Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Location: On the border between Tennessee and North Carolina containing portions of the counties of Swain and Haywood in North Carolina and Sevier, Blount, and Cocke in Tennessee.

Introduction:

Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Smokies for simplicities sake) (Wikipedia page) is actually a park that I have been to several times before but most of these times were before I had started blogging at all. It had been a while since I had done anything outdoorsy let along go to a National Park it was nice when my wife and I were able to get away for a weekend and head out there. While it is still too long a drive for us to justify heading out there every weekend if you live in the Knoxville area it is ~1 hour away and totally worth many trips.

The Smokies is a huge park encompassing over 500,000 acres total between Tennessee and North Carolina. What makes it more impressive is on several sides are National Forests making the natural beauty of the area seem to go on forever. The towns around the area are very cliche and touristy but this means the type of people you will meet in this park varies drastically from who you will meet in other parks. In fact the Smokies were the 3rd most visited park in 2011 with over 9 million visitors. This isn't always a good thing for someone who enjoys getting away from it all as there are people who head to this park that likely haven't been or won't be headed to any other park so typical park/hiking etiquette is often thrown out the window, along with garbage sometimes I am afraid. This isn't the fault of anyone who works at the park but its location is part of the problem. As I mentioned it is only an hour from Knoxville but it is within driving distance for many other major cities in the Eastern United States, such as Atlanta, GA. It is also free to get in, minus any charge for camping if you do that or hotel if you don't.

With all of that said if you live nearby and haven't checked out the Smokies yet you need to. There is a natural beauty to the park that is not seen in many of the big cities on the east coast. Trees, including old growth forest, abound and animal life from the common white tailed deer to the less common black bear are very often seen but perhaps most impressively and only rarely seen are the Elk which were reintroduced to the park in 2001, I have never actually seen elk (although I am pretty sure I saw evidence of them this past trip, even if it is an area where they aren't known to be so I could obviously be wrong and it could just be evidence of a large deer). Much of the local plant life is on display as well and during the spring there is a rush of people coming in to photograph the wildflowers, they were just starting to open up when we were there, and in the fall there is just as big a rush to take pictures of the beautiful fall leaves that makes the area many brilliant colors. I have been in both the summer and winter as well, and trust me both those times are absolutely beautiful as well.

Heavy visitation and being near so many urban areas has also effected several other aspects of the Smokies. While it gets it's name from the fog and low clouds that sometimes cover the area air pollution has been causing problems from as simple as making views appear hazy to as dramatic as killing plants due to the effects of acid rain. Another major problem has been the infestation of an insect called the hemlock woolly adelgid. This insect infects hemlock trees and basically sucks them dry causing them to die off, you can see evidence of this throughout the park, both dead and infected trees abound, and like the American Chestnut in the '20s and '30s the hemlock is likely to be extinct in the region soon if the National Park Service can't get it under control. That doesn't mean they aren't trying to stop the spread of this insect but they may already be fighting a losing battle.

All the problems you would expect with a major tourist destination aside, yes that includes traffic jams, the park is big enough and there are enough areas that are not visited much that it is easy to find yourself in the peace and serenity of nature. I will be headed back soon and every visit I find something new. The area is beautiful and even if you don't want to see nature you can see buildings built when the area was still the frontier or you can just be a tourist and stay in the towns around the area and just go check out the visitor center there are many different options.

Geology:

Interestingly enough the geology of the Smokies gives me a great place to pick up from Russell Cave NM and C&CNMP as far as the geology of the southeast is concerned. It is worth going to check those two out because the rest of this post is going to be based on the assumption that you already at least partially understand what is going on there.

Looking at the regional geologic map, which can be downloaded or opened here (you will have to click on the link for the huge PDF), it should become obvious that the area has two primary geologic rock types. To the north and west there are primarily sedimentary rocks, these rocks are similar, although not quite the same aged as those at RCNM and C&CNMP. These sedimentary rocks represent the Ridge and Valley Province and were likely laid down in conditions similar to those of a warm shallow sea. To the south and east the rocks contain a mix of igneous and metamorphic with metamorphic rocks being the primary constituent. These rocks represent the next geologic province the Blue Ridge Province (also known as the Blue Ridge Mountains). The contact between these two provinces can vary from place to place, in some areas of the east the sedimentary rocks of the Ridge and Valley slowly become more and more metamorphic till they are the very metamorphic rocks of the Blue Ridge while in other areas the transition is very abrupt.

Moving on to the more local map, found here (warning link goes to PDF), you can see that the majority of the park consist of metamorphic rocks, meaning that the Smokies are located in the Blue Ridge. So lets talk on a very short description of how the Blue Ridge formed. Very simply the Blue Ridge was formed by accretionary metamorphism. During the formation of Pangaea as well as the formation of the previous super continent Rodinia, during the Precambrian more specifically the Mesoproterozoic the east coast of the US moved eastward. During this time subduction of an oceanic plate was occurring under the continent, this produced a lot of heat (this is why there are currently volcanoes on the West Coast and why there are igneous rock on the east coast (and even this comes with a caveat that it isn't a Triassic/Jurassic rift basin)) and pressure. This heat and pressure caused changes in the rocks in what is now the Blue Ridge and Piedmont changing them from sedimentary to metamorphic rocks and why in some areas the transition is very hard to see. In the Ridge and Valley this accretion caused the many different anticlines and synclines you see but similar things happened in the Blue Ridge some fell over or got pushed over the younger sedimentary rocks to the west, this will be important in a minute.

During the Mesozoic the Appalachian Mountains, of which the Blue Ridge is a part, may have been as tall as the Rockies are currently but as accretion/subduction stopped so did the mountain building and eventually the only force acting on the mountains was erosion. As the Appalachian got more and more rounded off and lower in elevation due to erosion all of this rock material flooded the continental shelf. This caused loading on the shelf which lifted up the continent and again raised the mountains. There are some ideas why you can have the same rocks in the Piedmont and Blue Ridge but a huge elevation change is due to the a fault or some other geologic feature being able to act on the western side and force up the Blue Ridge while other ideas say that the Piedmont has just been eroded away. All of this relates to the uplift currently of both the Blue Ridge and the Ridge and Valley, which allows rivers like the New River to form great cuts in locations.

During all of this time the rocks on the Blue Ridge that had been pushed on top of the younger sedimentary rocks in portions of the Smokies were being eroded away as well. In several areas these rocks completely eroded away to expose the underlying sedimentary rocks in what is known as a tectonic windows. This is why on the geologic map you may have areas of old, non alluvium, sedimentary rock surrounded on all sides by metamorphic rock. The most famous example of this, also one of the most visited (I am sure most of the people who visit it don't even realize what they are driving through), is Cades Cove in which the ~9 mile driving/biking route follows most of the outer edge of the window.

That is a very short summary of the geology but as it is getting long already I will call it quits. As should be obvious from this is just how complicated the geology that formed the Smokies, and much of the east coast in general, actually is.

More Pictures: All images are by the author ask permission if you want to use them, and if you do make sure you give me credit.

Further Reading:
Southworth, S., A. Schultz, and D. Denenny. 2005. Geologic map of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Region, Tennessee and North Carolina. U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2005-1225. (Link goes to PDF)

Thornberry-Ehrlich, T. 2008. Great Smoky Mountains National Park Geologic Resource Evaluation Report. Natural Resource Report NPS/NRPC/GRD/NRR—2008/048. National Park Service, Denver, Colorado. (Link goes to PDF)

NPS website on the geology of the Smokies.

National Park Service Series Page