Step by step I worked my way up the gradual incline, trekking poles assisting me to make the burden of each step just a little less. The sound of two feet and the knobby end of two poles constantly pushing off the ground filled the air with the distinctive sound of crunching dirt. There was another sound permeating the air; that of the heavy breathing of the three people enjoying this hike with me, my wife Jess and our friend John and his wife Lauren, making their first trip to the Great Smoky Mountains. I paced onward, practically oblivious to their plight, my overriding concern being to push the group forward to minimize the possibility of us getting caught in a significant thunderstorm, something I had experienced before and wanted to protect my less experienced friends one. If I may be excused for being oblivious to the physical struggles of my group, one must understand that it almost unfathomable that I could outhike anyone; for in the days and weeks leading up to our Smoky Mountain trip, I had legitimately barely been able to walk.
Ah, 2020.
My year went sour before coronavirus was front page news. I came back from a hike in late February feeling an episode in my bad hip coming on, and that was compounded by a trip and fall at home. In the worst of all timings, this occurred simultaneously as the hospitalization and then death of the enduring rock for my wife and I, my biggest supporter and patron, my mother-in-law Karen (a subject which I’ll avoid delving into further in this post because it’s deserving of far more attention that I can give in a hiking-related post). While I was understandably concerned and frustrated at my hip going bad again, I tried to remain optimistic, for I had endured a couple episodes since my initial injury and recovery in 2017 and I had found a way to manage them just by being smart about activity for a while. But despite my optimism, this time was different. I tried resting it. I tried moderate activity. I tried an at-home exercise program. But when I tried to test myself around the end of May to see if I was capable of mountain hiking again, my hip delivered an emphatic NOOOO!!!
What followed were some of the most painful weeks of my life. It wasn’t that I was overwhelmed with a sharp, unbearable pain. It was that I had a constant pain that ate away at my brain and got immeasurably worse when I was working, in which even the covid-19 work from home version required immense amounts of sitting. I couldn’t avoid the pain because I couldn’t avoid working; I’ve found an income a necessity for providing for the basic needs of life. With that came immense anguish, as I had to deal with the mental trauma of causing myself pain. Most of all, I had do deal with the distress of not knowing when I would return to function. And function was something that at times I entirely lacked. Sometimes just walking to the end of the driveway caused the entire side of my pelvis. For some driveways this might not be as big of an issue, but I can assure you that I don’t live in that nice of a house, nor is the length of my driveway anything that should cause someone pain to navigate.
To say my wife and I needed an escape was an understatement. I was so stressed that I got more stressed just trying to find a place to de-stress, especially when you added the closures, travel restrictions, and necessary crowd avoidance that came with the summer of covid (which has had a hard time capturing the hearts and minds the same way the Summer of Love did). On a whim, I finally accepted a cabin in the Smokies as our destination. Though even in two trips I had scarcely found time to explore the many wonders of the area, I could tell you from memory where most of them were. And if my memory failed, I had a notebook filled with hiking guides and directions to waterfalls and swimming holes already assembled from the year before. (It might have seemed an obvious decision to make, but I was concerned about the effect being in one of my favorite hiking areas while I had limited hiking ability would have on my psyche). Not long after we made the decision, we booked the first cabin we’ve ever booked, and as it was a two bedroom, two bath dwelling, we decided to invite our friends John and Lauren to grab the second room. As fate would have it, they had been hoping to take a vacation that week anyway.
Many people in the middle of bad torn hip labrum episode would have chosen not to hike at all. Those people aren’t me. The need to explore and create is my true joy in life. But on top of that, while hiking was bound to be painful, and I was certainly going to have to ration my miles and elevation gain, moderate hiking was actually less physically damaging than my regular workdays. Seeing as rest and recovery hadn’t, and my unavoidable workdays were daily tests in pain tolerance, I was going to do the only thing that made me feel alive if it were physically possible to do it.
The Little River Trail was the perfect place for us to start exploring the Smokies this time around. With a negligible incline, its wide, easy-on-feet path followed the banks of its namesake for several miles, beginning in the Elkmont section of the park, which happened to be a fairly close drive to our cabin in Wears Valley. Depending on my physical ability and the weather, we would have the option of doing an out and back hike of about four miles, and could do a longer loop using the Cucumber Gap Trail and finishing off with a return trip on the Jakes Creek Trail to roughly the same parking area. We were taking a chance with the weather; it had rained on and off all night, only letting up a couple hours into the morning, and there was a strong possibility of storms returning not too long into the afternoon (as a rainforest, the Smoky Mountains are the only area I’ve been in whose summer weather is just as difficult to predict as my home state of Florida). In between these potential rainstorms would be a wealth of cloudy, misty weather – the exact type of stuff a photographer dreams of.
