Great Smoky Mountains - Crown Jewel of the Appalachians

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Narrator: Horace Kephart wrote in his seminal 1913 book on the Smoky Mountains Our Southern Highlanders, "The Smoky Mountains have a character all their own. Their apparent height is more impressive than that of many a loftier Summit in the West... Nearly all of them are clad to their tops in dense forest and thick undergrowth... There are no bare, rocky summits rising above timber-line... Seldom does one see even a naked ledge of rock... The very cliffs are sheathed with trees and shrubs... a dreamy blue haze, ever hovers over the mountains, unless they be swathed in cloud, or for a few minutes, after a sharp rain-storm has cleared the atmosphere. The Smoky Mountains owe their name to this tenuous mist. It softens all outlines, and lends a mirage-like effect of great distance to objects that are but a few miles off... until finally the sky-line blends with the sky itself. "The Smokys are old... They were old, very old, before the Alps, the Andes, the Rockies and the Himalayas were molded into their primal shapes... Upon them, were born the first hardwoods of America - perhaps those of Europe, too... and upon them today the last great hardwood forests of our country stand in primeval majesty, mutely awaiting their imminent doom... The richness of the Great Smoky forest has been the wonder and the admiration of everyone who has traversed it." (Randy) I write books about hiking in the southeast and hiking in the Smokys but frankly I moved to this area many years ago to find this kind of environment. I mean the high Great Smoky Mountain environment with evergreen trees and distant views and mysterious mists, it just one of the most scenic places in the United States. (Brad) They're very few parks that have the word great in front of them and this has got to be the most diverse area in the entire world and to me I have a passion to preserve the past here and I don't know how long I'll be in the Smokys. I've been here 10 years now and I'm just scratching the surface of what there is to learn about the people who once lived here, the Cherokee all the way up to the first settlers that were here, and to me the challenge and my passion is to dig as deep as I can and learn what I can and try to interpret it to the nine million people that come here every year to the Smokys to continue the story of the people who once lived here, and I love the challenge that I have to do that research. I hope that challenge never gets old, because I love this place, I love the people and there is not a single visitor that comes here one time that doesn't come back again. I think some parks you may say, "Ah, I've seen that park, no big deal," but when they come to the Smokey's, they're going to come back, they're going to bring their friends, grand kids, great grand kids. There was a family today that was four generations that came to the Smokey's and there's just something about this place that gets under your skin, and I understand it. I can't put it into words but I understand how great this place really is. (Paul) Just being able to walk through this beautiful forest and to be able to appreciate both the people that came before, the Native Americans, the early settlers, the scientists that explored these mountains, but be able to make some discoveries of my own even if it's not a new species to science it's still an amazing observation of a salamander peeking out from a hole in the rocks on the side of a cliff or a butterfly that I've never seen before. That kind of ability to discover biological diversity here right where I work is just amazing for me. (Cherokee Man) My people are from here so it means a lot to me personally to live in this land still. I feel whenever I leave Cherokee area I kind of feel lost and afraid. Whenever I'm here I feel safe. (Cherokee Woman) That is so true, that is so true. Once we're in the flat lands it's so open, you have no protection. In here we're protected by our mountains and by just the area. Narrator: Fortunately for the hiker, the historian, the scientist and the Cherokee, the "imminent doom" Horace Kephart predicted for the glorious forests that covered the Smokys never occurred. Instead, in 1926, Congress authorized the creation of a great national park in the east... a great national Park east of the Mississippi River... a park in the Southern Appalachian Mountains... a park that would contain the largest wilderness area east of the Mississippi River... a park that today covers over 500,000 acres of breath-taking beauty: lush highland meadows... glorious waterfalls... pristine mountain streams... the highest mountain tops in the Appalachians... the largest stands of old-growth forest in the eastern United States... And to crown it all, it encompasses one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in the world: This is Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the crown jewel of the Appalachian Mountains. Narrator: This is easily one of the most beautiful places in the world. Every square inch seems to lie beneath the shade of towering hardwoods - poplars, oaks, rhododendrons, hickories and maples - that are magically emerald green in the summer, [montage] and forests that are vividly explosive in their fall foliage. [montage] The beauty of the Smokys is about the enchanting play of light... a play of light that is ever changing... a play of light that reveals something that will never be seen again. [montage] But spring is when the Smokys