So a couple months ago I decided to try to snag a backcountry permit for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park so that we could go experience the eclipse without the crowds that would be flocking to the zone of totality. To my great surprise, 30 days prior (the earliest you can secure a permit), there were still a few backcountry sites up for grabs. I made a reservation for site #83, about 5.3 miles up the Hazel Creek trail, in the heart of the park.
To complicate matters, we also planned a couple days in Bryson City to go tubing at Deep Creek in the eastern portion of the park. I managed to find a fairly spartan cabin on the creek for two nights, so we booked that.
Getting all the equipment packed was a nightmare of course. Kayaks for the paddle across Fontana Lake to the trailhead on Hazel Creek - and a tenuous plan to pick up a canoe outside of Knoxville (which thankfully worked out)…
After a few hours of driving, we arrived in Bryson City / Deep Creek…the little cabin was perfect for our purposes…
Located right on the creek, we could tube all the way back to our cabin. Kai exploring the creek…
Not luxury accommodations but the cabin was clean and well appointed (and conveniently located)…
The location is perfect for families, with a ton of things for the kids to do while the adults drink…
The boys used the sluice box to find gems in “paydirt” that you bought at the general store…
The next morning, I got up early to head up to Maryville, just outside of Knoxville about two hours away. I had an appointment to pick up a Mad River Explorer kayak that I liked from a CraigsList seller. Thankfully, the transaction went perfectly, and the canoe is in pristine condition. What I didn’t realize is that the road there and back is the “Tail of the Dragon” road…famous around these parts for the 318 curves in 11 miles. What a ride…in fact, professional photographers set up in a similar fashion to the Mach Loop and sell photographs to motorcycle riders that come to ride the road at high speed…a few of the photographers captured my ride too…LOL…
Marisa approved of the canoe since it matched her clothes…
Tubing later that day was great…even if the water was a smidge lower than normal, it was still great fun hiking up to the top of the falls and drifting our way down over the course of the day…stopping for lunch at the midpoint.
Enjoying a fantastic meal at the end of the day…
We got up early Sunday morning, packed up our backpacks and the car, loaded up the rest of our gear, and headed to Fontana Lake for the morning paddle across…
Getting a canoe was a strategic decision since I figured the boys (Kai and his cousin) might not be able to fully paddle the distance in their kayaks. Thus, I could swap them in and out of a kayak and into the canoe to break it up for them. Plus, the canoe can carry bulky gear (too much gear actually…!)…
Kai working his way across Fontana Lake and up Hazel Creek…
After a few hours of paddling, we reached the outlet of Hazel Creek where we’d unload the boats, put on packs, and start the hike up Hazel Creek to our site…
One of the worst decisions I made on this trip was deciding to go “luxury camp”…a camping style we usually reserve for car camping or short (less than a mile) hikes. I thought I’d cracked the problem though by buying a really nice pull cart from Amazon. Rated for 300 lbs. and with nice big rubber tires, the trail is really just a forestry service road, so I figured it’d be no problem right?
Wrong. That thing was a beast. We pulled it about a mile and a half or two and we caught an amazing break. Sunday was grave visitation day for the relatives of the dislocated residents and descendants of the abandoned town of Proctor on the north side of the lake. As such, rangers were shuttling people back and forth up the trail…and a kind ranger took pity on us and threw our cart on his Gator and took it 4 miles up the trail, leaving us only a .7 mile haul in…! Kai, Joseph, and I walked the distance while Marisa sat with our gear until we could catch up. What a huge break…!
Kai checking out an abandoned building on the way…
A couple hours later, we caught up with her and we had a quick picnic before heading the rest of the way to our site.
The boys helping me up a big hill just prior to reaching the Bone Valley campsite…
Celebrating our good fortune at our camp and new home for the next three nights…
The advantage of luxury camping - good food…! First night was tacos and fresh pico…
Temps dipped down to the lower 60s at night…really comfortable for sleeping…
The boys checking out the creek running next to our site…
Camp…
Monday was eclipse day and we hiked down to the lower campsites to have a good view through the canopy…I’ll copy paste our eclipse experience below:
So we had a front row seat…saw the eclipse with only one other person in attendance (a fellow camper who we rapidly made friends with…). We also lucked out on the weather since Asheville and some of the surrounding areas were getting scattered clouds that obscured the views for some people.
