A Smoky Mountain Pandemic: Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Townsend, TN

Right now we’re supposed to be at Wayne County Fairgrounds outside of Detroit, spending our last night in Michigan before starting to head south. Back when we finally decided to cancel our big Michigan trip after weeks of going back and forth, we immediately booked a couple of shorter trips closer to home to give us something to look forward to. Trip #1 was to Townsend, TN–a little town just outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park that bills itself as “the quiet side of the Smokies.” But as far as I can tell, every town near the park except Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg bills itself the same way.

Of course, after we made the call to cancel Michigan, the entire southeast started looking like a big old mess while the Upper Peninsula in Michigan continues to be the New Zealand of the US, coronaviruswise. OH WELL. Next year, Michigan! (knock wood).

I’ll just go ahead and say that I found this trip pretty stressful, and we ended up coming home early. Which made me think canceling the Michigan trip was the right call after all, because all the sources of stress on this short trip would have been amplified on a much longer trip with so many moving parts. I felt like we were able to stay safe for the most part and take a lot of the same precautions we would at home, but then there were things like public bathrooms and campground neighbors who weren’t big on personal space and big crowd levels that made things less than ideal. Also, Dave was working teaching summer school (online) while we were there, which made things less fun, and then little things kept going wrong as you’ll see when I describe our string of half-finished hikes.

But! We did have a good time much of the time and saw some new to us things. (And we did another trip later in the summer that was a better experience, and I’ll get to that one later).

Big Meadow Family Campground

I feel kind of bad that I’m talking about Big Meadow Family Campground under these circumstances, because I’m going to say some things I didn’t like about it that I think probably wouldn’t have bothered me much in Normal Times. So I’ll say first off that overall I think it’s a good choice in Townsend: good location, nice amenities, very well maintained, friendly people.

So the parts we didn’t love: pretty tight sites. This is, in our experience, pretty standard in the Smokies. We’ve stayed at Imagination Mountain in Crosby before and loved it, but it also had very narrow sites. To some extent I think this is a built in problem with building campgrounds in the mountains: real estate is limited, particularly flat real estate. So the sites aren’t super tiny or anything, but there’s not a ton of room to spread out (and we happened to have especially….friendly neighbors on this trip, who got a little too close for comfort on a few occasions).

The website proudly announced that they are “open and operating under cautious conditions,” but here is the one piece of evidence of “cautious conditions” that we saw:

No one was wearing masks in the office/camp store or anywhere else; everything was open and there were no similar signs anywhere else (on the playground or splash pad, for example). So. If you’re looking for extensive precautionary coronavirus measures, you might want to look elsewhere. We had already planned to mostly stick to our own site and avoid bathhouses, the playground, etc. so it wasn’t a huge deal. We did go in the dog park once, since we knew the gate handles were super clean. That was sarcasm.

Most of the sites are pull-throughs and all pretty much the same. They all have concrete pads and are nice and level. They have picnic tables, but no fire pits….however you can bring your own firepit or borrow one from the office for a $20 refundable deposit. There are some back ins that are billed as “sites overlooking river” and technically they are….but be aware that the river is across a fairly busy road from the campground, and that these back-in sites are small compared to the pull-throughs.

Some of the back-in sites along the back of the campground, backing up to a big field, seemed pretty spacious, though:

Nice amenities here; there’s no pool, but there is a splashpad area, a nice playground, the aforementioned clean-handled dog park, and a big open air pavilion.

The campground is right in Townsend; it’s easy to get to, but you do want to make sure you don’t miss the turn onto the campground road or you’ll find yourself on a not trailer friendly mountain road in short order. And the turn back out of the road the campground is on can be tricky for larger rigs–nothing impossible, but there is a bridge on the corner, and it’s a tight turn–just wait until no cars are coming so you can swing into the far lane and it’s fine.

The campground is a good place for blowing bubbles:

River Rat Tubing is right next to the campground, which can be very convenient if you want tubing; if you don’t it means there’s a very busy parking lot right next to you during the day. But anything you want in Townsend is within 5 minutes, and the entrance to the park is maybe 5 minutes away as well. The Townsend entrance is very convenient to Cade’s Cove and not too far from Gatlinburg. We also did a day trip over to Cherokee and the Oconoluftee Visitors Center one day, which was a long drive but a lovely one (or it would have been if it hadn’t been raining) and very doable. So all in all a good central location if you want to make it to a lot of different parts of the National Park.

So, as I mentioned, we cut our trip short and we also cut some of our hikes short, but, looking back, we did get to do a good many things. Here they are! (And you can read about our last trip to the Smokies here and here.)

Cade’s Cove

We’d been to Cade’s Cove once before, but we had the dogs with us that time, which made touring more complicated. So it was nice to return, canine-less. Cade’s Cove is a really lovely scenic drive through the site of an old mountain settlement, on a one way loop road. There are lots of places to stop and check out views and old cabins and churches, there are some trails that start here, and there’s a visitors center partway around with MORE old cabins and whatnot to see.