I could hardly contain my excitement as we drove the short distance from our cabin to the park and began following the road that ran parallel to the Little River, one of the focal points of the national park. Jess and I have no designs on having children, but for the moment, John and Lauren got to be our children as we got to experience the joy of exposing someone to a new world of wonder. We had long extolled the virtues of the Smokies; now they were getting to see why it was one of our favorite places. We all marveled at the numerous rapids and cascades it navigated within view of the road. Immensely tranquil on this rainy morning, this stretch of roadway is usually so crowded with people and vehicles that the river comes off rather different.
We parked at the trailhead in the Elkmont area of the park. As we gathered our gear, I tried not to betray to my colleagues just how nervous I was about both the weather and my physical state. Soon we were heading down the pathway, and my trekking poles made a distinct clanking noise on the hard-packed gravel, a sound I was still unused to, as I had only gotten them a few weeks prior to reduce the stress on my damaged hip. (I had long avoided using them, as using them makes it more difficult to use the often multiple cameras I use while hiking). The wide path was escorted by a tunnel of immense mountain greenery, on which moisture glistened. The natural setting would have come across as quite peaceful except for the quiet roar that filled the trees. This was the sound of the river, flowing at a torrid pace not too far away but not yet in view.
At our first opportunity we took an off-trail adventure to catch our first view of the river on foot. Our path took us through a wide series of clearings, dotted by the sites of many former cabins, their chimneys still standing in a state of disarray to attest to their former existence. Some people find these remains quite interesting, and I can’t find fault in that, but I was little interested in that today. I wanted to see the river that was casting such a noise through the woods.
I had seen the river before just a short distance from where we were know. We had used an afternoon the year prior to take the road to Elkmont for the first time, finding a few places to grab a shot before we ultimately landed at a pool that made great swimming hole (an approaching lightning storm had forced us away not long after entering the water). The river today was some altogether different. Angry, thrashing, and….brown? The consistent rain over the last day had done the river clarity little favor; in some places, it almost resembled diarrhea. I setup for my first shots, not quite knowing how the brownness of the water would come out in a long exposure, but knowing that I would never find out unless I gave it a shot (in the event I found the brown was a bit discomforting in the pictures, but could easily be managed with some editing. Some of my pictures in this post are edited in such a way, others aren’t). I was thankful we hadn’t planned to swim here today, for we would have been very disappointed. Sometimes people get so fixated on waterfalls that I wonder if they don’t fully appreciate just how beautiful the unnamed rapids and cascades of a mountain river are. Thankfully, John and Lauren seemed to be enjoying the site of the mountain river, much like I was.
The ruins of the cabins gave something for the others to look at while I was getting my long exposure game dialed up. I would use it quite a bit today. We headed back on the trail, and I was pleasantly surprised that the beauty of the old forest road exceeded my expectations for what a forest road trail would provide. Soon enough the river was running parallel to the trail, and it would remain in view for most of the next mile and a half. This type of trail is great if you’re a photographer. It’s just as good if you’re not.
June is a great time to come to the mountains, as not only do you get to see the fascinating depth of greenery at its height, you also get to see a variety of flowers in bloom. Some places feature great patches of rhododendron. Other, more select places feature the elusive flame azaleas which are rumored to have been the final impetus for the Smokies becoming a national park. Here along the Little River Trail and in other places on our trip we got to see nice mountain laurel lining the waterways. Coming in close proximity to their wet buds while trying to frame shots, I was surprised to find they are actually very sticky.
The closures of most recreational facilities due to covid-19 has naturally pushed people into the outdoors in unprecedented numbers. In most cases the newfound outdoors people have gravitated towards predictable places with lots of public exposure, overwhelming certain locations in numbers they are ill suited to support, especially when trying to accommodate social distancing, while some others out of the public eye have remained relatively quiet. Unfortunately, the Smokies belong to the former, meaning there would be a balancing act when trying to explore the park. Fortunately the inclement weather of the morning had kept people from overwhelming the Little River Trail thus far; we encountered but small pockets of people for much of the hike, and the trail was more than sufficient to provide a great amount of space between parties.
Those that had gotten on the trail had ample time to pass us. While by necessity I had to be a bit selective about where I deployed my tripod along the river, there was still a constant barrage of scenes just too perfect for me to ignore. We don’t have wonderful mountain rivers in Florida, after all, and I had little idea if I would even be able to walk at all on my bad hip after today’s activity, so I was going to make it worth it.
The trail gave witness to the many times the river split around small islands and large boulders. Despite the wet weather which made generally every surface slick, John couldn’t resist navigating a set of rocks and logs which formed a shaky natural bridge out to one of the boulders, which he climbed to enjoy a unique view. I wondered if he knew that it was much harder to climb down a wet rock in the middle of a river than it was to climb up. I grabbed my phone to capture video, anticipating a mishap. To my surprise, he experienced no problems on his return trip. Only much later, long after we had finished our hike and located a post-lunch swimming hole, and also when no cameras were nearby, did he learn about slick rocks the hard way.
