Cades Cove (Blogophilia 10.12)


Interesting timing of this week’s topic. I was packing to leave for East Tennessee for the week when it was posted. It wasn’t a vacation abroad, but it certainly was good to get out of town. The highlight (for me) was a day at Cades Cove in the Smoky Mountains National Park and a decent woods hike.
The cove is a wide mountain ringed valley first settled by Europeans in the early 1820’s. It has a number of well preserved log cabins and structures.

Missionary Baptist Church
And from the inside.

The church here is one of the newer structures. It apparently was built in the late 1800’s. There are several log cabins that date from almost the earliest settlement.
Along the way, we saw a juvenile bear playing in a meadow (he’s in the cover photo). We were about 400 feet way. That was close enough. I didn’t see a Mama, but she could have been in the woods right behind him. He goofed around for about 15 minutes and then dipped into the treeline. So we moved on.
Soon we got to the target destination, Abrams Fall’s Trail. The trail head is at the end of a dirt road. We find a place to park, where we were greeted by five different varieties of butterflies dancing like Dervishes and feasting on the buttercups in bloom across the meadow.

Butterflies
Hiking to the falls was fabulous. This is one of the shorter trails in the park at a little over 5 miles round trip and is rated as moderately difficult, mostly for rocks. Wide and well maintained, there were no trees to jump or major streams to ford. The recommended time for the hike is three to four hours, reasonable for most non-walkers. There are mild inclines which could take your breath (as it did with my wife) if you aren’t in shape. Me? If I were solo, I would have been done in two and half.


She ended up waiting on a pretty overlook a little over half way to the falls with another couple that were in the same boat, while I went on. It wasn’t much further to the falls. But the trail went down a fairly steep hill and they didn’t think they could make it back up.
It was worth it.

It isn’t the tallest of most powerful one I have seen. But the sound was soothing and you felt like you had been transported back to an older time. Just the antidote to the social media outrage machine we are subjected to daily. Because Kathryn was still up the hill, I only stayed for about fifteen minutes. The hike back up wasn’t as bad as it looked.
Now that I’m back in Atlanta, I am ready to go back there again. And if you have kids, take them here instead of the tourist traps in Pigeon Forge. Let the see the nature around them. It’s better than under cooked green beans, I promise.
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Topic-Christine Wichman
Pic-Linda Thurmond
Pic guesses; Dervish (in blog), Turks, Byzantine, Dancing, Spinning, Princess Bride, Wedding. Bollywood

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