become the park of flowers... ephemeral spring flowers that last for only a few weeks... butter cups... lilies... violets... wild phlox... and many more. [montage] Then there are the elegant Fern fiddleheads... and of course, the most glorious of all the spring flowers - the Trillium. Higher up the Great Smokys, a damp, moss-laden, evergreen, spruce and fir forest lords over the mist covered mountain tops... Ancient survivors left untouched by the last Ice Age... and here left untouched by the lumberman's saw. A Noah's Ark of plants that repopulated the continent. [montage] (Randy) It's so eerie when the fog is ebbing and flowing through the trees and it's always cool, always snowy in winter. It's a little bit of the north and the south frankly and I just love the dripping dampness and cool, lush rich kind of environment out here. It's very, very special that you can get this high in the southeastern United States and find a climate that is not very southern. Narrator: There is a special feeling... a haunting beauty around the old buildings in the park... buildings long abandoned. Not only buildings but also cemeteries. (Brad) I'm very passionate about the cemeteries because they tell so many stories; they tell of life and death, they tell of how big families were. Most people think mountain people were isolated and they were not as isolated as we once thought because they did get out into the outside world and cemeteries tell us so much about this. They tell us about marriage, when people were married, the child deaths that are in these things and the epidemics that came through, they tell so much and I love the cemeteries out there. What we have here is one of the cemeteries in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We have about 170 different cemeteries in the Smoky's and this is the Evens Chapel Cemetery, which has about 75 graves in it. Of those we have about 30 of them we actually know were born here, and where we're walking right now are a section of stones here that are children. I was talking to and old-timer one time who told me that if a child could live to the age of about five years old then he could live to be a ripe old age of about 35 or 40. Those first five years were very tender times in the life of a farm child here in the Smokys, and most of these right here are three, four, five years old, but we really don't know who some of these folks are. Some of these are just headstones and a foot stone, with no markings on them what so ever, but then we do have some that do tell us the name of the family, when they were born, when they died and very close to some of the other families here in this area, but most folks here in the Smokys lived about maybe about 50, 55, 60 years old even though there were some people who lived up in their low hundreds here in what is not the Smoky Mountains. Narrator: Water... rushing water... falling water... a powerful kind of beauty... a beauty gathered in the strength of movement. [montage] And of course, there are the ever-present deer and black bear that make the Park their home. [montage] And there is a subtle beauty in the small things... in the extraordinary details everywhere you look. [montage] It is in these remarkable details - up close and personal - that the Park reveals its astounding biodiversity - a wealth of genes, species, and ecosystems that the park is famous for... a biodiversity built on its unique climate and geology. Narrator: Great Smoky Mountain National Park rests in the geographic province known as the Blue Ridge Mountains... mountains called that because of their distinctive blue appearance when seen from a distance... mountains that, in turn, are part of the larger Appalachian chain of mountains... a vast chain of mountains that extends from the northeastern provinces in Canada to the southern state of Alabama. The Blue Ridge Mountains were actually uplifted and crumpled and pushed up into the most mountainous region of the whole system... a region containing the highest peaks, with over 39 majestic summits exceeding 6000 feet in height. Paul Super is a park biologist who has studied and cataloged the park's unique biodiversity. He is aware of the geologic forces that shaped the Blue Ridge Mountains. It is a geology that started around 400 million years ago. (Paul) The gist of what's happened with the formation of the Appellation Mountains and the Great Smoky Mountains, we've had several smashes, if you will, between different plates, continental plates. Africa and Europe have smashed into North America of a couple different occasions and continue to push the strata, the rock up over itself and that has been a contributing factor to the formation of the Appellation Mountains. Most of the rocks here are sedimentary rocks, or layered rocks that have been so push and contorted by the continents coming together that they have been partially metamorphosed, so they're almost metamorphic rocks. Narrator: Here the nearly metamorphose sedimentary layers can be seen clearly. So it was during the time of Pangaea - the super continent - that the ancient Appalachians were at their highest... soaring higher than the Rockies today. Since the supercontinent pulled apart, these new rugged highlands... these ancient ancestors of the Smokys, have been subjected to intense erosion from ice, wind, and water ever since. Mountain valleys were carved. The rocks most resistant to erosion were left to form the highest peaks. At the same time, the park's beautiful waterfalls were formed by downward cutting