” Lovelace said.

What to do about the park

The Great Smoky Mountains National Park will be a hotspot for viewing the eclipse.

“People love the Smokies. When they think, ‘Where can we go to see this out in nature?’ it’s a go-to place,” said Susan Sachs, an education coordinator for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. 

The park is no stranger to crowds. As the most visited national park, it sees 11 million visitors a year. But the windy two-lane roads in and out of the Smokies only have so much capacity.

“One of the tricky things is we really just don’t know how many people are going to come,” said Clay Jordan, associate superintendent for the Smokies. “There’s nothing to help us gauge.”

The park’s eclipse committee has been holding marathon-planning sessions twice a month since January to coordinate the big day.

“This is the largest single event we’ve ever had in the park, because it is in so many locations,” Sachs said. “It’s all hands on deck.”

The Smokies has taken a two-fold approach. Clingman’s Dome, the highest point in the park, will be closed for a ticketed-only event—the 1,350 spots sold out in just four minutes back in February. Closing Clingman’s Dome was deemed a necessary evil.

“We would have had something of a nightmare on our hands that could be detrimental to the protection of resources, and potentially a really lousy visitor experience as tons of people try to flood in and then get gridlocked by traffic,” Jordan said.

Not all of the park falls in the path of totality, but two areas that do have been designated as public viewing sites—the field at Oconaluftee Visitor Center in North Carolina and Cades Cove in Tennessee

If and when the park reaches capacity, it will shut down the main entrances. Usually, park visitors stop at overlooks, take a gander, and keep moving.

“But in this case, once they settle in to a spot they will be there for the duration,” Jordan said.”

On the road

Outside of the national park, there’s plenty of public land in the Smoky Mountains for eclipse watching—from the Nantahala National Forest in North Carolina to the Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee.

“National forests can’t close,” said John Innes with the Partners of Cherokee National Forest. “People will do their level best to get to the center of totality. The path rolls right through the Cherokee National Forest, so we thought we better pay some attention to this.”

Innes realized early on there would be a lot of people pressing in to the path of totality who have no idea where they’re going. Especially when they lose cell signal and their map apps quit working.

To help people chart their way through eclipse territory, Innes rolled out a commemorative eclipse map of the Smoky Mountain region with a focus on public lands and outdoor recreation spots.

“This is a way to keep control of your experience and enjoyment and not miss a minute of it,” Innes said.

You can order the eclipse map through the Great Smoky Mountains Associations online store.

With the eclipse bisecting Tennessee, a whopping 17 Tennessee state parks fall in the path of totality.

“Everybody is fascinated with this and I think it is a great opportunity to introduce the sky into our realm of consciousness,” said Jeff Wells, programming director for the Tennessee State Parks system.

Communities of the Smokies have rallied to a monumental occasion, taking every measure possible to pull off the eclipse weekend without a hitch.

Unfortunately, some on the front lines won’t actually see the celestial show they’ve worked so hard for.

Jordan has no false notion of watching the eclipse from a lawn chair.

“I will be sweating it out, hoping that a million moving parts on that day go smoothly,” Jordan said.