So we had a front row seat… We paddled deep into the Smoky Mountains to go camping for this event. While the surrounding communities were being flooded with tens of thousands of extra visitors (and traffic snarls), we managed to secure a back country permit and 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.