streams. Today, geologists estimate that the mountains are being eroded away at the rate of about two inches... every thousand years. But it was because of what didn't happen during the last ice age that accounts for much of the park's unique biodiversity. (Paul) The Sothern Appellations, the Smokys never had glaciers, but we did have cool temperatures and a lot of rocks being worn off the mountains by the long winters, the freezing and the thawing, so we've had a lot of impact from the glacial period but no actual glaciers here. A lot of species from up north moved down south, were being push by the glaciers and the cold temperatures and found refuge here in the southern appellations, and we are a place that many of these plants and animals have then spread out from after the glaciers retreated, so out of Appalachia concept. Narrator: Interestingly, this wealth of biodiversity still remains as relic plant communities... communities still in the Smokys today because of its climate. (Paul) We have a range of climates because we are a mountain range. If you were to take our lowest elevation and anchor it here and then spread out our climate to the tops of our tallest mountains, top of Clingmans Dome, it would be similar to spreading a line out to Canada from here, so we have everything from the very humid, warm southern climate up to an almost temperate rain forest in our higher elevations, and spruce fur forest typical of a southern Canadian evergreen forest. This diversity up the mountain range was something that is a standard in ecology and it was really that idea but it was formulated in the Smokys, looking at that. Then of course we have hundreds of miles of stream in the park, so lots of diversity in the streams, what lives in each stream depends a little bit on how connected it is to bigger rivers, what the acidity of the stream is, what plants are growing around it and then we have certain forests that are found only on the edge of the streams and in floodplains with the blue beach and sycamore, and then moving up into wetter areas we'll have a rich hardwood forest like this hardwood forest with a couple dozen different species of plants, of trees. We have stripped maple here, Canadian hemlock, American holly, oak, red maple, tulip poplar, a variety of different trees here. Narrator: Some of those trees, even a casual day visitor to the park, can't help but notice are dead. Sadly, a large number of the magnificent Canadian hemlocks have been dying. (Paul) It introduced an insect called the hemlock wooly adelgid that has come into the Smokys and in just a few years has killed off a lot of our hemlock forests. We spend quite a bit of time and effort and money trying to protect the hemlock in certain areas of high biodiversity of particularly large hemlocks in places that our visitors go to look at the forest, so we have several hundred, over a hundred different management areas. We are trying to protect the hemlock while we're looking for more holistic ways of controlling that disease. Narrator: Because of its remarkable biodiversity, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was designated an International Biosphere Reserve in 1976 and a World Heritage Site in 1983. No other area of similar size and climate has as many documented species of plants, animals and microbes. So when you hike the park's forest trails, take some time... stop... look at what is around you... become an observer. Here is an example of what you can find within a few square meters. (Paul) So I love to stop when I'm hiking along a trail and see what kind of biodiversity there is, just right around here, what sort of critters there are such as; we've got the Christmas fern here. It's our most common fern in the park; found just about everywhere. A little bit of hog peanut looks a lot like poison ivy but poison ivy tends to be a little more pointed than the hog peanut. I hear the thunder and the rains about to come down here but sometimes when we here rain we get critters telling us it's about to come. I was hearing an acedia a while back; here we go, on this shrub here. A lot of things have been feeding on this shrub. I always wonder what's been eating what makes a round hole versus taking a big chunk out of the edge. I imagine that some of this is perhaps katydid eating. Some katydids, the only way you can tell the difference between species is to hear them call, otherwise they look exactly the same. Let's see if we can find a log turned over. There's often some a lot of neat stuff under logs. As long as you put the log right back were it was before, you've caused very limited harm. We've got some bracket fungus on the outside of this log and it's usually good to turn the log toward you if they're any surprises here that you don't want such as a snake, then you've got the log between you and it. There are a number of millipedes, a lot of millipede diversity here. Some of them smell a little bit like cherries or almonds. It's a defensive chemical that they release when you bug them. Things that can live under logs, there's some tunnels here that small mammals might have made. We have over 100 different types of land snail that live here in the park and of course our 30 species of salamander. Most of them can be found in our streams or under logs or under leaf litter. Narrator: This is a Red-cheeked Salamander, a key stone species of the park... and the kind of salamander that lacks lungs. Incredibly, it breathes - that is exchanges oxygen and carbon dioxide through the walls of tiny blood vessels in its skin