For the practical stuff, see Smokies details

If national parks have specialties, the Smokies is known as a hiker’s park. The scenery is diverse: mountain views, old-growth trees, waterfalls, streams, and more shades of green than a paint chart. Trails are well-signposted, wide and easy to follow. The comfortable backcountry campsites and the spacious front-country campgrounds make the park an excellent first-time, family camping destination. Yet with all these amenities, wilderness hangs on in the rhododendrons and mountain laurels, the signature flowers of the area, which can be found in bloom from late March until August, depending on the altitude. Wildflowers, from the first bloodroot in early spring to the last asters and goldenrods in the fall, line many trails.

Although the Smokies may be the most visited national park in the country, only the roads and parking lots are congested. With hundreds of miles of trails, even popular trails are not very busy. One mile off the road and you see few people. If you want a formula, try this one “Crowds diminish according to the square of the distance from the nearest road and the cube of the elevation above it.” This means that the further off the road you go and the more you have to climb, the fewer people you will see.

For a quiet, out-of-the way entrance with good hiking and fascinating artifacts, head for Cataloochee in the Southeastern section of the park on the North Carolina side. Cataloochee is not untouched wilderness; nothing in the Smokies is. White pioneers arrived in the late 18 th century and most of the Smokies was settled by the time the area became a national park in 1934.

Cataloochee was the largest settlement in the Smokies, supporting about 1,200 people at its maximum. The first families came in 1836, attracted by good farm land and abundant forests. Twenty years later, with the next generation of settlers, the valley became overcrowded. The newcomers migrated over Noland Gap to the next valley, which they named Little Cataloochee. A hundred years later, the settlements prospered with schools, churches and post offices. The residents were so self-sufficient that they barely felt the depression in the 1930s and took in relatives who had left the region and were suffering in the outside world. The people in Cataloochee were isolated. Even in the twentieth century, women would only leave the valley once a year to go into town.

Like communities throughout the area, the people of Cataloochee were forced to sell their land to the government and move out when the park was formed. The National Park Service burned many buildings, concerned that the residents would sneak back to their homes. The Cataloochee valley went from wilderness to community back to (a modified) wilderness in less than a hundred years.

A few artifacts were saved; churches, houses, barns and a school. They are not laid out neatly in a circle like Cades Cove. In Cataloochee, the buildings are in their original places and you need to search for them. You can drive into Big Cataloochee but you must walk or ride a horse to reach Little Cataloochee. To understand history at your own pace, I recommend Cataloochee instead of a frustrating drive around crowded Cades Cove.

If you are lucky and go very early, at dusk or in cold weather, you might even see the elk. Elk were native to the area but became extinct before the Civil War. Now 52 elk have been reintroduced back as an experiment and are doing well. Nothing restricts the elk physically to Cataloochee, so in a few years, they might spread out all over the park and into neighboring national forests.

Due to deed restrictions imposed when the park was established, there are no entrance fees. I count 16 entrances into the Smokies, the most popular being from Gatlinburg. It is easy to criticize Gatlinburg, famous for its 20,000 motel rooms, fast food and T-shirt shops. I keep returning to Gatlinburg because it is an easy reference point to popular trails in the northern areas of the park. From Gatlinburg, you can explore the Smokies from several directions. Gatlinburg and other gateway towns is what keeps the commercialism out of the park itself. In the park, you can’t buy a meal or take a shower. If you want showers, restaurant meals and a bed, besides Gatlinburg, you can stay in Cherokee, the Indian reservation on the North Carolina side, or Townsend, Tennessee, west of Gatlinburg, which prides itself as the quiet side of the Smokies.

If you want to stay in the park, the drive-in, front country campsites are well equipped with tent pads, picnic tables, cold running water and group sites but no showers or hookups. The three most popular campgrounds, Cades Cove, Elkmont and Smokemont, take reservations but the others are on first-come, first-serve basis.

Miles of intersecting trails and over 70 miles of the Appalachian Trail allow loop hikes that can keep you backpacking for weeks. You need to stay in either a designated shelter or backcountry campsites. All shelters and some campsites require reservations. Both are well-laid out with fire rings and the all-important pack suspension devices, meant to keep your food away from the bears. Though Smokey the bear did not come from the Smokies, over 1,800 black bears live in the park. Bears are shy so your chances of seeing even the tail end of a bear dashing into the woods are slim.