Hiking in the Smokies

About me

My husband, David, and I graduated from the University of Minnesota with undergraduate degrees in Fish and Wildlife Management, and advanced degrees in Zoology. We moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in 1965, where David began teaching ichthyology at the University of Tennessee, and I began raising our family. After our three children started school, I began working part-time at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) where I worked for 27 years. During that time, I authored or co-authored over 50 technical reports, 20 journal articles, and 5 book chapters, and was co-editor of two books. I accompany my husband on many of his field trips, and the two of us work together as consultants doing environmental surveys. My family and I spend idyllic summers at our remote island on the Minnesota-Ontario border where we live an old fashioned lifestyle with no running water or electricity, cell phones, TVs, or computers.
I have a wide variety of interests, including quilting, stained glass, watercolor painting, gardening, bridge, and volunteer work. I continue to play tennis, golf, and volleyball, to swim daily at the island, and try to lead a very active life. However, although we have lived within an hour of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for 40 years, I didn’t begin hiking until 1998, when I was 58 years old. I immediately fell in love with the mountains, and the exhilaration of hiking many miles in good company, surrounded by beauty at every step. I soon became obsessed with hiking all of the trails in the mountains, and set a goal to complete that task before my 60th birthday. I found that planning the logistics of the hikes was often much more difficult than the hikes themselves, and I spent hours poring over the maps to find the easiest and shortest way to accomplish my goal. As a result of those hours and hours of planning, and from the subsequent urging by my hiking friends to write it all down, I published a "Day Hiker's Guide to all the Trails in the Smoky Mountains."

My work

Want to hike all the trails in the Smoky Mountains? The Smoky Mountains National Park contains 522,000 acres of forested land that traverses the Blue Ridge mountains between Tennessee and North Carolina and may be accessed from either state. There are approximately 800 miles of trails in the Great Smoky Mountains (GRSM) that are officially maintained by the Park Service and may be used for horseback riding or hiking.

Currently, there are 151 maintained trails in the Smokies and this Day Hiker's Guide has laid them out in 75 easy to follow day hikes ranging from just a few miles to over 20 miles in length. It provides you with an approach to hiking all of these trails that minimizes duplication of miles hiked while ensuring that no trail segments, or spurs, are left behind. Indeed, if you follow my approach, you can hike all the maintained trails in the Smokies in a total of only 1060 miles!

This guide provides excellent color-coded maps showing the hikes for each area and tables that list the trail sequence and total mileages for each hike. Included are a list of available car or boat shuttle services for the more remote hikes, a handy checklist of all trails, and over 30 color photographs of the Smoky Mountains, wildflowers, and historic structures in the Park.