Hiking In National Parks

As plans to create a national park in the eastern United States began to unfold in the 1920s, specifically in the area of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina, various organizations began the process of procuring lands and constructing for the eventual national park. At the same time, the Great Depression had wrought havoc among the nation’s people, leaving many homeless and unemployed. One of the organizations then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt created to get Americans working again, the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was instrumental in the development of the hiking trails and campsites in the national park. Many of the hundreds of miles of trails in the park were dug by the CCC in its formative years–even those still in place today.

Other hiking trails were, in another incarnation, in use hundreds of years in the past. Before the settlement of Anglo-Americans, largely from Scotland and Ireland, in the area of today’s Great Smoky Mountain National Park, the region was a small portion of the expansive Cherokee territory. The Cherokee often traveled over the mountains via established routes for trading and reaching hunting grounds away from their homes. Over the years with the steadying encroachment of white settlers, many of the old Cherokee mountain roads were adapted to the uses of the new settlers and, eventually, a few of these were converted over to some of the hiking trails in the national park[3].

In addition to the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps and mountain routes of the Cherokee Indians, various hiking clubs have also worked to improve upon currently established trails and to construct entirely new trails in their own right. Perhaps the most popular of these, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which promotes the conservation of the Appalachian Trail, works through an affiliated club to maintain the trail within the national park. Other similar groups perform similar functions on trails throughout the park.

Hiking trails of the national park

Of the more than 150 hiking trails in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the majority of traffic centers around a few of the shorter trails located just off of the main highway, U.S. Highway 441 (Newfound Gap Road). Most more lengthy and relatively isolated trails are much less frequented, though, at any one time, very few hikers will be completely alone on any trail in the park.

Trails in the park cover all types; Short, self-guided nature trails are found off of the highways in purposely diverse areas of the park, while longer, strenuous backpacking hikes are available along the Appalachian and various other primarily highland trails. Some trails are paved, some lead to waterfalls, others to overlooks, and still others lead to more trails.

Cross-county trails

Perhaps the most famous trail in the world (certainly in the United States), the Appalachian Trail bisects the national park, for most of its 70 mile (113 kilometer) length within the park running on the border of Tennessee and North Carolina. Another lesser known, more recently constructed footpath, the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, begins (or ends) at the Clingmans Dome Observation Tower, and runs, as the name suggests, from North Carolina’s mountainous border with Tennessee, to the Atlantic Ocean at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

• Appalachian Trail: Seventy miles of the 2,158 mile (3,473 kilometer) Appalachian Trail cut through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, entering northward at Davenport Gap and exiting southward near Fontana Dam. The trail remains among the crestline of the Great Smoky Mountains throughout this portion of its length, passing just behind the observation tower at Clingmans Dome, the highest point anywhere along the trail (at 6,625 feet [2,019 meters]). Shelters are placed approximately equidistant of one another, at locations roughly equivalent to one day of backpacking from one shelter to the next. While spending the night there is free, unless determined to be thru-hiking (which the national park determines as anyone starting a minimum of fifty miles [eighty kilometers] and ending at least as far outside of the park) it requires a permit obtainable through the park service to stay in the shelters.

• Mountains-to-Sea Trail: Though only 365.4 of the planned 700 to 800 mile trail is completed, North Carolina’s statewide trail is intended to stretch from the mountains of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park to the state’s Outer Banks on the Atlantic Ocean. The segment of the trail within the national park extends for twenty-five miles (forty kilometers) and is three-fourths completed, starting near the summit of Clingmans Dome. Since this part (and many other portions) of the trail is composed largely of other pre-existing trails, it is navigable for much of its existing length.