The mural above is on the wall in the eating area of our Tru hotel in Knoxville. It shows the 2 predominant structures in Knoxville, the Sunsphere and Neyland Stadium, home of the U of T Volunteers football team. The mural is a nice depiction of the riverfront.
Today we’re moving to Asheville, but we’re taking a detour in order to go to Cades Cove. I receive various travel emails showing places to go, like the 5 best hidden gems on the East Coast, stuff like that. In one of these emails I saw a blurb about Cades Cove being a wonderful historic place in the mountains of Tennessee. In keeping with Christine’s enthrallment with the Christy story, I thought this would be an interesting place to visit. So off we went rather early Tuesday morning. The promised storm and cold front came through last night. It was still very overcast and drizzling when we left, but at least the heavy rain was gone.
I had forgotten that Cades Cove was in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but I was thrilled to be able to tick off another national park on my list of parks visited. Lucky me, two in one trip, since we did Shenandoah National Park during our Skyline Drive drive. I missed a chance to get a photo of that park’s sign, but I got the Great Smoky sign.
The road to Cades Cove is just as beautiful, if not more so, as Skyline Drive. It winds 9 miles through the mountains along the Little River. There are no scenic overlooks, but the colors of the forest along the road were stunning.
The mountains along the road are also covered in rhododendrons and mountain laurel, all 9 miles along the road. I chatted with a park volunteer at the entrance to Cades Cove and asked if the shrubs were rhododendrons. He confirmed that they were and he said it brings tears to his eyes just talking about how beautiful the drive is in the spring when everything is in bloom. It must be absolutely spectacular.
When I think of the word cove, it brings to mind waterside small inlets. But I learned that a cove is also a sheltered valley mainly or entirely enclosed by ridges and having a relatively level floor, arable land, and a single drainage outlet. And that, in large part, is what one drives around on an 11-mile, one-way loop around the valley floor. Cades Cove was first Cherokee land. There was a small Cherokee village in the cove. Apparently, the cove was named for Chief Kade. The 1819 Treaty of Calhoun (which began what eventually was the Trail of Tears as the Cherokee were forced to relocate to Oklahoma) ended all Cherokee claims to the Smokies. European settlers arrived at the time of this treaty and began settling in Cades Cove.
Around the 11-mile loop road are several of the buildings the settlers built. These are all the oldest structures in the park and give a glimpse of what life was like. In addition, there were 3 churches from the 1820s, 2 Baptist and one Methodist. The reason there are 2 Baptist churches for such a very small population in the cove is because there was a falling out in the community about the importance of missionary work. The Baptists split into two camps and the mission sect went off and built their own church.
The Great Smokies get their name from the appearance of a blue misty haze caused by a natural photochemical process. All the vegetation emits natural hydrocarbons that react with ozone particles wafted down from the stratosphere. Moisture condenses on these aerosols, which then scatter the shorter wavelengths of light in the blue-violet spectrum to produce the signature haziness. Yeah, too much information (sorry about that). But we didn’t get to see that blue haze because the mountain tops were hidden by low clouds, a very different kind of bluish haze. The photo below is looking across some of the cove
One of the more interesting stops around the loop was a very small community. I loved the old mill. Even though the waterwheel was not functioning, the water to run the mill was diverted from the nearby river via a very long sluice.
There was also this very cool old barn.
We then headed to Asheville, NC, although we were so far off the grid that we didn’t have any cell coverage so the GPS wasn’t working. We had some maps, but it was very difficult to figure out which direction we needed to go. I went on another scenic route through the park, and although we were a bit nervous about going far afield, the route was so incredibly beautiful that we soon just relaxed and enjoyed the very scenic route. At one point, we were on the Foothills Parkway, and there was one great overlook.
We finally got cell service again and we synced up with GPS and discovered we were doing well route-wise. We went through Gatlinburg, TN, a mountain resort city. It’s quite a tourist destination. In the winter, it is a major ski area. There are lots of outdoor adventure activities, including zip lines. The place even has a space needle. And there’s a huge Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Personally, I thought the place seemed pretty tacky, but there were loads of people there walking the main street.
The remainder of the drive was uneventful. I-40 winds its way through a gap in the mountains along the Little River. Where the gap was too narrow for the highway, the highway went through the mountain via tunnels. And surprisingly, with our confusion about route from Cades Cove, we actually rolled into our hotel parking lot just a couple of minutes passed 4:00pm, practically right on my self-imposed schedule of getting off the road by 4:00pm. We’ll be in Asheville for 3 nights.
Tomorrow, we visit the Biltmore Estate. Can’t wait.