Hiking the Appalachian Trail through the Great Smoky Mountains--Things you will WANT to know! Part Two: Newfound Gap to Davenport Gap

This is the second post of a two-part series offering personal insights into hiking on the Appalachian Trail through the Smokies. It is my intention to make planning your thru hike or long section hike through this part of the AT a little easier by letting you know what to expect from the shelters and the trail, focusing on what you will see and what you do NOT want to miss while you are here. Part One: Fontana to Newfound Gap can be found here. This northern section of the AT through the Smokies is my favorite area of the entire Park, so hopefully you will find some things here to enjoy as you make your way through this jewel of the South.

The Trail, its Sights, and Shelters (South to North) 

Newfound Gap to Peck's Corner
The first mile of your hike north on the AT from Newfound Gap will likely be pretty crowded. Most everyone who drives up to the Gap for views from the parking lot will want to take a few steps on the famous Appalachian Trail, so just be prepared for the typical "are you a thru-hiker" questions! The crowds will thin considerably by the end of the first mile or so, but will become almost non-existent by the time you pass Charlie's Bunion at the 4-mile point. More about that in a moment!

The climb up from the parking lot is a breeze compared to the climb up from Fontana Dam, so you will definitely enjoy this day! This section of trail follows the ridgeline and offers spectacular vistas repeatedly on either side, first with North Carolina to the right and later with Tennessee to your left. If you did not take a night or two in Gatlinburg and instead hiked up from Silers Bald or Double Spring Gap shelters, you might be aiming for Icewater Shelter as your destination for this night. Just a heads up...it will likely be full, especially on weekends, but often during the week as well. This shelter is so close to the road and so easily accessible, it is a favorite for, shall we say, less-than-experienced hikers. With that said, you might find yourself surrounded by partiers and folks who don't understand what hiker midnight means because they've never put in a long hard day on ANY trail. However, in addition to having a very nice privy (even handicap-accessible if I remember correctly), the best part about Icewater Spring shelter is that it offers some of the best sunrises in the entire Park, so that trade-off might be worth having to put up with a bit of partying. The water source at Icewater Spring tastes just like you would expect. It's a pipe spring coming out of the ground literally crossing the AT just a few yards north of the shelter. It is cold and delicious! But, as always, treat any water you drink while in the backcountry.

Whether you stop for the night at Icewater Spring or not, hiking on beyond it, you will soon come to the side trail for one of my very favorite locations in the entire Park. A very short trail leads off to your left and bears the sign marking Charlie's Bunion. Please do NOT miss this spot! It is SO worth it, and you will want the picture from the rocks reaching out over a massive overlook with Mt. LeConte on your left and the Greenbrier region of the Smokies in front and beyond. On a clear day, from Charlie's Bunion, you can almost literally see forever, or so it seems. The views, in my opinion, are better than those from McAfee Knob because you are 2400' higher here. Standing, or sitting if the winds are fierce, out there on the rock outcropping, you will feel small and unimportant which is, in my opinion, good for the soul on occasion.

You might wish to know that these rocks were laid bare by a 1925 wildfire so hot it killed everything living there and rendered the soil incapable of regrowing vegetation. Four years later, a thunderstorm dumped a significant amount of water in a short period of time, washing the remaining soil down the cliffs, exposing what we now call the Bunion. Those of us who love the Smokies do wonder if a similar fate awaits the Chimney Tops and Bullhead regions so ravaged by wildfires back in November 2016. But you will probably not notice the devastation of that area unless you hitch or shuttle to and from Gatlinburg from Newfound Gap. The AT does not pass through the scorched area itself.

Once you have soaked up the vistas from Charlie's Bunion, you return to the trail and will soon cross the Sawteeth. There are spots along the trail between Charlie's Bunion and the next shelter at Peck's Corner that are very narrow strips of trail on a ridgeline seemingly no wider than the width of one hiker and his/her hiking poles. It does NOT feel scary though, so don't worry about that. There are brush and myrtle bushes along both sides of the trail, so it doesn't feel like you're going to fall off the ridge. One other notable feature you will pass is Bradley's View, a flat Anakeesta rock outcropping that provides both a resting spot and phenomenal views down into the North Carolina Smokies and foothills.

Peck's Corner shelter lies about .4 miles down the Hughes Ridge trail that intersects with the AT. This shelter does have a privy and a good water source, and if you climb up the little knoll just past the turn off to the shelter from Hughes Ridge trail and past the privy, you can find decent cell reception (which truly is a bit unusual in the Smokies). That is also a nice spot to go to for sunrise if you are inclined to chase them as I am.

Peck's Corner to Tricorner Knob
Just so you know, you are now in the most remote region of the Smoky Mountains, perhaps as remote as any part of the trail you will encounter until you arrive at the 100-mile wilderness in Maine. No roads and only a few seldom-traveled trails connect with the AT from here until the Cosby area. THIS is my favorite part of the entire Park!

