EASY GARDENING TIPS

Golden trees and black bears in Great Smoky Mountains and Cades Cove

Golden trees and black bears in Great Smoky Mountains and Cades Cove

November 28, 2022

On Halloween, we sought the warm colors of storing — pumpkin orange, harvest gold, wildfire red — withal the Blue Ridge Parkway and in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the North Carolina-Tennessee border. And we found them too, despite the lateness of the leaf-peeping season, in a year when the trees turned early. In this mountainous region, the fall foliage season starts upper on the mountaintops and then colorizes the slopes and sooner the valleys. We found plenty of verisimilitude to make us glad we’d come.

Chimney Tops

Chimney Tops in Tennessee was expressly trappy with black-trunked trees, gold and orange leaves, and a craggy, notched mountain of weathered stone.

One graceful, sinuous tree reminded me of a Japanese calligrapher’s brushstroke.

Blue Ridge Parkway

Cruising withal the Blue Ridge Parkway, we stopped at numerous overlooks for views like this: a glowing, golden valley versus rumpled mountain flanks.

Clouds transmissible on afar mountaintops at Thomas Divide Overlook near Cherokee, North Carolina

Appropriate Halloween colors

Red and orange

And more

And more! I drank it up, knowing that fall verisimilitude (such as it is) wouldn’t victorious in Austin until virtually Thanksgiving — now, in fact.

Red foliage with deject wisps

Wild turkeys on the Blue Ridge

One particularly trappy stretch of golden trees demanded we pull over for pictures.

A golden wood

A flock of turkeys decided to navigate the road, and drivers politely stopped for them.

Safely across

Gorgeous!

Cades Cove

That afternoon we made our way to Cades Cove, a picturesque valley near Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Native Americans lived in Cades Cove for thousands of years, surpassing stuff pushed out. In the early 1800s, families of Anglo settlers arrived to sublet and built the log cabins, primitive churches, a mill, and other structures that remain standing today. Their numbers grew, and 700 people resided in Cades Cove by 1900. Just 30 years later, however, most of them had wonted buyouts for their land when the national park was established.

Today the valley is managed as a historic district, and older management practices of grazing and haying, to maintain the unshut fields, are stuff phased out, equal to the Cades Cove Tour brochure. Prescribed fire keeps the meadows self-ruling of shrubs and trees and aids in the re-establishment of native plants.

An 11-mile, one-way road loops through the valley, which visitors can drive, walk, or bike. Cades Cove is reportedly one of the most visited areas of the park, but visitors were few on this chilly, drizzly afternoon.

We crush past quiet, tawny meadows in happy solitude. Whenever we did see a line of cars stopped on the side of the road, we quickly learned that meant that a withstand had been spotted.

Like this shaggy fellow, lounging upper in a tree. See him?

Here’s a wider view.

Methodists in the cove were outnumbered by Baptists, as the brochure tells it, but they managed to establish a church. This one, built in 1902, replaced an older log church.

Out back, a cemetery quietly memorializes the cove Methodists.

The departed are not forgotten. Some of the gravestones were ornate with flowers.

Others with coins and flags.

Peaceful, but moreover a little haunted, perhaps, on this Halloween afternoon?

A quick squint inside

One of the log cabins withal the loop road. This one belonged to George Washington “Carter” Shields, who fought for the Union in the Civil War.

The human history of Cades Cove is interesting, but seeing a withstand in the wild is far increasingly so, at least for me. We saw 4 woebegone bears this day, surpassing my expectations. Later, when we mentioned our withstand sightings to Asheville residents, we usually got a smile and something like this: “Oh yeah, we get bears in our yard all the time.” OK, so bears for Ashevillians are equivalent to deer for me — no-big-deal garden visitors who can be rather pesky.

Bear salt and pepper shakers at The Old Mill Restaurant in Pigeon Forge, TN

But they sure do like to decorate with bears here!

Up next: An storing stroll at the North Carolina Arboretum’s botanical garden with bonsai. For a squint when at elk watching in Cataloochee Valley, click here.

I welcome your comments. Please scroll to the end of this post to leave one. If you’re reading in an email, click here to visit Digging and find the scuttlebutt box at the end of each post. And hey, did someone forward this email to you, and you want to subscribe? Click here to get Digging delivered directly to your inbox!

The post Golden trees and woebegone bears in Great Smoky Mountains and Cades Cove appeared first on Digging.

.