3 Hour Voyage

April 4, 2023 – Day 48

I had had a bad night’s sleep so today was going to just be an easy day, no super long hikes looking for birds or anything like that. We planned on making the short hike to Clingman’s Dome, the highest point in Tennessee. Curiously, I had thought it was the highest point in North Carolina also since the NC/TN border lies along the ridge there, but NC also has Mount Mitchell, which is higher.

I just wanted to take it easy in the morning, doing nothing, have lunch, then head out in the afternoon. The hike has a 330 foot elevation gain, but that’s in only 0.5. So it is short. Yay! But super steep. Boo!

Susan said, let’s just make sandwiches and head out. We can eat them at the top, then to do the hike.

Man, am I glad she suggested that! The road in was fun, this was on the “scary” road I talked about earlier, Route 441, which had been closed for a few days. It was nothing compared to some of the roads we had driven the past few days. There wasn’t any point in taking photos, frankly, the views were incredible but still the same. Plus, the photos from the other day were much better.

Then the traffic stopped.

It took us over an hour and 15 minutes to get from where the traffic stopped to the parking lot! We need to vent about the National Park Service here. The parking lot was nasty, you didn’t know when you would get a spot. They need to meter the input to the parking lot. Once a car left, you let on car in. Sure, it would require another ranger, but it would have made the place less tense. (Ominous music here…) Oh, and that’s an expensive ranger. We saw in the gift shop down below that they were hiring, $15/hr with a $20 bonus for working Clingman’s Dome!

Lunch was great, the view was fabulous.

Then we had the hike.

But we made it to the top.

The view from the top was wonderful. Curiously, it wasn’t as nice as the views on the Blue Ridge Parkway, but the 360 degree nature of the view made up for it. We also disliked how many people were there, it was awful. It was really difficult to move around.

See the antenna? As we walked down the ramp we both heard a brief burst of Morse Code! I’m learning Morse on this trip and it was neat to hear it in the wild. We tried to find somebody broadcasting at the bottom of the ramp, maybe doing a SOTA, but we didn’t see anyone.

Queue the ominous music…

The reason they need a ranger is that when you spend 1 to 2 hours in traffic and you see aggression like this. It really alters the feeling you get visiting a national park.

Yes, that is a handgun under his T-shirt. A ranger stationed at the nearby could have defused or prevented this situation. We’ll be contacting the NPS about this. This is not right.

We got back down and I needed some moonshine. Well, needed is a strong word, I just figured I should get some since I’m in the South. Sure enough the tribal “ABC” store (aka liquor store) had it.

The had about half a dozen flavors, including one jar stuffed with pickles! (Susan here: 🤢) I just went for the traditional, “white lightning” variety.