Walking Up a Mountain

My wife and I walked up the Laurel Falls-Cove Mountain trail. This starts at the Fighting Creek Gap (don't you just love these names?) parking lot, goes a little more than a mile to Laurel Falls, then 3 more miles up to the crest where the trail intersects the Cove Mountain Trail.

The route is four miles up and four miles back. We covered it in four hours.

The bottom section is like a shopping mall. It is crowded, paved, and has an almost amusement park feel at the water fall.

The next three miles has a drastically different feel. It isn't the steepest climb in the Smokies, but we ascended 1,500 feet in three miles. We returned to civilization at the crest where we found a ranger tower (closed to the public), a power line coming up the opposite side of the mountain, antenna towers, solar power panels, and a jeep trail.

The weather was great for late July. The entire walk is shaded. We didn't see any bears, but met to groups of people who did.

A good walk.

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