Three generations of my family visited the Great Smoky Mountains at the beginning of June 2024, being in almost the four corners of the national park over four days out of our 10 day trip across Tennessee. This provided us the opportunity to take in the expanse of “scenic vistas of characteristic mist-shrouded mountains”, the “clear running streams” and the ancient and ecologically rich woodlands that see this site inscribed under four natural criteria. 

We flew into Knoxville, rented a car (is there any other option?), entered the park through the Townsend / Wear Valley direction before embarking on a 31 mile trip along the Foothills Parkway which closely matches the boundary of the park and racks up plenty of the aforementioned scenic vistas. One of them is Look Rock Tower which is actually an air pollution monitoring station needed due to extensive coal power plants in the Tennessee Valley. Since 2023, it is now required to have an official paid parking tag matched to a license plate number to park anywhere in the national park for longer than 15 minutes. Does this mean the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is still technically free? I suppose it’s OUV could still be appreciated in a series of small timeframes but it’s a hard argument to make. I picked my weekly tag up in a kiosk at Lock Rock Campground.

Next we drove what is advertised as America's number one motorcycle and sports car road with 318 curves over 11 miles - The Tail of the Dragon. It is not clear to me whether some of this road is in the inscribed area or not or whether it forms the boundary of the park. In any event, a worthwhile journey for the adventurous (or foolhardy) traveller if only for the extraordinarily high number of expensive sports cars that frequent it.

Having overnighted in Cherokee, we reentered the park to traverse the Newfound Gap Road. Not long afterwards, we were greeted by a herd of deer lazing in a meadow roadside. As we climbed however, the weather began to turn and the Newfound Gap and Clingman’s Dome were enveloped in rain with no visibility. A return trip two days later from a sunny Gatlinburg  was minus the rain but still had these higher reaches shrouded in fog. Nevertheless, we engaged in a pointless climb up the Clingman’s Dome from a still-packed car park. We then drove through the Roaring Fork Loop, which was nice but possibly not worth the time and effort with such a narrow road. On the way to our high altitude apartment accommodation in Gatlinburg, we had the first of our four urban encounters with black bears - this one crossing the road in front of us and disappearing behind a set of bins.

The following morning we set out early for Cades Cove. Yes, we traversed it at five miles an hour but saw two bears in the forest 10 yards from our window and three bears out in a meadow, so worth it in my book! I might have felt differently if we just saw the big turkeys! There are also some ye olde cabins and other wooden buildings to provide a bit of pioneering lustre if that’s what floats someone’s boat. Further stops were made at The Sinks (recommended), the Cades Cove Nature Trail at the campground (not recommended), the Cades Cove Visitor Centre (aka a gift shop) and the Sugarlands Visitor Centre (a nice free exhibition through taxidermied animals of the diversity of flora and fauna in the park). The visitor centres, like Dolly Parton, work 9 to 5!

Ultimately, the purpose of our trip had been to attempt to see the synchronous fireflies, a natural phenomena I had been inspired to try and see since seeing it in an Attenborough documentary years before. Since there is only an annual viewing window of about a week which is never known too far in advance and weather dependent, I tried to book our trip to give us the best chance of being there at the same time. Elkmont has one of the premier firefly viewing events in the world but access is only available through a lottery - multiple attempts at winning this lottery failed unfortunately. Further online sleuthing indicated some trail areas they might show up, but we’re from Ireland where the most dangerous encounter in the wild might be with an irate swan so we didn’t feel brave enough to risk meeting a black bear alone out in the woods late at night!

Ultimately we bit the bullet and gambled on a $75-a-head guided tour into the darkness with Smoky Mountain Guides, figuring we’d have safety in numbers. A nature walk with an experienced local guide describing the various features of the forest was followed by toasting marshmallows over a campfire (described in the blurb as a culturally-inspired snack!) before bringing a fold-out chair to a spot on the Lower Mount Cammerer trail where the guide assured us we would see both synchronous fireflies and blue ghost fireflies. Sure enough, as dusk melted into darkness, we were treated to a beautiful flashing spectacle from both species of fireflies. I could have stayed for hours more if not for the cold and the dark and the tiredness, but I was elated that I had overcome the lottery of synchronous firefly viewing (literally). On our red-lamped-lit way back through the forest we met several other small groups who obviously were not afraid of the gentle black bear and were enjoying their own spectacle for free. Fortune favours the brave!