and the lining of its mouth. The Great Smoky Mountains are known as the "Salamander Capital of the World." (Paul) So I'm going to put the log back the way it was and hope that we find something else. This is one of our most common trees. This is the tulip poplar. It's the state tree in Tennessee, which is one of the two states where the Smokys are found. A lot of things are, it looks like a storm may have broken off the main trunk and now new shoots are coming up to replace it. Meanwhile we may have a dozen different species of beetle that would be found only in a tree like this that's been broken off, so feeding on dead or dying wood. Something's been feeding on the tulip poplar as well. Everything is food for something else in this ecosystem, food and habitat. Here's our Canadian hemlock, at this particular location they're in good shape. We've treated some of these with a systemic pesticide to keep the hemlock woolly adelgid at bay so that these hemlocks here will stay healthy, but some of the parts of the park, the adelgid has pretty well killed off most of the hemlocks. Now a really old tree like this that's lost all of it's bark, it's starting to get spongy, there are a whole suite of organisms that live only in this kind of tree and a whole suite of different mosses and liver warts and likens that live on the outside of it, and you'd find very different organisms living on an old spongy log like this then that fresher log that we saw that came down from the tulip poplar, a totally different group of organisms. We've only just touched the surface, so to speak, of what's here. We could spend days looking over the area we've just walked over and would probably find several hundred different species of plants, animals, fungi and not to mention microbes that would be living in the soils and in the wood and even inside the organisms. That would add perhaps even a million different species, but the diversity here rivals rainforests and rivals corral reefs. It's one of our most diverse national parks in the system. Narrator: Nevertheless, the animals most people come to the Smokys to see are black bears and white tailed deer. Odocoileus virginianus... a sub species of the white tailed deer lives throughout the Park. Born in late June, the newborn fawns lie still, camouflaged in the tall grass. Many are lost to predation during their first few days... but soon they are able romp and play in the constant company of their mother. By their second spring, males begin to grow antlers... antlers that fully develop in August and September. At the same time, the year and half old does, are ready to breed. Mating occurs in November. Antlers fall off by mid-winter. A typical white tailed deer will live in the wild 8-12 years. In the evening and early morning they are easily seen grazing in the open meadows. The diversity of plants growing in the park provides excellent food sources. The best places to see deer, from the sweet dappled fawns to the magnificent bucks, are in the open fields around Cades Cove. It is also the best place to spot a black bear... a black bear that here is only found in its black coloration. (Paul) The bears we have are, as a top predator providing some control over some species. They are one of our largest organisms. They have a host of parasites that depend on them and they're also very popular for the visitors, so they're one of our great attractions to get people out in the park. Narrator: The Park is one of the few places remaining in the eastern United States where black bears can live in the wild. Biologists estimate approximately 1,500 bears live in the park, a density of nearly two bears per square mile. Cades Cove is also the best place to experience the park's rich and colorful history. Brad Free is a park historian who loves every aspect of the park's history... a history going back to the period when Indians had used the present-day park as a hunting ground. (Brad) Well, we really don't know who were the first Native Americans that were in this part of the country. We do know that the Cherokee do believe they were the first people in this area. We have not found any archeological evidence, anything farther back than about 10,000 years here in the park boundary, but the Cherokee believe that they have been in this area about 25,000 years, so technically they are probably the first people to step foot into what is now the Smoky Mountains. They mainly used this land for hunting and probably following some of the wild game that were in this area, elk and probably woodland bison as some time. They had very few settlements in this area. The terrain was just so rugged that most of the settlements were in the flatlands outside of what is now the park boundary. Narrator: Indeed, it is right here that the Cherokee origin stories placed their beginnings. (Cherokee Woman) What this land means to me, this is home. This is home for me, this is home for my children and when I have grand children it will be home to them. We'll be here forever. Narrator: The Cherokee are a Native American people that lived in the Southeastern United States - Georgia, the Carolinas and East Tennessee. During the late Archaic and Woodland Period, the Indians in the region began to cultivate plants such as marsh elder, pigweed, sunflowers and some native squash. They created new art forms... adopted new technologies... and followed an elaborate cycle of religious ceremonies. The successful cultivation of corn surpluses allowed the rise of larger, more complex civilizations... chiefdoms with