June 6, 2012 Great Smokey Mountains

Today is our anniversary! One year married. First we went to Cherokee-which is in the Cherokee Indian Reservation. We parked in front of the fudge shop and used their free wireless to check a weeks worth of emails etc. and I posted all the last weeks blogs. There was no internet or cell service in Cataloochee. There isn’t in Smokemont were we are parked now. Then we went up to Clingmans Dome, the highest point in the Smokey’s- 6643  feet for sunset.  John took me out to dinner at the lookout on Clingman’s Dome for cold pizza while we waited for sunset!

The Cherokee Indian reservation, written in Cherokee and English. For a fee you could get your photo taken with a real Cherokee Indian.

I took a couple’s photo here, so they took mine. Great Smokey Mountains. The bus at our campsite in Smokemont campground.

Interpretive sign in both English and Cherokee. It tells of the Cherokee legend that when the earth was still mud the buzzard god flew above it and dried it with his wings.  Each up beat of his wings created mountains and each down beat made the valleys.  Sue on the Appalachian trail. It follows the crest of the mountains in the Smokey’s. It starts in Georgia and ends in Maine. The most heavily used portion is in the Smokey’s.

The lookout tower on the highest point of Clingmans dome.  From the parking lot it is a paved trail, gaining 330 feet in one half mile. Very steep. John with one foot in North Carolina and one in Tennessee. A man stood there later and his phone kept saying central time zone(Tenn.) and then eastern time zone(NC), back and forth, it could not decide. The border is the crest of the mountains. 

Sun behind a cloud, looks like the moon. View east, the Frazier firs are infected with an adelgid (bug) that is killing them. This is the only place south of Canada that they grow- in the unique environment of high altitude and high moisture.

John taking a photo of the view south. Here is the view. The  ‘smoke’ is from the evaporating moisture, this is the wettest place in the US. Also pollution from the states west of the Smokies.

Sunset, sunset ended with the sun dropping below these clouds as a red ball, but we did not get a photo. While we were up there people said that there was a black bear and two cubs on the trail on the way up. They all crowded around to take photos, but we stayed in the tower were it was safe.

The last of sunset on the way down.

The Cherokees call Clingmans Kuwahi, it means Mulberry place. The mountain is sacred to them and played an important part in their history and folklore. the Cherokee believed bears had their townhouse inside Clingmans dome. Bears would congregate and hold dances here in the fall before retiring to their dens for the winter.  Nearby was the enchanted lake of Attagahi, where wounded bears could submerge in the water and be cured. the lake was invisible to people. but if a human were to sharpen his spiritual vision by prayer , fasting and an all night vigil there was a slight chance they might catch a glimpse of Attagahi at daybreak. The lake would appear as a wide  but shallow body of purple water, fed by springs flowing from the high cliffs. Paw prints off all the bears would be in the sands along the shore. Fish and reptiles teemed in the water and a multitude of birds flew constantly overhead.  the southern Appalachians were once the Cherokee homeland, but white man drove them out.  President Andrew Jackson presented a plan for the removal of the Native Americans to western territories(Oklahoma) the federal troops rounded up  Cherokees for a forced march now know as ‘The Trail of Tears’