Lund Rover

The next morning we woke up to a good breakfast of Mountain House freeze dried blueberry granola and dried fruit. (Which was really good in my opinion) Afterwords we packed up and headed out. The trek out was about 4.7 miles to a large waterfall, and then after that 2.5 miles to the car. We noticed immediately that this day's hike was a much steeper and rougher terrain than the day before. Steep hill after hill after hill. Both of us were a bit tired from the previous day too, so it was a bit of a struggle. About 2 hours into the hike it started raining. Not hard, and the trees we walked through did a good job of sheltering us; it was just enough to cool us down actually, and felt pretty good. We reached the falls at around 11 am right when the rain started to pick up. We spent some time there snacking and taking pictures, but because it was raining it wasn’t really fun to stay in one place. So, after about 20 minutes, we took off on our fi...

On Wednesday mornings Cades Cove does a cool thing where they close the loop to all vehicles until 10 am, allowing people to bike/walk/run the loop without having to worry about cars. We decided to check it out since we couldn’t go anywhere anyways. So, we got up, made a pancake breakfast and cleaned up what we could before taking off on our bikes to ride the loop. The loop has two roads that cut across allowing you to make it shorter if you want; we had a big hike planned for later that day, so we only biked the first bit until hitting that first shortcut path. I think the ride was probably only 2-3 miles total. Still fun though. Not as pretty as the night before, we totally lucked out on that one. After getting back to camp we started to get ready for our backpacking trip. We got all our food and gear situated and packed up then headed out to the trailhead. The parking lot for the trail head was on the far end of the Cades Cove loop (so we had to drive half of it again) and ma...

The next morning we got up, made some dutch oven Mountain Man Breakfast Casserole  and packed up camp while it was cooking. We dried stuff out as well as we could but it was still pretty damp so there really wasn’t much we could do. Once breakfast was eaten and cleaned up (so good!) we hit the road taking the New Found Gap Road. It was a really pretty drive on a 2 lane highway. Gorgeous trees line most of it, but as you climb higher you start catching glimpses of some pretty spectacular views. We stopped and pulled out at the many overlooks to take it in and snap some pictures. Our first stop was Clingman’s Dome. I wasn’t originally planning on going because it's a bit of a detour, but it wasn’t too far off our path so we figured, "why not?" The Dome is a manmade observatory that gives you great views of the park. As we were driving the 7 miles to the parking lot all the clouds started rolling in and it began to get SUPER foggy. It looked really cool, but ...

The majority of day one was spent driving from our house to the Smokies. We left relatively early, around 8:30 am, to make the 4.5 hour drive, arriving at our campground (Smokemont) around lunchtime. First order of business was eating, next, to set up camp. After everything was squared away we decided to go on a hike. We struck off on the Smokemont Loop Trail that circles around the campsite. It was super hot and humid (like always) and we were sweating before we even began haha. The first 45 min of the hike was uphill nonstop; not exactly what I had expected, but a good foreshadow of what was to come. The area is really green with lots of trees so it was  really pretty; we didn't catch any views though. Eventually we reached the apex of the hike and started going downhill. About 15 min later we had our first bear encounter. It was a little scary, but nothing bad. The thing wasn’t all that big and black bears aren’t typically aggr...