On top of Ol' Smoky

We didn’t go anywhere today, except up. Drove down the 441 through Gatlinburg (that’s what Pigeon Falls is supposed to look like!) and into the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

They’re not biiiiiiig mountains, but the tallest peak, Clingman’s Dome, at 6643ft, is the third highest in the US, east of the Mississippi – which tells you all you need to know. They do erupt abruptly from the surrounding hills, their outlines fuzzy all the way to the peak with a canopy of indomitable trees. At almost any altitude, the forests are densely packed. Driving through the lower slopes, the roadsides are lined with countless spindly trunks whilst white water splashes and chuckles over rocky grey courses. In the lowest part of the park, the ground flattens out into broad meadows, thick with tall grass and cow parsley.

Here you’ll find the log cabins and tiny white toy churches of the families who lived here, in splendid but crazy isolation, a mere century and a half before the invention of the internet would make such a lifestyle even remotely tolerable. In truth, I felt quite annoyed that the Europeans had dared to come in live in this beautiful place, clearing two thirds of the forest before the National Park was established. It seemed to me that it deserved to be left to itself and I found I had no problem with the thought of Cherokee Indians hunting amongst the enchanting stillness of the trees, as they had done for generations before President Andrew Jackson ordered them to be evicted from Tennessee in the 1830s.

As the afternoon wore on we began to wind our way up into the mountains. National Parks are enormous and consequently have good roads. But a combination of great distances, popularity and strictly enforced speed limits mean that a journey between sights of interest can take a surprisingly long time and you soon find yourself in a slow moving convoy of vehicles, snaking between switchbacks. By the time we had got up Clingman’s Dome to the trail head, five thousand feet above the valley, it was gone five o’clock, and the hot sun had succumbed to thickening clouds, leaving the air pleasantly cool and the sky grey.

At the top of Old Smoky there’s a half-mile path to the summit, paved but steep. There were already clouds below us, white wisps obscuring some of the nearer peaks. Above us the sky was darkening and rich with the echoes of approaching thunder. The climb felt longer than it was, I’m sure, and at the top we were rewarded with ghostly views of the nearby mountains, fading to white one by one as the storm approached. The viewing tower (another climb!) was still busy and people were still coming up the path behind us, but it seemed clear to us at least not to tarry. On the way back, the forests below us seemed to have vanished entirely into the cloud and the car park was becoming foggy as we packed up and got moving.

Within minutes the first fat rain drops were slapping into the windscreen and we slowed right down as the steep road down the mountain became slick with water. I was sure that we would end up in another interminable caterpillar of cars, creeping down through the rain as the natural splendour of the park was reduced to a tourist gridlock. But this didn’t happen – for whatever reason we didn’t see a single car.

The road turned this way and that down the mountain and we followed it. The countless trees pressed in on either side and the forest came to life about us as the water rushed all around, racing us down the mountain: cliffs of dark shiny rock spewed cataracts of white, the hairpins gushed with tiny rivers that ran across our path. The sky blackened between bursts of fork lightning that crashed against the peaks, but if there was thunder I couldn’t hear it over the noise of the rain.

Suddenly and momentarily we had the forest to ourselves. It seemed right. We were passing through, like the Cherokee.