several villages and concentrated populations. The Cherokee were known by the English as one of the civilized tribes. They participated in various aspects of colonial and United States history until gold was discovered in parts of their homeland. (Brad) I have to state that the reason there's a Cherokee reservation on the other side of the park goes back to the settlement of the first European settlers that were in this area. As the settlement became in this area a lot of these trees were signed over the years, the Cherokee began losing a lot of more of their land and because the Cherokee at one time owned about what is now part of eight southern states and their land's been getting smaller and smaller and so the get pushed further and further into the hills and in the 1830s when gold was found in the north part of Georgia and southern part of what is now North Carolina, that was really the last Cherokee hold and at that time Andrew Jackson who was president at that time wanted to move all Native Americans west at that time, west of the Mississippi River and that in turn moved most of the Cherokee which are now on the trail of tears out into what is now Oklahoma, but some of the Cherokee stayed back, and there's two different stories on how they stayed. One of them was that they fought the army to stay here and the other was that they already owned their land anyway and so they were allowed to stay at that point. Whichever one is the actual true story we don't really know, but the people were allowed to stay at that time and they eventually became what is now the Cherokee Indian Reservation over time. (Cherokee Man) Us Cherokee, we never cried on the trail of tears. It was those sailors watching us Cherokee walk the trail; they're the ones who cried. The Cherokee people had too much honor. We knew where we were going and our families that stayed here, we weren't forced to leave; we left on our own accord, but the families that stayed, the men, we kept our families up in the mountains, but as a warrior we stayed at the bottom for those men who came here to harm us, we were there to kill them, so us Cherokee fought to stay here, and this is not a reservation this is our home. Narrator: Today the Cherokee still live in their traditional homeland, just outside of the southern boundary of Great Smoky Mountain National Park. They have created a place of living history where they demonstrate traditional Cherokee skills, customs, and way of living. (Cherokee Man) This face paint, it isn't just an every day thing, it us telling that person that we were going into battle, that we're ready to die. The red, it stands for life and the blood. We come into this world bloody and screaming, so when I go out of this world I want to be covered the same way, but I'm not going to be screaming. This black stands for death and these three markings and all the markings on my face are significant to me and only me. Every man will have their own markings because when ever anyone of us would fall in battle, they'd know who we were, but these three dots on my forehead represent the three men that kept my family together on the trail of tears, the lightning bolts stand for the strength and power that they had, and that dot on my chin represents me that the power and strength comes into, but this black line across my eyes it represents telling that man I'm fighting and that I want to kill him. The black is only worn in times of war. Narrator: Curiously, the area that would become the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was not settled by a western movement across the Appalachians but an eastern movement of pioneers... pioneers who followed Daniel Boone along the Wilderness Trail he blazed from Virginia to central Kentucky and onto the Tennessee Valley. (Brad) Technically what happened with the first European settlers in this area goes back to the American Revolution and the original 13 colonies. After the Revolution and the country was able to say we own all the way to the Mississippi River, people started trickling in to what is now wilderness area. They were coming down the old Wilderness Road from Pennsylvania down into Kentucky, east Tennessee, which is now interstate 81 basically, and once they got into this area they got settled into the Tennessee Valley. Most people think that they came from the Atlantic coast through North Carolina and came across the mountains to settle here, but they actually settled in the Tennessee area and went east. They settled in the flat areas of what is now severable Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg Tennessee and then as those lands became more and more densely populated they became coming in what we call the suburbs of these areas and moved in to what is now the mountains, so we're talking about the time period 1790s would have been when the folks first settled in the valleys and in the mountain areas we're talking about the 1810s-1820s before they settle into what is now Great Smoky National Park. The people that settled this area in the early 1800s would have been more of the Scots/Irish decent. There was English of course. A lot of Germans settled in this area. There were Swedish, a lot of different European cultures settled in the northeastern part of the United States and even the Atlantic seaboard near North Carolina were settling into this area at that time. Very few African Americans were in this area but there were some by the time of the American Civil War. Narrator: The American Civil War fought between 1861 in 1865 was the costliest