Ice Water Shelter, Charlie's Bunion, Fontana

I woke up this morning super early due to the intense need to pee and found myself looking out over an amazing sunrise!!


Great Smoky sunrise

I tried to lay down a little longer, but the hustle and bustle of early risers in the shelter and the increasingly pink sky forced me out of bed – the earliest morning for me yet! The sunrise was just so pretty over the Smokies. The coolest thing I got to see was the creation of the Smokies... As I watched the sunrise, the mountains were visible and the sky was filled with clouds of color. Slowly, as the sun got higher and higher, from the valleys of the mountains grew what looked just like smoke, of course it was fog. But before I knew it, the Smokies were covered in this “smoke”. It was pretty neat to see.

We then hiked to the Bunion of Charlie for some pretty nice views, and a good sense of the AT. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be hiking the very same trail with a backpack on – it got me excited! But there were also some parts of the trail that really seemed to be a bit treacherous – narrow trail on a cliff, rocky and wet. Yikes.

We got back to the car and took some pictures of the Tennessee/North Carolina border, one with Byran in NC and one with me in TN.

We then made our way through the rest of the park. We discovered the reality of being in the MOST visited National Park in the country – there were sooo many cars, so many people everywhere. This frustrated Bryan greatly, so we got out of there as quickly as we could. But before leaving we did find a nice pull over spot and got to go swimming in the river by ourselves. Brrrr! It was cold, but so refreshing. It took me Quite a while to actually dunk my head under, but I did it!

On our way to the Foothills Parkway, which takes you along the Western edge of the park, we say lots of tube rentals, as the Little River is quite popular for lazying down. We almost took our raft and went for our own river adventure, but decided to carry on and get away from all the people. We made it to Lake Somethingorother below the park. The further we traveled down the road, along the lake, we started to see fog above the water. There is a dam up stream that causes extreme temperature differences between the air and the water, so the fog gets quite intense! It was soo cool. We stopped in one area with a little field near the lake and took some pictures. While we were there the fog started to come out of the water and reach for the road… seriously, it could have been part of a horror movie as I swear the fog was reaching like a giant hand, you can see what I mean in one of the pictures. We also took some silly pictures with bark while there. We came to a place to finally use our raft. We floated on the lake for a while, which would have been longer if not for the little Pffftt noise we heard coming from the boat. It seems to have a very slow leak, but we weren’t going to risk going to far into the lake. It was nice though.

We then made a very good decision to NOT hike in a mile and a half to a backcountry camping site, but rather kept driving and happily found a great campground near the Fontana Village Dam. This campground was perfect! We got a site near the creepy foggy water, there was a trashcan right in our site, we had a small “padio” for exercising, FLAT land for the tent, and … a SHOWER!! Hooray for showers! It was a good nights rest!

Link to more Great Smoky Mountians National Park pictures:

http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?mode=fromshare&Uc=9gc0q893.9xwbwkpv&Uy=rh6sss&Ux=1