Settling on the Smokies
As 2021’s arrival brought a welcome end to 2020, my hopes for international travel were high. But as the year wore on, it became clear that “normal” was still too distant to venture outside the U.S. We’d settle for a semi-local trip instead, my husband and I decided, taking a couple weeks off work to camp a loop around the Smokies.
“Settle,” of course, is the wrong word for that decision. Other people travel thousands of miles to experience the famously gorgeous Great Smoky Mountains region, and we are blessed to have it in our proverbial backyard. In fact, there are so many trails and overlooks within an hour of our house that we’d never had the motivation to explore the equally spectacular mountains two or three hours away.
This trip would change that.
While most people are familiar, at least in name, with the 816-square-mile Great Smoky Mountains National Park that straddles the North Carolina-Tennessee border, fewer are familiar with the millions of acres of national forest land that ring it. Here, it’s possible to find a pull-off on a lonely gravel Forest Service road, set up camp for free, and venture off in the morning to some remote trailhead or little-known waterfall.
We thought we’d found the perfect spot for our first night of camping, in the Cherokee National Forest just outside the Bald River Wilderness Area. We didn’t see a soul as we drove the steep road up from the river gorge, tooling along the ridge until we found a flat spot to pitch the tent. After dinner and a campfire, we crawled in and fell asleep.
Not for long, though. Somewhere around 4 a.m., a parade of headlights came up the road, shining directly into our tent when they rounded the curve. Shortly thereafter, the dogs began barking. It was bear season, and we’d clearly decided to camp in someone’s favorite hunting grounds. Neither of us got much sleep that night.
Thankfully, our subsequent camping spots worked out better. There was the place near Lake Conasauga in Georgia’s Chattahoochee National Forest, where firewood was plentiful and great-horned owls hooted at night. Then somewhere in the mountains outside Helen, Georgia, we found a spacious site on a triangle of land that was invisible from the road but offered a sunset view without even leaving the camp chairs.
We passed our evenings sitting around the campfire, roasting marshmallows and watching the flames flicker. But our days were busy, spent hiking, stopping at overlooks and breweries, and choosing the scenic route rather than the most direct path. Sometimes this resulted in some harrowing moments, like the time a logging truck fully loaded with timber whipped past us as on a narrow Forest Service road. My husband hastily tucked the car into a pulloff to avoid the oncoming vehicle, but we still stuck out too far into the road—and the logging truck wasn’t stopping. We sucked in our breath as he laid into the gas pedal, shooting the gap as the truck rounded the curve. The logs rustled uncomfortably close to my window.
Mostly, though, the scenic route and backcountry sleeping quarters served to place us closer to the beautiful places we’d come to see, especially waterfalls. We hadn’t planned it this way, but the trip turned out to be a tour of the Southern Blue Ridge’s finest waterfalls as much as anything else.
We saw well-known, popular ones like 729-foot Amicolola Falls, just past the famous stone arch that marks the start of the ascent to the Appalachian Trail’s southern terminus at Springer Mountain. We hiked the three-mile loop at DuPont State Recreational Forest that passes by Hooker Falls, Triple Falls and High Falls, which collectively drop a total of more than 280 feet. It was a Monday but the crowds were still heavy. During a weekend respite in downtown Greenville, South Carolina, we wandered through the landscaped gardens at Falls Park, right in the center of town, and across the curved 345-foot pedestrian bridge that crosses the Reedy River, offering a straight-line view to the downtown’s resident waterfall.
We also found some hidden gems, all the more beautiful for their solitude. A Google Maps marker alerted us to a 50-foot cascade barely visible from the road to our campsite near Helen, so after setting up the tent we rolled back down the mountain and picked our way up the faint path hugging the slippery banks. Soon we stood at the base of a wild cascade, alone and miles from civilization. A friend’s recommendation put three more jewels in the crown. Just over the South Carolina line, we pulled off of yet another gravel road to follow yet another faint path along a creek bank in search of beauty. Over the course of three hours or so, we saw two other couples and three waterfalls, culminating with a multi-tiered cascade falling into a calm, shady pool somewhere near the confluence with the Chattooga River.
That sense of discovery is perhaps what I love most about travel, but defining “travel” as a journey to some far-away place can lead to the delusion that exploration is only possible hundreds of miles away from home. On this two-week journey, the furthest we ever roamed from our doorstep was about 150 miles, but the spirit of adventure stayed strong. Settling on the Smokies is a pretty good deal.