Great Smoky Mountains National Park - The 2018 Visit
It's been several years since we've had vacation time available to camp for a full week at a national park, something that we quite enjoy doing, so we were pretty excited to be able to work it into the schedule this year. It was actually our first time camping without any kids along. What a milestone! That meant I had to help set up camp and accompany Wayne on all of his hikes, but that wasn't a burden at all. In fact, it was quite enjoyable. We had a wonderful time!
We arrived on Saturday afternoon and set up camp. Then on Sunday we drove the Cades Cove Loop, which included several short hikes and one longer one. Each day afterwards we went on a different hike.
Abrams Falls - 5 miles - hundreds of people
Rich Mountain Loop - 8.95 miles - 21 people
Gregory Bald - 14.81 miles - 4 people on trail, 2 at a back-country campsite
You'll notice that's over 60 miles of hiking in 6 days; I'm quite proud of myself for doing something I've never done before. If I note that we did the Abrams Falls and Rich Mountain Loop trails on a holiday weekend, it makes sense that there were more people. The other ones were done on weekdays. That pattern matches the capacity of the campground as well. We stayed at Cades Cove which has 159 sites and they were all filled when we arrived Saturday afternoon. However, when we came back from Monday's hike, it felt like a ghost town, with maybe a dozen sites occupied in our section. That's probably a good thing, since the one bad thing about our stay this time was water issues - something about a broken main - which led to a boil water notice and the "comfort stations" being closed intermittently. However, we survived perfectly well, and that just helped make this particular stay unique.
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