Get there early! Is essential Cade’s Cove advice, at least in the summer. We made it there not super early but before 10 and did okay, but by the time we were leaving there was an unbelievably long line of cars just sitting, waiting to get started on the loop road.

Also, the earlier you get there, the more likely you’ll have great wildlife spottings, like bears. We did not see bears. But we did see a deer on the path at the first place we stopped to look at a cabin:

Then we stopped at a church, which I decided called for black and white pictures:

We stopped by the visitors center and checked out the mill and other buildings there. The visitors center was open, but they were limiting how many people could be inside and requesting that only two people from your party went in. They were encouraging but not requiring masks, but most everyone going inside seemed to wearing one. Behind the mill there was a little stream to check out, but then there’s pretty much always a little stream to check out in the Smokies:

Oconaluftee Visitor Center and Mountain Farm Museum

We’d never been over to the North Carolina side of the park (I hadn’t been since I was a kid, at any rate), so one day we made the very steep, but very pretty drive through the park on Newfound Gap Road to Cherokee, North Carolina and the Oconaluftee Visitor Center.

See those people up there both holding cameras up, appearing to take pictures of the entrance to the visitor center? Well, that’s exactly what they were doing, because there was a nest of baby barn swallows (we think) up there:

I felt bad for the parents; they probably built that nest there back when the visitor center was still closed, and it seemed like a nice, quiet place to raise babies. Oops. Anyway, it looked like the babies were doing well and close to ready to leave the nest.

We grabbed some take out food in town, ate in the car while it rained, and then spent a little time checking out the Mountain Farm Museum:

Mingus Mill

 

Still over on the NC side, very close to Oconaluftee, is historic Mingus Mill. The grist mill still operates, and you can buy corn ground there, or you can just take a look at mill and walk along the stream that feeds into it.

Kephart Prong Trail

Also on the NC side, this is one of our aborted hikes from the trip. Jeremy and Stephanie rave about this hike on the RV Atlas podcast, so I knew we needed to put it on our list. It was supposed to be a four mile roundtrip, but we turned it into a two mile roundtrip on account of a potty emergency on the part of one member of our party. But from what I understand, this isn’t a big finish kind of hike, so we got the idea, I think. You wind through the woods, going uphill at a fairly gentle pace, alongside a lovely mountain stream, crossing over the stream periodically via these log bridges:

So, potty emergency aside, this was a very nice hike…but my enjoyment of it was tempered somewhat by the fact that it was a rainy day and those pretty little bridges were just a bit too slippery for comfort. In dry weather they wouldn’t have seemed scary to me, but the rain just made those rocks below look a little too sharp and the water a little too fast for my tastes.

In addition to slippery bridges, you might also notice some Civilian Conservation Corps ruins alongside the trail:

Or maybe a not very shy deer (but slightly blurry. Not my fault: blurry deer):

Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center

The Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center is the third place I’m mentioning where you can go into old cabins and see displays about life in the Smoky Mountains back before it was a national park. But it was also the most thorough and our favorite. It’s a museum just outside the park in Townsend, so there is an admission charge. It’s $10 for adults, and we found it was cheaper for us to buy a membership than to pay to get in once for our big family with older kids.

Townsend isn’t, or at least wasn’t when we were there in late June, a place where you see a whole lot of masks or people taking precautions in general, so the Heritage Center’s careful reopening plan was great to see:

I believe they started off with only the outside areas open, but when we were there the indoor museum was open as well. It wasn’t crowded at all, and masks and social distancing were required, so it felt very safe. And also kind of weird to be in a museum.

But we started by checking out the outside area and all the buildings they have, including a moonshine still, cabins, print shop, church, machine shop, etc.

Cantilevered barns like this are all over the place in the Smokies:

And then we spent a little time looking at the museum, which gives an overview of the history of the area, starting with Native Americans:

Schoolhouse Gap Trail

I’m not going to tell you that Schoolhouse Gap Trail is one of the best in the park or anything, but it is a family friendly hike near Townsend, so we found ourselves checking it out when we drove into the park the first night of our trip. You basically walk uphill along a stream for awhile and then either turn around or meet up with another, longer trail. We did the former.

Elkmont/Little River Trail

Word is if you make it to the 2.2 mile mark on this trail near Gatlinburg, you’ll see a nice waterfall. But this was yet another hike cut short for us, this time by our late start and impending darkness. But we did get to see the remains of the old resort settlement on the site, including the very cool, moss covered “Troll Bridge” (you’ll need to take a short spur off to the right near the beginning of the trail to see this):

The trail itself is a gentle uphill grade alongside the very pretty Little River. While we didn’t make it to the waterfall, we still enjoyed the hike and saw THREE (tiny) snakes along the way:

I feel a little sheepish that we went to the mountains, and I don’t have much in the way of mountain vistas to show you….we went in more for picturesque mountain streams this time, I guess. But our OTHER summer trip will have more mountains. Promise.

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