Smokies 2015 - Day 1

April 23, 2015

Yahoo - time for another adventure!  This trip took us down to the Great Smoky Mountains. We had visited the Smokies back in May 2008, so it was not an entirely new vacation destination for us. We left home bright and early and made it down to TN in time to do some evening hiking.  For this trip, we stayed outside of town at Bent Creek Golf Village. It was really nice not to be in the city, on our previous trip we had stayed at the KOA near Dollywood.

Timing our trip with the annual Wildflower Pilgrimage we, at least I, had hoped to see a ton of wildflowers.  We found some wildflowers along the trails that we hiked in the Greenbriar portion of the Great Smoky Mountains. Trails that we hiked included the Old Settlers Trail and the Porters Creek Trail. Both trails claimed to have wildflowers, which they did, but not to the extent that I had intended – yellow and large-flowered trilliums. The Old Settlers Trail deviated from the stream quite quickly and was an easy hike, granted we only hiked in for maybe a mile.

Porters Creek Trail followed the creek and had a few wildflowers. We probably hiked about a mile and a half on this trail. The full round trip hike would have been 7.4 miles. The trail was an easy hike.