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We actually had clouds this morning! We sat there watching the pretty sky out of the room’s window before heading to breakfast at the Carriage House.
This is our catchup on anything that we’ve missed day. After breakfast, we headed up Little River Road to Newfound Gap Road, heading for the Chimney Tops trailhead. It’s only two miles to the top of Chimney Tops, but it’s a very strenuous climb. We passed on the full trail. However, the trail starts out by crossing the Middle Prong of the Little Pigeon River (too sunny when we got there) and Road Prong (nice cloud cover for these two bridges).
The two photos above were taken from the bridges over Road Prong Branch on the Chimney Tops Trail. The one on the left was taken from the second bridge and the one on the right was taken from the third bridge.
We spent some time shooting the cascades around Road Prong for a while, then returned to a full parking lot. People just arriving asked how the view was. We considered telling them, but finally admitted that we had only gone as far as the third bridge....
So we dropped a ways down the mountain to the Chimney’s picnic area. There we encountered another naturalist led nature tour that we had to contend with. We parked at a picnic table, planning to eat lunch there, also.
We spent the rest of the morning on this short, 0.9 mile trail. Lots and lots of wildflowers. Most of the time, the trail was nice and peaceful, but it’s close enough to Newfound Gap Road that we heard every motorcycle that passed by. And there were a lot of them on the mountain today....
The two photos above show just a fraction of the wildflowers we encountered on this trail. The one on the left has a hillside of yellow trillium and wild blue phlox while the one on the right is an aerial view of one of the largest clumps of showy orchis I've ever seen.
As we walked back to the car, a smelly, diesel, little bus pulled into the picnic area. It pulled into the picnic spot next to ours.... A bunch of old people piled out and tried to take over our picnic table as well as theirs!!!
I told them that we’d be happy to share if they’d get the driver to shut off the engine. It seems they planned to, once they finished unloading a couple of wheelchairs. They needed to keep the engine running to operate the hydraulic lift....
The clouds continued to build during the day - this would be our day with the most overcast. Thunderstorms were possible in the afternoon.
After lunch, we continued down the mountain to the “second quiet walkway”. When we passed it this morning, the parking lot was full. Now, there’s only a couple of other cars. There’s a small cemetery down this trail, some wildflowers (nothing new), and eventually, the Little Pigeon River. We had a nice walk and disturbed some beautiful butterflies near the bog, but didn’t take many pictures.
We sat for a while on the bench near the river and talked. While we were resting, we heard thunder (in addition to the motorcycles). There were a few light drops of rain, but nothing to send us covering up the camera equipment.
So we continued off the mountain, back along Little River Road, past the full parking lots at Laurel Falls and The Sinks, and back to the Inn to rest for a while. It’s been a long week. We sat out on the back porch of the room and enjoyed the air. A couple of dogs dropped in to visit as they made their rounds. It was a relaxing afternoon.
About 5:30, we packed up the gear again and headed back to Cades Cove, this time to do some animal hunting. We spotted lots of horses, several turkeys, several herds of deer (one of which is shown to the left), and a Pileated Woodpecker - he was huge!!! It was fun hunting, even though the Cove was getting crowded. It was Friday evening....
Back to the room to drop off the gear and we headed out for dinner. We’ve eaten at most of the places in Townsend, so we continued on down the road towards Maryville, looking for something that was still open. We wound up at the Back Porch Restaurant not far down the road and had soup and salads with blackberry cobbler ala mode for dessert. It was pretty good. And, once again, we closed a restaurant down. Most of them closed at 8:30. With sunset around 8:15, that didn’t leave us a lot of time to find a place to eat.... They’ll start staying open until 9:00 next month.
Back at the Inn, after checking the weather for tomorrow (which looks the worst we’ve had all week), Deb landed on TBS, which was showing Secondhand Lions. We just had to stay up and watch the end of that, so the lights didn’t get turned out until 11.