After not as much sleep as any of us wanted, we got up at 8
(6am), got dressed for the day and headed down to what turned out to be a very
good breakfast in the lobby. It took us
all a while to get going but I was feeling anxious because today was/is
literally the only day in our remaining trip that doesn’t have significant rain
in the forecast. We entered the park
around 10am and Nick went into the Visitors Center to get a map, pay, and let
them know that a family of four would be hiking a slightly remote, 8 mile
hike! Several surprising things to learn
– all of the roads that had been closed due to the weather, had re-opened 2
days before, there were a bunch a bear sightings on the hike we were about to
take and the park was free to enter.
That was so surprising because the Great Smoky Mountains National Park
is the most visited of all national parks.
We were redirected out of the main entrance and drove to a little bit
east to the Greenbrier entrance. Our
instructions were: drive to the dead end and you’ll see the trailhead. So we drove a little ways (shorted than we
thought we should have driven) and saw the “trailhead”. We got all off our gear on (the kids got new
hiking packs and hats for the day) and were about to take off when Ryan said,
“You can drive across this bridge.” And then Grant said, “Which was is the
trail? This looks like a road.”
Oops! Both kids were right. The trailhead was still several miles
east. Whew – that would have made for a
REALLY long hike.
So we got back into
the car and drove a few more miles to the real dead end of the road and set off
at 10:50 (only 2 hours and 50 minutes later than I’d wanted to because I’d
heard that this hike could take up to 9 hours).
We’d been told that the first 3 miles were fairly easy and
the last mile was like hiking up boulders.
Well I took “easy” to mean flat and that wasn’t the case. There was a total elevation change of 1,800
feet. But the hike was AMAZING!
There were two log bridge crossings, one of which even scared me –
railing on only one side…easy enough for a 7-year-old to slip right through and
crash into a raging rocky river below.
There was 3-5 water crossings that had no bridge at all and those were
really exciting too. We drank some cold
water from a small water fall. Oh and
there was ice and snow everywhere which added to the experience. We had to be very careful in places, where we
stepped. We saw small waterfalls all
along the way and several of them were frozen over. We even saw ice crystals in the mud. Along the way we sang the “Nonsense Song”
over and over so that the kids could learn the lyrics – the song that starts,
“Oh one night one morn when I was born and the whistles went toot toot.”
We arrived at the very top 4 hours later and man was it
worth it. When we got to the top it
brought tears to my eyes. It was
magnificent…and cold…we ate a picnic lunch and could feel the mist of the falls
on our faces.
We shared summer sausage,
crackers, cheese and bananas. And we
used a boulder for a table and other rocks were our chairs. Half of the falls were frozen. A fellow hiker showed us a picture of the
falls from two weeks prior and they were completely frozen over. I should have mentioned that the winter of
2015 has been one of the coldest, snowiest and iciest in history over all of
the United States. Oh – the trail was
called Ramsey Cascades and the falls that we hiked back to are the tallest
falls in the Smoky Mountains. 
After a short lunch and nice chats with the people around us
(Jim from Ohio stopped us and said that he and his wife used to take trips with
their kids like ours and that seeing the 4 of us eating was very emotional for
him.
We hit the trail again, this time to head back, and it was
much easier. I’d told the kids that
there would be “awards” for the person with the least number of injuries and
despite this, Grant kept running down ahead of us. At one point he fell and scraped himself and
we rounded the corner and saw him getting up so he said, “I’m not injured. That was just a really good learning
experience for me.” SO FUNNY. The boys took several pee breaks on the way back, only one of which I captured on film:
We finished the hike 6 hours and 15 minutes later, at around
5:15 and we celebrated.
We went back to the Visitors Center to get hat pins, etc.
but it had closed at 5:00 so we drove a very short distance back into
Gatlinburg (our motel, the Hampton Inn, is about 1 mile from the main
entrance). We ate a very mediocre,
overpriced dinner at The Parks Grill.
One funny thing happened at dinner:
Grant ordered a small steak off the kids’ menu and the waitress asked
him how he wanted it cooked. He said,
“Hmm, I guess in pieces?” Laster he said
he thought she asked him how he wanted it cut but regardless, it was adorable. After dinner we headed “home” for showers, a
few games of gin and then bed. Truth be
told, I didn’t even type this up today.
I typed it the next morning at breakfast!
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