The Great Smokies Park is roughly 54 miles long and 19 miles wide at the widest point. It is oval shaped. Except for a few high, level pastures, it is tremendously rugged throughout its entirety. It has 16 peaks more than 6000 feet high.
Vegetation is lush, clear to the top of the highest peak. There is no timberline in these mountains. Balsam and spruce grow thick in the upper regions. In summer the rainfall is almost tropical, and in winter heavy snows blanket the trees and slopes into a fairyland.
Almost constantly a gray haze hangs like a thin veil over the pile after pile of far, high, ridges. That is why these mountains are called The Smokies. They say that no one knows for sure what causes this haze, but one explanation credits it to tiny particles of moisture rising from the heavily-soaked vegetation.
The park is half in Tennessee and half in North Carolina. The high, sharp backbone of the Smokies cuts the park in two, and along this backbone runs the state line. A horse trail follows this backbone the length of the Park, but there is no motor road up there.
A fine macadam highway crosses the Park, from Gatlinburg to Cherokee, on the Carolina side. And a few gravel roads stab short distances into the hills from several entrances.
Aside from that, the public must take to foot or horseback to see the vast, beckoning interior of the Park. And since taking to foot is one of life’s accomplishments which I am most prodigious at, to coin a phrase, we shall take to foot in a Herculean way about tomorrow.
MT. LE CONTE LODGE, Great Smokies Park, Oct. 25, 1940—
When I go to see a National Park, I like to walk in it.
I don’t want to mope along with a tourist party behind a naturalist, and I don’t want to ride no damned horse. I just want to get out all by myself like a hermit and square off my shoulders and head uphill.
There is plenty of walking for a fellow like me in the Great Smokies. In fact there are 675 miles of trails that meander all over this vast park.