The view from Eagle Rocks

From Newfound Gap to Peck's Corner shelter is only about a 10-mile day, short for a thru-hiker. If you have the energy and time, consider hiking on to Tricorner Knob, my very favorite shelter anywhere in the Smokies, as it's only another 5 miles.

About a mile after you leave the Peck's Corner and Hughes Ridge intersection, you will come to another open rock outcropping which affords more excellent views. This spot is Eagle Rocks, and you will find a geological marker there telling you the elevation at which you stand. It makes for a nice photo as do those phenomenal vistas you will be enjoying. The walk between Peck's Corner and Tricorner Knob skirts around the two summits of Mt. Sequoyah and Mt. Chapman and traverses through virgin forests, never logged, which cannot be said of the part of the Smokies you have already come through. These old-growth forests are simply magical! Stop along the way and take it all in--the sights, the smells, the mist, the connection with ancient time.

After climbing and then descending from the shoulders of Mt. Chapman, there is one short, final ascent to Tricorner Knob shelter. This shelter has a pipe-spring coming from the hillside just in front of the shelter and a privy large enough to make a nice changing room just a short distance down a flat (which is much appreciated after Peck's Corner), well-beaten path.

The bear cables are down the same wide path to the privy, making them easy to access as well. The nights I have stayed in this shelter, we've had roaring fires in the fireplace, another welcome accommodation considering it is usually colder here than anywhere else along the AT in the Smokies.







From Tricorner Knob to Cosby Knob

The trail you take when you leave Tricorner Knob and head toward the Cosby area will offer respite from the typical Smokies climbs. While experiencing an overall loss of elevation, you will cross two interesting areas you might not otherwise notice or understand. About 2.7 miles from Tricorner Knob shelter, you will come to a flat area across which some concrete rectangular slabs have been laid. The trail crosses right in the middle of them. This is an old helipad created after the wreck of a military jet in 1984, the remnants of which you will see in a few minutes if you know where to look for it. The helipad is another wonderful place to take off the packs and take a snack or breakfast break. On a sunny day, it would be a nice place to dry out your gear if you've had rain on previous days.



Once you leave the helipad, you will hike a short distance and come to some well-built stone stairs.

After going down those stairs, begin to look off the trail to your right, down slope from the trail. You should see some jagged, misshapen pieces of the plane that hit directly into the face of this mountain while traveling at over 400 mph. Both the pilot and the passenger were killed instantly. Please show this site the respect that it deserves due to the loss of life of two servicemen training during the Cold War to do reconnaissance to keep us safe from any global threat (credit goes to my friend Steve Oliphant for this information). Do not disturb the wreckage and by all means, do not remove any of it.



Walking on, you will pass into now less mature forests, an area that once again, had been logged heavily in the years before the National Park. After you pass the intersection with Camel Gap Trail, you will climb for a little bit before reaching the next shelter, Cosby Knob, at a distance of 7.7 miles from Tricorner Knob shelter. This shelter is used regularly by local Park visitors and is known for its not-shy mice and, in the summer, frequent visits by bears. I once woke to the scampering of tiny feet across my sleeping bag, raised my hand inside my bag to knock him off, and sent him flying with a thud into the shelter wall beside me. I have not stayed there since. This shelter closes almost every summer due to aggressive bear activity, so be sure to check the status if you are planning to stay here or be prepared to keep walking.

Cosby Knob to Davenport Gap

Pink Lady Slippers can be seen here in early June

Leaving Cosby Knob, you will have about a mile of descent to Low Gap before making your final long climb within the Smokies. However, these woods are lovely, dark, and deep, and we have been fortunate to experience them in rain and light fog. Those conditions turn any part of the Smokies into an otherworldly experience, as you can glimpse in the photo above. The climb up Mt. Cammerer, locally known as White Rock for the large white rocks that burst forth from its summit at precarious angles, is about 700 feet over 2 miles, so that's pretty doable. But Mt. Cammerer is definitely the STAR of this show! You will see a sign for a .6 mile side trail out to by far my favorite structure in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The Mt. Cammerer Lookout Tower, crafted from stones blasted and shaped by workers of the Civilian Conservation Corp in 1937, was used as a fire lookout until 1960, but is no longer used for that now. You can climb up those white rocks to the lookout, walk around the structure on the railed decking, and even go into the building. Sadly, you cannot camp here to protect the structure from overuse and abuse. As you can see when you enter, it has already been defaced by visitors who hold no respect for the hard labor that built this fine and unique structure. This building is definitely worth the 1.2 mile easy round trip if you have the time. You can keep in mind as you decide, that it is an entirely downhill trek from this point to the northern boundary of the Park. Go out to Mt. Cammerer Lookout! You will not be disappointed!