One great patch of trail and river view ran into the next. I don’t have a story for each beautiful section we went through, other than to say that there wasn’t a single point of this part of the Little River Trail that wasn’t a small sliver of photogenic beauty. In the weeks before, when I couldn’t even make it around the small block in my neighborhood, I could only dream of such a serene walk. Now I was here, and I couldn’t think of any other place I’d rather be.
Even the one very brief section of trail where the river was hidden from view for a few hundred yards wasn’t a disappointment. It provided a great opportunity for the trail to again be encapsulated in that magnificent green forest escorting it on its way.
A typical trail in the Smokies starts in a mid-elevation area where the woods are composed of striking, deep cove forest that provides awe-inspiring beauty. And as you work your way deeper into the heart of the Smokies things somehow get even more breathtaking. The shrubs get bigger. The rocks have more foreboding edges. If you’re lucky, some of the trademark mist rolls through, making it feel as if you’re on another planet, or at least on the same one 300 million years ago. We were blessed with that mist as we got further along the trail, where the magic of everything seemed elevated. To not be able to capture that air of mystery in all its glory makes one feel insufficient as a photographer, though I am not sure a picture could ever truly convey the experience. I’ll never stop striving though.
About two miles into the trail is Husky Branch Falls. You probably noticed earlier that I talked about the Little River Trail not being a waterfall trail, yet I’m mentioning a waterfall here. That’s because Husky Branch is scarcely more than a foot wide as it tumbles down a roughly twenty foot escarpment, which hardly makes it a destination, especially when one considers how it pails in comparison to the river it flows into just on the other side of the narrow trail bridge. Nevertheless it does make a nice waypoint along the trail, and many find it an ideal place to turn around while doing an out-and-back. Quite a few were grouped around the small fall this morning, far more than I had seen pass us as we stopped along various sections of the river. Nevertheless I was able to find a place to deploy the tripod, though it was far more out of a desire to document the waterfall for those curious about it than out of any compulsion to capture its beauty, knowing it was more interesting in person than its small flow would allow in picture form.
That gaggle of people was something I wanted to avoid, especially as I knew the crowds would only increase the further we got into the day. That was further encouragement to try to push on to make this a loop, which I always prefer over the drudgery of repeating the same section of trail – even a nice section. It was a short distance to the junction with the Cucumber Gap Trail, which we would have to use to make a loop, but upon reaching that point I dithered. I had promised the group a six one way, half-dozen the other length, making our return route negligible. I was surprised to find the just the Cucumber Gap portion of the trail in front of us to be longer than retracing our steps along the Little River Trail would be – and that didn’t include the .7 miles we would also have on the Jakes Creek Trail. Up to this point we’d had a great, albeit short, hiking outing, and I had visions of being caught in a deluge of rain, accompanied by dangerous lightning, completely ruining that. But I also knew I’d feel a little incomplete at not doing the loop, which I was feeling physically capable of doing, and I was also preferring to walk a quiet section of loop back. Nobody in the group seemed to notice my indecision, and as the group leader I decided to push on for the loop, hoping to give my friends a bit more varied experience on the single-track Cucumber Gap Trail, far different than the forest road path of the Little River Trail. Would we be paying for that decision later?
The Cucumber Gap Trail began a slow ascent away from river level and up a narrow ridgeline. I was aware that the trail wouldn’t be flat like the Little River Trail, but I also knew that in mountain terms there wasn’t anything in the way of serious elevation changes either. I was kind of looking forward to the different scenery that elevation changes bring. It wasn’t long before we reached a very interesting creek crossing, what I presume to have been the top part of Husky Branch. The creek spread out in a very shallow flow some 15 feet wide, with no footbridge to cross. This is standard fare for me, but I was excited to show my friends something more akin to “real hiking” than the Little River Trail provided. The three others cheered me on and gave me points on where to place my hiking sticks, then they all slowly followed suit, all without incident albeit without my hiking sticks. Crossing a shallow creek doesn’t offer much danger, but it’s easy to get one’s feet wet, and while I’ve learned to embrace the wetness when its unavoidable, it’s certainly preferable to have dry feet when one has a few miles to go. And its also preferable to not have to write off a pair of shoes on a weeklong trip, at least until you can dry them enough to wear again.
The following section of trail served as a great supplement to what we had experienced on the Little River Trail. Thick hardwood trees stood on both sides of the narrow pathway, with much of the forest floor decorated by many small shrubs that provided an immense canvas of green wherever possible. While they were both cut from the same cloth, it was a vastly different experience from following the river.
