About the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

     Like a rumpled quilt thrown across the foot of the eastern United States, the Great Smoky Mountains sprawl across more than half a million acres of ancient terrain, the largest wilderness sanctuary in the East. The park is a patchwork of old-growth forest and high mountain meadow, its diverse habitats stitched together by mountain streams and roaring rivers.
     Encompassing nearly equal portions of Tennessee and North Carolina, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a land of superlatives. Here are the largest stands of old-growth forest in the eastern United States and the greatest mountains east of the Rockies -- 16 peaks shoulder into the sky more than 6,000 feet above sea level. But often, words pay poor homage to a park whose beauty also lies in the details of bloodroot and bluet, trillium and Turk's cap lily. A United Nations International Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage Site, the park contains about 125 species of trees, more than 200 species of birds -- even 27 different species of salamanders.
     These rugged mountains were once sacred to the Eastern Band of the Cherokee, who in 1838 were brutally removed from their ancestral home by government action and forced to march to Oklahoma. Thousands died along the Trail of Tears, but small groups of Cherokee held out in the North Carolina high country, and in 1889 the 56,000-acre Qualla Indian Reservation was formed. It now shares part of the park's southern border.
     The high mountains that attracted rugged pioneer settlers in the 18th and 19th centuries were discovered by the timber industry in the early 1900s. A librarian and writer named Horace Kephart documented the changing fortunes of the southern Appalachian mountain peoples in the classic Our Southern Highlanders and sparked a national movement to declare the Smokies a national park. On June 15, 1934, the park was officially established.
     Today the interior is managed as a wilderness preserve: there are extensive camping facilities and interpretive programs, but few other services. The park is traversed by two main roads: a portion of U.S. 441 called the Newfound Gap Road and Little River Road, which leads to Cades Cove. On the perimeter of the park the resort towns of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and Cherokee, North Carolina, offer extensive visitor facilities, while smaller towns around the park, such as Townsend, Tennessee, and Bryson City, North Carolina, afford a more limited array of services.
     This melding of facilities and sights makes the park a popular place. There are about 9 million recreational visits each year, more than twice the number of visits to any other national park. The oft-cited statistic that the park is within two days' drive of half of the nation's population shouldn't deter visitors, for solitude can often be found just a short hike from the blacktop. Step off the paved road and the true heart of the park opens itself. Here you'll find hollows and coves and ridges rarely seen by human eyes. In the space of a few dozen feet, quietness pervades, all sounds muffled by moss and fern, stream and forest. Birds call. Brooks trickle. Rain drips. Tiny unseen streams seep from the undergrowth. Welcome to Shaconage (Place of Blue Smoke), the land held sacred by the Cherokee, a land whose wildness is still celebrated today.