war in American history. It pitted American against American... sometimes family against family. That part of the story was certainly true for the people who lived in the Smokys. (Brad) There were no major battles here but there was defiantly an influence of...you know Knoxville was the local city on this side of the mountain. It was a very strong Union city. You had Ashville on the other side, which was a very strong southern city. What happed is a lot of the families split here over what to do. We had a lot of folks that fought for the Union, a lot of them fought for the Confederacy. It was more of a community level were it affected this area more than anything else, but you can go in any cemetery here in the Smokys and you'll find a veteran fighting for either the North or the South here, but not necessarily fighting in this area. Narrator: After the war, as America industrialized, the homesteaders in the southern Appalachians began to fall on hard times. Logging moved in and people started moving into nearby urban centers. Of course, there was always moonshining. Then in 1913 Horace Kephart published his book "Our Southern Highlanders." Almost immediately the book fired up the leaders of the preservation movement that was in full swing in the western part of the country. (Brad) There was a park movement back in the 1920s to create a national park east of the Mississippi River. Before that time there were no National Parks east of the Mississippi River, so there were a lot of different places that were kind of looked at and this area was one of them. The problem with creating a national park here was that the land was owned by other people. When Yellowstone was created or Yosemite or some of these other parks it was easy for the President to sign off on it and say we're going to start a national park, here it is, it's land the government already owned. This was private land and the state of Tennessee and the state of North Carolina wanted to create this park and so they had to start buying up the land. They raised money through private industry, school kids would donate money, the government was able to give them some money and they started buying up land. They had what we call a fair market value, so they basically went to communities like Cades Cove, Greenbrier, Conalep, Smokemont and went door to door asking people to sell their land for this national park. Some people did, it was a time where money was tight and they needed money. Some didn't. Eventually the park commissions got enough land to give it over to the National Park Service to start creating the park, so most people in Cades Cover were moving out to Blount County and they were getting jobs at Alcoa Aluminum Plant and other places like that and giving up their land for the park to be created, but some of the biggest land that was bought was logging land, the Little River Logging Company owns 76 thousand acres and they sold that land to the Park Commission to create the park. Champion Lumber Company in North Carolina sold almost 95 thousand acres to create the park, so once these big logging companies started selling land and they started moving out some of the people started moving out with them and sold their land. Narrator: It is said of the section of the park called Cades Cove - seen here from the air - if it was a National Park by itself it would be the third most visited park in the nation. It is a ghost community. (Brad) Well, Cades Cove is one of many communities here in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, what is now Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it was one of the largest communities in this area. It had close to 1000 people at one time. Some 200 families lived out in that area. It was settled about 1818-1819. It was primarily a farming community. They had corn, there was tobacco out there, a lot of cattle and sheep raising in that area. There were four churches at one time; in fact the Methodist church split during the Civil War, there was a Southern church and a Northern church this one only had four churches, several grist mills, saw mills out in that area. It was a very prosperous community at one time. Narrator: Now all that remains of Cades Cove is a handful of historic buildings along the 11 mile one-way loop road. (Brad) Most what your going to find out there are log structures but there are some frame structures as well. The thing about the park is that when the park was created they didn't save every building that was in the Cades Cove area. I've seen documentation where thousands of buildings were torn down in the Cades Cove area and what was saved in Cades Cove was considered historic structures in the 1930s, which meant that most of your log cabins were going to be saved out in that area, but in this day and time we would think that some of the frame structures would have been historic at this time so you're kind of mislead in Cades Cove when you go out there and say that everybody lived in log cabins, which was not the case. Narrator: Brad has a few Cades Cove favorites. (Brad) I do love the Tipton House, it one of the houses on the backside of the loop over there. It's one of those structures that was saved from destruction because inside the building, it's a two story frame structure outside but if you go inside the structure its log and what a lot of the families did back in the 1890s and early 1900s, they were modernizing their log structures, and like today when we put aluminum siding on our houses to modernize them they were putting sawed lumber