The remainder of your time in the Smokies will be, literally, a walk in the Park. This pleasant section of trail descends comfortably until you come to the final shelter, Davenport Gap shelter. This is the only shelter remaining in the Smokies that still has the chainlink fence surrounding it. Most, if not all, shelters on the AT at one time sported these chainlink surrounds which were designed to keep bears and humans carefully separated from one another. The flaw in the thinking here, though, turned out to be that designers had no idea people safely ensconced within the fences would FEED bears through the fence. However, that is by most accounts what became the undoing of the design. As you can imagine, what ended up happening was that the people became virtual prisoners within the fencing because the bears became conditioned to being fed. The Park Service has long since removed all such fences, except, for some unknown reason, this one, and instead have placed the bear cables for all hikers to use to hang food and anything bears might THINK are food. Please do abide by the restrictions regarding no food in the shelters. I would hate to see the Smokies become one of the places where you have to hike through carrying a bulky bear canister.

From Davenport Gap shelter it is approximately one mile to the end of the AT in the Smokies and the spot where you can drop off your no-longer-needed copy of your permit. If you continue hiking on from here, it is an easy 2.7 miles to Standing Bear Hostel where you can get a little resupply or enjoy a night in that very unique setting. I have used them several times for shuttles and they are really nice folks. If you are there, look for Lulu, the Boston Terrier, and throw her a rock or stick for me!

I sincerely hope this series has helped you with your planning of your thru or section hike of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. May you be blessed with bluebird skies and moderate temperatures! If you have further questions, feel free to comment below. Happy trails!

A Glorious Three Days in the Backcountry of the Smokies--Day 2

Thru-hiking couple at Tricorner Knob

When you overnight with thru-hikers, bedtime comes pretty early if you are respectful of their adventure.  An Appalachian Trail hiker once told me that the reason thru-hikers go to bed at 8:00 is because it takes them 11 hours to get 8 hours of decent sleep! The thru-hikers in our group that night went to bed as soon as they finished eating their dinner, so that ended up being about 8:00 p.m.  The rest of us were tired too, so in order to keep from disturbing them, we just all crawled in bed by around 8:30—it wasn’t even dark yet!  The warmth of our sleeping bags on this chilly, high-elevation night was also partly the reason for our retreat. That meant, too, that by the time the sun was coming up, we were all pretty ready to get out of bed.  However, we didn’t expect the wake-up call known as “Boomer” running across the bunks just inches from our heads, but that is what we got! He didn’t stick around long, but it was almost like he was saying, “I’m hungry! Would you please get up and cook breakfast so I can get any crumbs you drop?” 

A long section hiker and another thru-hiker

Our day began with breakfasts prepared with our JetBoil cooking systems after retrieving our packs from the bear cables. Mine on this day was the Breakfast Skillet meal (one serving size found at Walmart) wrapped in the two wheat wraps I had carried for this express purpose.  I don’t like all of the Mountain House meals, but that is one of my favorites! I had attempted carrying the Mountain House meals on an earlier backpacking trip without searching for the single serving size, but ended up packing out the excesses of too many rehydrated meals. Instead of getting lighter as the days wore on, my pack was getting heavier because the ends of the meals that were too big for me had been rehydrated, and thus, were no longer light weight. This single serving size worked just great! Thanks to Matt (aka @GSMNP_Hiker) for telling me that Walmart had them.

After breakfast, the thru-hikers left, one by one. I made sure to tell them about the beauty they were about to experience as they crossed one of my favorite sections of trail in the Smokies. The six miles between Tricorner Knob and Camel Gap passes across the shoulders of

Across the grassy helipad area near Mt. Guyot

Mt. Guyot, also traversing across the helipad area, a relatively flat open expanse that bears a concrete marker that can, presumably, be seen from the sky by helicopter pilots.  It is old and slightly overgrown, but I imagine it can and probably has been used to airlift folks out of this most remote section of the Great Smoky Mountains if they are in trouble.

This section of trail is almost always moist, if not from rain, then from the dew of the morning or clouds that had settled around the mountaintops overnight.  Snails are a frequent sight on the trail as are mushrooms of multiple varieties. On this trip, the mountain laurel and Catawba rhododendron were blooming, lining the trail with laurel tunnels and carpeting the path with spent rhododendron blossoms.  My favorite thing about this section though is the vista of the surrounding peaks and forests.  The sense of renewal here is real—almost tangible—both in the sense of the nature around you, and also in the sense of the renewal of your own world-weary spirit.  Heaven on Earth? Yes, in my opinion, it’s pretty close!

