Stopping by Woods on a Busy Saturday

Saturday, October 23, 2010. I had been camping in Great Smoky Mountains National Park that week, Greenbriar, I think, though possibly the Cades Cove campground. I was beginning to work my way back across the mountain toward Cherokee and then on home. I stopped at the Chimneys Picnic Area and took some shots of the cascades in the Little Pigeon River beside the picnic area (great spot, by the way - see the cover photo for Water and Stone), and hopped back in the car to continue on my way.

A flash of color caught my eye, and pulled off the road to take a look, and to see if a photo or two or three might be in the offing. While I was stopped, barely 10 yards off the road, camera on tripod and eye to the viewfinder, a dozen or more cars pulled off the road to see what I was taking pictures of. Most, after looking at me, looking at the scene, and looking at one another, shrugged their shoulders, shook their heads, and pulled back on the road. “No deer! No bear!” I could heard them say, not out loud but in my mind, “What’s that idiot taking pictures of?” Passersby thought it quite queer to stop without a critter near. A single whitetail deer will cause a traffic jam a quarter mile long. The most beautiful, wild, tangled, sublime mess of asters, maple leaves, oak trees, dead branches, and fallen leaves I could imagine wasn’t worth a moment’s stop on their journeys.

Barely out of the scene, to the left, is the entrance to the tunnel on Hwy 441, eastbound, where the road begins the loop-de-loop, crossing over itself as it crawls its way up the mountain to Newfound Gap.

I visited Great Smoky Mountains in the fall for 15 years in a row, and this is one of my favorite photos of the Park. Even more so because I found beauty in a scene that thousands of cars passed without a moment’s hesitation. I have stopped there several times since, and I have never found a similar view. On that day, this scene was waiting for me, and for anyone else who cared to stop and partake. I did, and for that I was rewarded and I am grateful.