Hiking in the Smokies

Our group of 5 hiked from Newfound Gap in the Smoky Mountains to Charlies Bunion, down Dry Sluice and Grassy Branch to Kephart Prong and the road. We had dropped a car at the Kephart trailhead in the morning. There is a new signpost at Newfound Gap, giving the distance to Katahdin, Maine. We saw several through hikers at Charlies Bunion.

It was a neat wildflower hike, as we saw early March flowers all along the AT to Charlies Bunion, then "walked into April" as we got into lower elevations. The hillsides all along the AT were blanketed in Carolina spring beauty, with masses of trout lilies blooming on sunny banks. I thought it odd that we never saw the intermediate wildflowers, like bloodroot, rue anemone, trilliums, etc. We did see bead lily just coming up, as well as some monkshood, and lots of small turkscap lily foliage. A few clumps of false heliobore were just coming up (I consider these to be late spring flowers at lower elevations). Click on "photos" above for the pictures I took on this hike.

On Dry Sluice we found sunny banks just covered in trailing arbutus, in full bloom, a big surprise given how late it is in April. As we turned down Grassy Branch, we began to see what I consider early April bloomers at lower elevations: Trillium erectum, T. grandflorum, star chickweed. There was a lot of brook lettuce blooming by the streams we crossed, as well as monkshood about to bloom. We never saw T. luteum the entire hike. A large section of Grassy Branch had been swept away, apparently from some big rock slides, and it was a bit difficult to get past that section.

As expected, on Kephart Prong we saw some large masses of T. grandiflorum and T. erectum, as well as several nice big clumps of painted trillium (T. undulatum). Wild phlox was in full bloom, and wild geranium was just beginning to bloom.

Our big disappointment for the day was that we couldn't find the place along Newfound Gap Road where the huge clumps of yellow ladyslippers have always been found. To our dismay, it looked like the area had been mowed and bushhogged recently, and possibly backfilled. We did see a few yellow ladyslippers blooming along Little River Road, as well as enormous crossvines hanging down from trees along the road.

Wednesday, April 25, 14 of us hiked the AT from Clingman's Dome to Road Prong Trail and down to the Chimneys, only 9.3 miles, but it seemed longer to many of us. About ten days ago, there apparently was a huge wind storm near Newfound Gap. We read that over 200 trees had been cleared off of Newfound Gap Road and Clingman's Dome Road, which were both closed for awhile. We found the section of AT that we hiked had many very large trees that had fallen, but many had already been cleared off the trail. Road Prong had trees down, but hadn't been cleared, and we had to scramble over and under quite a few deadfalls.

The picture shows trees fallen across the AT that had not been cleared. We started at about 6200 feet, and there were spring beauty's everywhere, making a carpet all through the woods. The photo album, AT/Road Prong shows some of the wildflowers we saw as well as some more of the trees on the trail.