G.A.S.P.

The next day (3-30) I got to climb a mountain for the first time since I left Big Bend National Park in Texas.  From Townsend, I had a ride of about 20 miles to the Sugarlands Visitor Center.  It was all uphill for the first 17 miles and I was beginning to think that I was making a major dent in the mountain, but then I went sharply downhill for three miles and lost much of my hard-earned elevation gain. 

The Visitor Center is at an elevation of about 1450’ and I had to clear the spine of the Appalachians at Newfound Gap at an elevation of 5048’.  This little climb of 3600’ stretched out for about 13 miles, and took me 3½ hours, including time to fix a flat tire about half-way up.  This is a very credible mountain climb, one that reminded me of those in Washington State.    

On this day (and I suspect many others), Great Smoky Mountains National Park was quite different in Tennessee versus North Carolina.  The western slopes of the mountains (Tennessee) were shrouded in fog all day.  The visual highlight was the small stream (named Little River) that followed the road (named Little River Road) to the Sugarlands Visitor Center.  It flows swiftly and purely, and is fed by numerous creeks cascading down the hillsides. 

 Click on bicyclist to see more photographs. 

Cherokee Indians called this land Shaconage “the place of blue smoke.”  They farmed the land here and built log homes.  When Europeans arrived in the late 1700s, the Cherokee tried to adapt, but the white settlers continued to take their land.  When the conflict escalated in the 1830s, white men settled it by forcing the Cherokee to leave their homeland and walk (Trail of Tears) to Oklahoma.  Today, descendants of Cherokee who escaped the forced migration live on a reservation next to the National Park.