View from the helipad

Jennifer and Kirsten standing on the helipad

After reluctantly leaving the helipad area, we continued along the Appalachian Trail, looking now for the fighter jet wreckage found, probably less than a mile down the trail.  A marker, in case you want to look for it, is the stone staircase. Once you come to the stone stairs carefully laid in the trail by ATC trail maintainers, begin looking to your right and down the hill a bit. You’ll see a few remnants right along the trail’s edge, but most of debris is maybe 20 yards off the trail. There are well-worn footpaths you can take to explore what remains of the jet that crashed headlong into this mountain in bad weather a very long time ago.

 

View near Snake Den Ridge intersection w/the AT

The sweeping vistas continued to stop us in our tracks as we made our way beyond the wreckage on toward Camel Gap, marked by the intersection with Camel Gap Trail, which we would take to head back to lower elevations and our campsite for this second night. At one point, though, we were passed by a fast-moving thru-hiker who would have zipped by us without a word had we not spoken to him. When asked how far he was going, he replied, “well, I’m getting out of the Smokies tonight, that’s for sure!” I told him that sounded as if that were a good thing, and he responded with, “not as much elevation change; easier paths.” How sad! He didn’t even slow down to appreciate the breathtaking vistas—he just wanted out! That’s funny because I was to the point I never wanted to leave.  I have serious doubts as to whether someone with that attitude has what it takes to finish the AT. I didn’t get the sense that he was smelling very many roses along the way. 

 Camel Gap was a nice trail with gentle descent down into the valley of the Big Creek area.  It shouldn’t have taken us very long to get down, but it did! I can’t help but think that trail is mis-measured. It surely must be longer than the 5.1 miles that the sign says it is.

Finally, we made it to the trailhead for Gunter Fork trail to see yet another sign (we had seen two the previous day) that is lettered in bright red or orange paint warning that Gunter Fork is IMPASSABLE in high water! Our plan was to do that trail on our final day, but the weather was threatening rain now and the forecast had not been favorable at all for the third day, so we were going to make that decision at the last moment. We did go up Gunter Fork to the first crossing, just to see what it looked like and it seemed fine at that moment. We made our way on to Campsite 37 though with dark clouds building overhead and a bit of rumbling in the distance.

Once at our campsite, we picked out a spot, pulled out the tents we had not needed at the shelter, set them up, and then went to filter water out of Big Creek. We prepared our dinners just before the heavens opened up to dump a deluge of water on us and our belongings. Retreating to our tents, this would have been a great time for a bear to have taken advantage of the situation, because two of us left our packs where they had been placed before cooking dinner in our speedy retreat from the storm. Thankfully, no bears bothered our stuff, but there would be other critters we’d have to worry about before morning! We were able to come out a bit later and hang the packs on the bear cables before going back into the tents to escape the rain.

 

Rained into my MSR Hubba Hubba tent at 6:30 p.m.

You could tell we had not done much tent camping in the backcountry before though, because during the hardest part of the rain, we began to notice that our boots and other items we had set under the vestibule were floating in what was becoming a deep pond underneath our tents.  I took a shovel and went out to try to dig a trench to route the water away from us, but could tell pretty quickly that was going to be a futile effort.  Quickly looking around for higher ground that wasn’t standing in water, I told the other girls we would have to move our tents.   Once the tents were secured on higher ground and we had secured our other belongings on the bear cables, we took refuge from the rains inside our tents and eventually fell asleep, again much earlier than would have been true at home. 

The blessings of this second day, however, were not yet over! Somewhere about 9:15, Jennifer got up to go to the restroom (some shrubbery in the woods, really), only to exclaim that the fireflies were out! The next hour or so was simply, unimaginably magical! By  9:30, hundreds of thousands of fireflies (mixed in with enough mosquitoes that I am still scratching as I type this) totally surrounded us, caught up in their synchronized mating ritual for which thousands of people flock to the Elkmont area of the Park each summer. We were nowhere close to Elkmont, but apparently not all of the fireflies know that they are supposed to go to Elkmont to do their thing. Either that or they’re not very good at reading maps!

My phone wouldn't capture the fireflies, so this pic is from firefly.org.  Even this doesn't do it justice! 

This spectacle rivaled any fireworks or light show I have ever witnessed! For 5-10 seconds, the woods would be engulfed in total darkness, then all at once, flash-flash-flash-flash, they would be lit by a gazillion fireflies all vying for the attention of the females in the area! Then, almost as suddenly as they began, they would stop and we would be standing in utter darkness again. The cycle repeated itself, getting more and more powerful and more synchronized as it went along. Finally, with mosquitoes feasting on our bare legs and blood, we retreated again to the enclosed space of our tents, but since the rains had stopped while we had napped, we were able to open the rainflies of our tents and watch the display from inside. Not a bad way to fall asleep, now, is it?  

To read about the third and final day of our adventure, CLICK HERE.