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With the luxury of a few days off work just as summer crept into fall, I considered my options.  Somewhere warm?  Someplace mountainous? With beaches? A city? Somewhere I could practice the Spanish I’ve been trying to learn?  Schemes various and sundry swirled.  After some debate, I decided to have a look at our most visited national park.  Never having been there, it struck me as about time I saw the Smoky Mountains for myself.  I loaded up the car and sped off through the night with my dogs hanging merrily out the windows.

12 hours later, we rolled into Great Smoky Mountains National Park just as the sun was rising.

The Appalachian Trail snakes through the mountains on it’s way through 2175 scenic miles from Georgia to Maine.  I’ve read Bill Bryson’s uber popular “A Walk in the Woods”.  Wildly entertaining, there was no part of it that made me want to attempt to hike the entire Appalachian Trail. While I don’t see myself as having the wherewithal to spend 5-7 months trudging, plodding, and lugging my gear every step of the way over rocks, up hills, down gulches, and through the little settlements of Appalachia, the idea of putting foot to trail in one small spot or another did appeal to me.  So off we went.  I studied the maps and found a segment of the famous A.T. that crossed through the park.

It turned out to be every bit as beautiful as I thought it would be.  Truth be told, maybe even lovelier.  There were ferns everywhere and moss of unbelievable variety.  Tropical looking plants alternated with others that looked hardy enough to withstand a major Arctic blast.  I thought wryly that neither should be a surprise considering the climate in them thar parts.  The surprise was in the silence encountered just a few hundred yards into the trail.  While the whole world whizzed by on the road, in cars, trucks, Jeeps, RVs, and on motorcycles, it was a rare soul indeed who seemed inclined to step off into the silent woods.  I only saw one other hiker in all the days I roamed the Smoky Mountains.

For a person confident in her abilities as a hiker (c’mon people, we’re talking about WALKING here!) these trails were something of a challenge.  Elevation was only around 5000 feet, but the ups and the downs were pretty taxing.  The dogs wore out more quickly than I’d foreseen and I nearly had to drag my poor old German Shepherd back to camp at the end of the first day.  A relative flat lander, it’s hard to train for conditions quite so variable at home and I found a few little muscles I hadn’t realized I had.  I would recommend the trails at Great Smoky Mountains National Park to anyone looking for a good workout in a beautiful atmosphere.   All in all, a very satisfying walk in the woods, indeed.       ~DG