The elevation also gradually increased. Utilizing trekking poles for the first time on a real hike, I scarcely noticed. The rest of my group had a different experience. I doubt it was because of any fitness level of mine, though I’m at least somewhat mentally accustomed to climbing regardless of shape. Rather it was because, at least on a gradual incline like the Cucumber Gap Trail, trekking poles really do make the climb almost imperceptible. Consider me a convert, even though I enjoy having my hands free. There’s just around 700 feet of elevation gain to be experienced on the loop, but with none it of the steep variety, and thus most people should be able to manage it just fine – even if Florida flat landers who legitimately go an entire year without having to navigate a legitimate incline will get somewhat winded.
If I had a complaint about the Cucumber Gap Trail, it has nothing to do with any elevation gain. It’s that after a certain point the woods lost their distinctive luster and come to be a little plain by comparison to what you’ve experienced preceding it, and there are long stretches of trail with no creek interaction and certainly no views to break the monotony. I know there are some who are of the belief that there is such thing as a bad walk in the woods, and while I always enjoy the thrill of exploring and experiencing the woods, there are some sections of trail that are better than others. You tend to think differently of these things when you’re hiking with a dysfunctional hip, and every mile could be your last. There’s also so much amazing to be found in the mountains, and there’s only so much time a person from Florida has to experience them. I could feel my group was starting to lose interest as well.
One section that did pique my interest was when the forest flattened out, and we encountered a large expanse of ferns carpeting the forest floor. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always had quite a soft spot for your standard ferns, even though they can be encountered regularly in my home state of Florida, too.
The Cucumber Gap Trail did level off for quite a bit, but one thing it did have for a while was a rather narrow path combined with a fairly steep dropoff to the right. As for the moment the storms were still holding off, they posed little challenge that a bit of concentration couldn’t fix, but I know from experience that hiking a narrow pathway next to a dropoff is quite an exhausting, nerve-wracking experience when the trail gets wet and muddy. We started downhill again and I finally came to another point of interest. This was a small crossing over a very shallow, almost ephemeral creek. The creek wasn’t what caught my attention though; it was the ridge lying just behind it, which was covered entirely in thick mountain laurel seemingly stacked one atop another as the ridge gained elevation. I instantly knew this was something that wasn’t going to be appreciated it pictures, but it made for an interesting sight when we were there. Crossing the small creek presented no challenge, though on the other side we were greeted with more narrow, steep-sided trail.
We hadn’t lost much elevation by the time we reached the Jakes Creek Trail. I soon found out why, as far from what I imagined a trail following a creek would be, the Jakes Creek Trail was a steeply descending, serpentine pathway, far steeper than anything else we had encountered on the trail. Like the Little River Trail, it was essentially the width of a forest road. While this made navigating the pathway easier, it also meant the trail lacked the scenic appeal I had imagined I would encounter.
By this point, I could tell that my hip definitely had enough, and I wasted little time trying to strain to slow myself as I descended, instead letting gravity do the work and not trying to strain my poor hip against it. Thus this downward section of trail went rather quickly for me, though others in my group took longer. Only upon reaching the bottom of this section did I see what I presume to be the actual Jakes Creek, running some 30 yards from a wide pathway we joined up with. At least on the .7 mile section we navigated, there wasn’t an unobstructed view of the creek to be had. With a little work, the creek wasn’t too far away, but I was too sore and the rest of my group too tired to want to put in a little work. There was one bluff behind another set of cabin ruins that provided a somewhat elevated view, and we did take that in before completing our journey to the parking area. In other circumstances I would have enjoyed getting a more intimate view of Jakes Creek, but that was not to be had today.
It was to my immense relief that we reached the car without getting caught in a storm. The area was inundated with severe storms later on that day, so my fears weren’t unfounded. I wanted to give my friends, and of course myself, a positive hiking experience, and for the most part we succeeded. It’s pure magic to get to follow a well-flowing Smoky Mountain waterway in close proximity and great conditions for several miles. My opinions on the Cucumber Gap/Jakes Creek portion of the trail were more mixed. I really liked moments of the Cucumber Gap Trail, but it was quite a contrast to go from the constantly wonderful Little River portion to the long stretches of comparatively plain Cucumber Gap Trail. I was hoping Jakes Creek would offer a similar experience to what the Little River Trail offered, and in this I was sorely disappointed. For what it’s worth, my friends were also not overly impressed with what we got out of the extra mileage on the loop. The Little River/Cucumber Gap/Jakes Creek Loop remains a popular hike in the Smokies, however, and it does offer the benefit of getting away from the crowds that branch out from the busy Elkmont section of the park. I don’t fault anyone who enjoys that, but people who have physical limitations like I did when doing this hike would lose anything “can’t miss” by doing the shorter out and back. Despite my opinions on the loop, this is a very good hike in the Smokies – not quite in the upper echelon with Alum Cave, Ramsey Cascades, or Chimney Tops, but still one offering some national park caliber scenery.
J. Parker Nature Stories 