We would be in the path of totality…a nice feature…we camped about six miles up Hazel Creek in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I snagged the permit on the exact 30 day prior availability somehow…(stayed up all night to make sure…LOL…) We are where the red dot is…just north of Fontana Lake…
The boys (Kai and his cousin) checking out the ever narrowing sun…
One of the more interesting things to me was the amazing quality of the shadows during the eclipse. Having hundreds of trees around us, each leaf acted like a pinhole camera…so the floor of the forest was just a mass of crescent suns as light filtered through the canopy. It was surreal looking…
Once we got near totality, I was able to snap a few images with my Nikon P900…
Then the scalloped shadows changed direction and started to move toward regular shadows over the next 45 minutes or so…
It was way more impressive than I though it would be. The quality of the light was just surreal. All of us are used to the “golden hour” of fading light at sunset…and this was a similar look, except without the long shadows and with the sun so high, it had a really bizarre lighting effect. And the totality was just simply awesome. What is amazing is how quick it goes dark compared to 99% eclipse and 100%…it is like really, really fast (like 30 seconds). For the few minutes of totality, the tree frogs started singing, and for about 40 minutes after the eclipse, the temperature continued to drop…it was really cool.
After the eclipse, we headed back to camp, then grabbed some gear for a short day hike up Bone Valley, one of my favorite trails ever. It is dark, spooky, rife with bear activity, and in the middle of nowhere…!
The trail has a dozen or so stream crossings, so it is best to just wear water shoes…
A small bear paw print…
I told the boys this was the valve that controls the flow of the stream…and not to spin it…
The entire hike there are signs of bear activity and at any moment you expect to see one. At the end of the hike is the Hall Cabin, constructed in 1892 by some early settlers to the valley. The story of how the Hall’s met their demise in “Bone Valley” made for a great story for the boys…
One of the many old graveyards that dot the park. This one held many of the Hall family…with ages from just a few months to their 70s. Most seemed to pass away young…in their 30s and 40s…must have been a rough life.
On the way back down the valley, we came upon two bears playing in the creek, and they took off like a shot up the side of the valley. Later, we also spotted a huge boar and a smaller one. And finally, right before reaching camp, another small bear jumped off the embankment on our left just twenty feet in front of us, hit the trail, and then took off into the creek. It was pretty startling and cool…(too fast to get any photos unfortunately…)
Back at camp, our solo backpacker neighbor (Saul), showed Joseph how to tie some knots…
We cooked up a nice spread for our second night, including blue cheese burgers, hot dogs, and beans…
Our super duper techno cool UV filter (SteriPen) quit working and left us with only the option of boiling water and then cooling it in the stream…
The next day we spent around camp before taking a short hike up to Cold Spring Gap. Here we are lounging in the creek cooling off and I’m doing some laundry by putting rocks on top of my clothes and leaving them to soak in the creek…
I had brought a fly rod, but didn’t really have a lot of quiet time to try my hand. I flipped a few flies…but didn’t really have time to do much more than that…
That afternoon we took a short hike up to Cold Spring Gap…a nice hike where we spotted a beautiful amber white tailed deer standing in the creek. We also visited another graveyard…this one was not as well marked, so no idea on who is buried there…
Stopping for a snack…
We ran our JetBoil out of fuel purifying water…so I had to switch to boiling water in my two empty beer bottles…which worked well enough…
In the late evening, Kai and I took a walk back up the Bone Valley trail hoping to spy some bears or boars…but it was just spooky and we didn’t spot anything…
The entire four days, we only got two very short sprinkles of rain…so the weather was near perfect…
Packing up on Day 4, cleaning up the site, and hitting the trail early…
With the cart way, way lighter…we were cruising down the trail at a pretty good pace. When, about 4 miles down the trail…disaster struck and the weld holding the rear wheel of the cart failed…which the boys thought was hilarious…and we didn’t…
Now this cart is advertised as a heavy duty cart, suitable for hiking, with a load capacity of 200 lbs. We probably had about 120 lbs. on it going up the trail, and about 75 lbs. on it going down the trail…and it was nothing more than a gravel road, and it failed after just 5 or 6 miles of total mileage. Needless to say, the cart went back to Amazon yesterday.
We tried continuing with me lifting the back left corner (while also wearing my pack) and we managed another half a mile before the second back strut fractured. Super. We parked the cart on the side of the track…unloaded some stuff into our packs and strapped gear to the outside of our packs and were resigned to shuttle gear back and forth the two remaining miles to the boats. We had just headed out and gone about a quarter mile when we heard the crunching of gravel behind us. Our super luck held out and two park rangers in an SUV came along with our cart in the back and offered to take our gear down to the boats after checking out our damaged cart. We took them up on the offer, and me and the boys climbed in while Marisa elected to quick walk without her pack. Woohoo! While she walked, we arrived at the boats and I set about getting everything loaded for the paddle back to civilization…
Kai heading out down Hazel Creek and Fontana…
The first half Kai paddled the kayak and Joseph paddled in the front of the canoe, then they switched off…
Finally back to the boat landing, then another hour or so of packing up once again…I was beat…!
Traditional celebratory Mexican dinner in Bryson City…
An epic trip for sure. Lots of gear due to the various activities…and a really memorable eclipse and outdoors trip. Now the boys head back to school…so I’m losing my summer buddies. There will still be weekends though…!
Motorcyclists love it!