The Dark Side of the Great Smoky Mountains, The Missing and Mysterious Disappearances in the park.

[Music] the great smoky mountains what a beautiful place nature's at its finest you can see for miles mountain range after mountain range it is so vast and so beautiful all the mountain streams the peak mountains in the distance it is just magnificent now here the park is 520 000 acres that's equal to 800 square miles and with the surrounding national forest you could easily triple the size of the wilderness in these mountain range some of the parks that national forest surrounded is cherokee national forest and natalya national forest just to name a few of them and you can see here's a geological map of just a 3d mount of just how vast how many haulers how many bridges how many deep crevasses and canyons and creeks streams that's running out of these mountains and i would say it'd be safe to say there's some places that man has never stepped a foot on but it's so beautiful and it's so vast this country and all these mountains and all the surrounding mountains all this was cherokee land and i reckon they called the mountain a place of smoke here's the cherokee name these cherokee hunted fought for thousands of years here now the settlers and white men come in here in the late 1700s they started setting up farms [Music] and just pioneered living off the land trying to scratch out 11 and from there they started starting little communities but it was a hard life and they start exploring [Music] the timbers the natural resources of the park i reckon they had chestnut oaks in here 300 foot tall and they really hauled them out of here and this logging community set up was elk mont tremont greenbriar just to name a few is cosby gatlinburg they hauled them out of here and the park required us acquired this land about 1933 i guess and they opened it up as a park in 1934. now here franklin theodore roosevelt opened to park up in the ceremonies in 1934 don't know how many attended now today the park went from i guess 40 50 60 years ago from a few hundred a year to a few thousand and about 20 25 years ago it was about two to three million now today i'm told that it's 10 million visitors a year 10 million visitors i've also learned that you could take yellowstone national park grand canyon national park in yosemite and combine all them visitors together and they still cannot equal what the great smoky mountains has in visitors every year of course i can't blame them it's such a beautiful part [Music] but it has its downfall traffic they've been working on roads around here for 30 years and it's still bumping up i've seen it dead stop from gattenberg back to 407 exited i-40 that's a good 12 to 15 miles away here's newfound gap parking lot a lot of visitors come and go there right on the very top of the state line between north carolina and tennessee a lot of hikers come through here i reckon the appalachian trail passes right through here here's clemens dome it's about a half a mile walk in the parking lot beautiful sight you could see for miles and miles here's the tunnel to cage cove i reckon it's just been newly repaired upgraded and here's case cole you've been to cage cove you know what you're seeing here it's bumper to bumper and if they see some kind of bear or deer or something it's dead stop you don't even know what's going on a mile ahead a lot of people don't never see no wild animals this is the only place they've ever seen but can't say that i blame them they're such beautiful wild animals here but you leave them alone [Music] yes the smokies are beautiful this park what people don't know it has a dark and mysterious side to it it's still wilderness and a lot of strange disappearances have happened in this park over the years [Music] they may be 10 000 visitors coming here but only a handful go on trail here's a map of the united states it shows all the missing people throughout the country in national parks and you can see that's a lot of people here's the area that we're we've been talking about the great smoky mountains where north carolina meets tennessee right there along the boundary line that mountain range and a lot of people been found been missing some good some bad but there's still five people missing to this day you could see this mountain range it's so vast some places are inaccessible so many haulers so many crevices so many canyons so many ridges and i would say to say that some places has never been stepped in to this day like i said there's a few people goes on these trails probably a few hundred or maybe a thousand or so but only a handful goes off trail and up that hop trail truck bunch some places are just inaccessible sometimes they don't come back and you can see these woods when you get off the beaten path nature is unforgiving if you're not prepared some of them get caught off guard or have an accident or get lost anything's possible [Music] but these woods are dark and mysterious especially in these big old mountains where the sun probably don't hit it but an hour a day if that probably can't be over the tree [Music] now here is the list of the five people that's still missing to this day that's dennis martin age six 1969 trinity gibson age 16 1976 thelma melton age 58 1981 christopher sista age 45 2011. derek lipkin aged 24 2012. these five are still missing to this day not a trace of them could be found it's like they just they was with a group of people and it was just gone for a second or a minute or two separated and it disappeared some some some is logical but most of them just don't make sense like they just disappeared off the base of the earth here's a map of where there was life seen at where they disappeared dennis martin disappeared up there on spencer's field on appalachia trail he was playing in front of his parents and went behind the bush for a minute but didn't come back out and trendy gibson she was going with a school group to uh and andrew's ball from the kremlin's dome parking lot and she got separated from her group just for a few minutes ahead of them and she just disappeared never be seen again emma martin walking with her friends in the deep springs area got separated from her friends just for a minute disappeared never to be found christopher cessna they found his car in the parking lot at newfoundland gap but on the trail a little bit they found his backpack just like he took it out just disappeared walked away no trace of it and that derek lipkin he uh he was at newfoundland gap parking lot walked up on the trail and never to be seen again so i couldn't tell you what happened to these five people i sure like to know so the families would sure like to know for sure again as you can see how vast these mountains are you just take the time to really look at some of these maps it's it's not just a little walk in a city park this is wilderness people so if you get up on one of them ridges somewhere and get down where you may walk 10 mile out of your way if you can walk it it's some steep country we're going to look at some possibilities here of what could happen most the time people just get lost and exhausted and according to what time of year it is they get hypothermia and they just pass away but some cases it's not that way some just cannot be explained they just simply disappear for no good reason and they've searched with dogs and thousands of searchers now here you've probably heard of david pilas he's he's a real expert on missing especially in in these national parks he's done a lot of investigation so if you've not seen any of his kind of work check him out he's got a book series on missing a lot of stories about the smokies people missing and all around the country so check him out and right here this is some these things in these mountains these things in the ocean that people's not seen and they're just eventually finding it and still you'll never see and i'm still a firm believer in these wilderness these things that don't want to be seen or in these mountains head now the cherokee called them the sloping giant now i can't pronounce the word i'm not even going to try to insult but they believe in them too because there's a lot of history and stories about these indians seeing these creatures too so anything's possible in these mountains in these wildernesses [Music] [Music] these mountains are vast a lot of them unexplored to this day so i thank you all for watching and i'll see you next time [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: DONNIE LAWS

Views: 249,082

Keywords: Tennessee Mountain History, Mystery, Great Smoky Mountains National park, Park Trails, Hiking, Off Trail, Missing, Unexplained missing, Strange disappearances, Lost, Lost in the woods, National park disappearances, Bigfoot, Wildman of the Forrest, the unknown, Missing people, Missing in national parks, Never found, Bizarre, Missing people in parks, Vanished, Mysterious disappearances, DONNIE LAWS, Dennis martin, Appalachian Trail, Bigfoot in the smokies, Bigfoot sightings, Cryptid

Id: FMeU8zUsS8c

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020