Smokies Park Facing Stiff Challenges from Ever-Increasing Visitation

At Newfound Gap, where President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated Great Smoky Mountains National Park in September 1940, the plaque nobly notes that the park exists ‘for the permanent enjoyment of the people.’

In 2019, nearly 80 years after the park’s dedication and 85 years after its establishment, a record 12.5 million people came to enjoy the Smokies. In 2020, despite a 46-day total park shutdown because of the pandemic, 12.1 million visited. From June through December of 2020, the park actually attracted one million more visitors than during the same seven months in 2019.

As GSMNP Superintendent Cassius Cash said: “This increase in use didn’t come without a cost. Visitors experienced even more congestion, the busiest places in the park became even busier, and visitors often left behind litter and damaged roadsides from out-of-bounds parking.”

Even in a park comprising about 520,000 acres, Smokies visitation numbers are staggering—more than three times those of Yellowstone and its 2.2 million acres, constituting the nation’s second most visited national park in 2020. The impact would be great even if no one littered, picked flowers, trampled vegetation, defaced historic structures, drove recklessly, flew drones, parked in fragile spots, took dogs into the backcountry, approached elk, or fed bears. Alas, those activities and others defying park regulations are not uncommon, even if many visitors do seek to minimize their impact on the park’s abundant natural resources. 

It’s true that some park visitors are mainly just passing through on U.S. 441, which traverses the Smokies for more than 30 miles as Newfound Gap Road. Even so, their vehicles are among the five million or so that are now entering the park each year, despite the fact that Newfound Gap Road is often closed in winter because of snow, ice, fallen trees or high winds. The vehicle count seems likely to continue climbing in a park that has a major U.S. highway winding through it and, by law, no entrance fee.

To compound the congestion, Smokies visitors who are not simply driving through often tend to gravitate to several perennially popular places, to the extent that any semblance of solitude is all but impossible. Granted, not every park visitor is looking for a measure of that. But for those who are, quietude is becoming increasingly elusive in certain pockets of the park. 

Although long known as a hiker’s park (though in fact it’s even more of a motorist’s park), hordes of hikers continue to be generally scarce a mile or two out on most Smokies trails. But that’s emphatically not the case on trails such as Alum Cave, Laurel Falls and Chimney Tops on the Tennessee side of the park. The Appalachian Trail northbound from Newfound Gap to Charlies Bunion, hugging the state line, certainly must rank as the busiest four-mile section of the entire 2,200-mile footpath. 

It also should be noted that many visitors are either not able or inclined to walk even a short distance during their visits. Yet they can and do drive to places such as Cades Cove, Clingmans Dome (seasonally) and Newfound Gap that, frankly, are overrun with visitors and vehicles most any time the weather isn’t miserable, and sometimes even when it is. Gridlock at those locations can rival that of any large metropolitan area, no surprise when you consider that Cades Cove and Clingmans Dome each draw more visitors annually than most national parks. 

The Smokies park has been the nation’s most visited since the 1940s, owning partly to its size, continuing free entrance, and relative proximity to much of the population of the Eastern United States. But visitation has exploded in recent years, increasing by more than 30 percent from 2010-2019 even as full-time park staffing declined by nearly 20 percent during that span. Perhaps more than any other national park, GSMNP wrestles with goals that can be at cross purposes: protecting and preserving remarkable natural resources while providing for public enjoyment of the park. With the park’s soaring visitation, both goals would seem to be in peril, though surrounding communities surely find no fault with the annual economic benefit from Smokies tourism: a whopping $1.38 billion in 2020, according to a National Park Service study.

In response to the visitation boom the park has begun a formal planning process, initiated by a series of virtual workshops, for visitor-use management. As you might imagine, there are no easy answers—perhaps not many hard ones, either.

For me personally, the tipping point came on a sunny Saturday in early November 2019. After I finished work late in the afternoon at Clingmans Dome Information Center, it took 20 minutes to drive from the dome parking lot to as far as the Noland Divide trailhead along Clingmans Dome Road—about the same amount of time it would have taken me to walk the mile or so. Even on the busiest of July and October days, I had never encountered such a significant slowdown while leaving the dome area. Vehicle traffic on the road finally did begin to flow past the Noland Divide trailhead.  

Fortunately, there had not been a vehicle accident on the road that evening. The stopped and slow-moving traffic resulted from heavy incoming and outgoing vehicle traffic, continuing heavy pedestrian travel, and numerous vehicles parked along the road shoulder in either direction that were not completely off the pavement. All told, it had the feel of departing a football game with tens of thousands of fans in attendance.

Not surprisingly, Clingmans Dome—and its prodigious parking area—is one of several places Smokies managers have identified as candidates for pilot projects that could prove effective in relieving congestion. This year, visitor impacts at the parking areas and on the trails for Laurel Falls, Rainbow Falls and Grotto Falls are being monitored by park personnel for possible future solutions.

Park managers also have begun work on a Laurel Falls Trail Management Plan. The plan will address visitor experience as well as safety, parking and trail infrastructure rehabilitation for the most traveled path in the park, hiked by an astonishing total of nearly 350,000 people per year.

During a pilot project from Sept. 7 to Oct. 3 of this year, parking in undesignated areas near the Laurel Falls trailhead was prohibited. Parking at the trailhead was allowed by reservation only through  for a fee of $14 per car. Visitors also could access the trailhead via shuttle service from Gatlinburg for a fee of $5 per person.

This past spring, park visitation soared past one million for the month of April for the first time: about 1.17 million according to preliminary estimates. In May, 1.36 million people visited—a 24 percent increase over May of 2019, the record-setting visitation year. And in June, the last month for which estimated numbers were available as of this writing, more than 1.66 million visited, or about 13 percent above June 2019 visitation. People continue to pour into the park to enjoy its beauty, biodiversity and history, with seemingly no letup in sight.