on the outside of their log structures so that when they were coming through and tearing down all these buildings, they were tearing down buildings they didn't realize were log, and somebody at one time must have gone into the Tipton House and looked inside and saw these logs on the inside and said, "wait a second, this is a log house. Let's not tear it down. This is one of the oldest buildings in Cades Cove." Narrator: And there are 17 cemeteries in Cades Cove... cemeteries often associated with churches. (Brad) I'm very passionate about the churches out there. We don't have that many churches left in the park. At one time we had probably 40 churches standing in what is now the Smokys and now we only have seven and three of these are in Cades Cove, and there's the beautiful collection of architecture and history of the religious faith out there. Narrator: Driving the 11 mile Cades Cove Loop Road has become a must do when one comes to the Smoky Mountains. People pile into cars and trucks and make the evening drive where they not only can experience the historic buildings, but it is also the place where one is most likely to see deer... bear... fox. It is just one of the ways to experience what Great Smoky Mountains National Park has to offer. Narrator: An auto tour of the park offers a chance to see panoramic vistas... rushing mountain streams... weathered historic buildings. A chance to travel through all of the park's ecosystems... see majestic forests stretching to the horizon... gaze upon tumbling waterfalls... and witness mist shrouded sunsets. There is an easy walk to the Mountain Farm Museum... a unique collection of farm buildings assembled from locations throughout the park. (Brad) On the North Carolina side of the park at the old Conalep Visitor Center and we have Mount Farm Museum, which is located up there and it's a recreated Appalachian farm basically and the buildings are historic and they were moved from different parts of the park to where they're at today, but it's sort of misleading in a way that all farms looked like the Mount Farm Museum does. The buildings would not have been that close together, you would not have had the black smith shop close to your barn but it gives everyone an idea of what was in Appalachia at that time, and our job over there is to do as best as we can by demonstrations of how a farm operated over there. We do period clothing over there; time period about 1900 is what we're looking at. We grow a lot of heirloom crops over there that have been grown in Appalachia during that time period. We try to keep buildings up as much as possible as they would back in that day and time. We use nails that were made by a black smith, we use shingles that were hand made, but we just try to represent kind of a window of what, just a small time period of what farm life was like back around 1900. Narrator: But it is the more than 800 miles of Park trails - trails ranging from quiet walkways to multi-day backpacking treks through the backcountry - that draw many visitors young and old. Randy Johnson has written the best selling book on hiking in the Great Smokys. (Randy) The interesting thing about the Smokys being the nations most visited national park is that most people stick to the roads, so all you have to do is take a short walk down one of the parks hundreds of miles of trails and you really can have the park to yourself. It's easy to take a hike in the Great Smokys, there's everything from very easy nature trails that anybody can tackle, to the Appalachian Trail and extremely rugged hikes. The thing to remember about hiking in the Smokys though is that it's a really big wilderness area, it's basically a temperate rain forest, so it's always good to carry a small backpack like I've got here, a small pack with a rain jacket, canteen, some extra food and of course a guide book or a map. Having a little bit of extras in your pack is a really good thing to do. The Smokys are a high mountain area, a very rainy area at times; temperate rain forest, so always bring a small pack, extra water, rain gear, some food and it's easy to have a great time in one of the best parks in the country to take a hike. Well, let's go try a few trails. One of the great things about Great Smoky Mountains National Park is that many of the trails are just like this one. Really easy nature trails that nevertheless allow you to get really deep in the woods and see things like this. This is the road of Rota Dendrobium Maximum one of the classic vegetation types in the southern Appalachians. It blooms in mid July and it just explodes the forest with white blossoms, it's one of my favorite plants, really beautiful. One of the really nice things about this trail is that these plaques are all along the way and they're fascinating, they really describe a lot about Cherokee culture and Cherokee beliefs. This plaque describes how some trees became evergreens and some trees loose their leaves or became deciduous. The Cherokee legend was that the Great Spirit told all the plants that they had to stay awake for seven nights and fast, by the end of that period in time only the laurel, the hemlocks and the evergreen species were still awake and the Creator permitted them to keep their leaves all year round, all the other trees loose their leaves every year in the fall, so that's, I don't know about you, but it gave be goose bumps. It's a fascinating kind of belief and one of the neat things about these plaques too is that the Cherokee language is part of the display. Chief Sequoyah created that language and when you're walking this trail thinking about Cherokee culture it's really a moving experience to see Cherokee men, women, joggers, hikers, people pushing baby carriages walk by and actually see the Cherokee people enjoying the domain of Native Americans here. It's a neat aspect of the trail. Let's go try a different hike. Not every trail in the Smokys is an easy nature trail, when you get way out in the backcountry you cross typical bridges like this over many, many streams. Narrator: The first bridge crossed over a rushing stream... a second over much calmer waters. Crossing bridges is a big part of many hikes in the Smokys. (Randy) The Great Smokys backcountry has a lot of bears but if you see one you're much more likely to see the bears rear end running away. They're very reclusive. They're really not a problem for backcountry hikers. You do want to keep your eyes pealed. Where you really will see the most bears probably might be in the campground you're staying at. Bears get used to coming around and trying to find food and the best policy is don't feed the bears; definitely don't get close to them. Many of the campgrounds have bear proof places to store your food and trash cans as well so that's the best policy. You'll mostly see bears in the campgrounds but the best thing to do is not to feed them. Keep your distance if you photograph them. Here's a really typical Smokys spot. Look down at this beautiful stream. Many trails in the Smokys cross bridges over rushing rivers and streams where they lead to waterfalls. The Smokys, if you haven't guessed yet is a temperate rain forest, it's a very lush green place and trails like this are the perfect way to experience it. Let's go up to a really high elevation area. Narrator: Interestingly it is a rain forest without mosquitoes. (Randy) Now we're at the highest elevation that trails reach in the park. The Smokys are almost 7000 feet and at that elevation you have what's called the Canadian forest zone, obviously evergreens, it's a little bit like Canada in the south. There's deep snow here in the wintertime, it's never hot, it's usually very cool even in the summer and one of the neat things is when you reach viewpoints at this elevation you're looking down a rocky mountain like vertical mile of elevation change. In the Canadian zone here in western North Carolina, in the southeastern United States the two main evergreens that you find are the Fraser fir and the red spruce, let me point those out for you. This is a red spruce here dripping with the fog and the clouds that roll through and this is the Fraser fir over here. This is a local species. It only grows in the mountains of western North Carolina and extreme southwestern Virginia. Narrator: The granddaddy of all the trails in the park is the Smokys' portion of the famous Appalachian Trail... a trail that for 73 miles runs right through the crest of the Great Smokys. In fact, in the park the Appalachian Trail forms the border between Tennessee and North Carolina. (Brad) Well, the Appalachian Trail, the idea of the history of that goes back to the 1920s. There were several people who wanted to create a trail that went a crest of the Appellation Mountains from Georgia all the way up to Maine and so there were a lot of different Appellation Trail commissions that got together and tried different routes of how to do this, and the Smokys I believe it was done in the 1930s is when they finally finished a route through the high point here in the Smokys. Today it's over 2000 miles long and people will hike six months to do this trail and it's just the highlight of their lives to do something like that. Narrator: As it was for the Jamison family from Tampa Bay, Florida. (Hiker) Well, we started four days ago up at Davenport Gap and hiked about two eight mile days and one 13-mile day. We had some bad weather the first day. We hiked through three hours of rain and our cloths are still wet. (Hiker 2) Yep, still wet. (Hiker) We met some interesting people and each night at the shelter you meat a different person every night and they've got their own set of stories about why they hiked and why they're hiking and where they're headed and that was the highlight for myself. (Hiker 2) It's a real challenge and the challenge is part of doing it, and if you can do this you can do just about anything. It's one of the hardest things I've ever done, especially the first day. The second day it gets a little better, the third day it gets a little better than that and by the fourth day you're getting into a rhythm of hiking and it's a lot of fun. (Randy) You won't be in the Great Smokys very long before you find out why it's called the Great Smokys. Mist and fog rolling through the trees is a pretty typical thing but there are clear times as well, early spring, late fall, winter when the vistas are much clearer. When you come to the Smokys don't be one of those folks that just sits in the car. Get out on a trail. When you consider from high to low all the different types of experiences you can have in the Smokys, it really is the place to hike; from easy nature trails, to stream side trails, to high elevation rocky crags and vistas, the Smokys is, it's all here, it's a very diverse park, so get out of the car you won't regret it.

Info

Channel: Mill Creek Entertainment

Views: 69,030

Rating: 4.8518519 out of 5

Keywords: Travel, National Parks, Everglades

Id: n8Dq6aqpZU4

Channel Id: undefined

Length: 77min 11sec (4631 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 21 2020