Beautiful Sights in the Smokies

So We had to be out of our Cabin on Saturday morning.  Everyone had to leave town, but I had nowhere in particular to be.  Once I returned to the intolerable western end of the state, there would be no going back, so i took a solitary drive up to Newfound Gap for a little peace and quiet.  Light streamed through the trees in the misty morning all the way up Newfound Gap Road.  No one was pushing me up the mountain, and I just cruised up at 30-something miles per hour and drank in the cool morning air through 4 rolled-down windows.  I got to the top and walked around like a beggar, asking people if I could take a photo of them.  Nothing is as sad as coming home to your photos and someone is always missing from the picture because they had to take the photo.  Sometimes the bold will ask outright if you will take their photo, but with camera-snatching always on people's minds, it happens infrequently.  So I just ask when I am around photo folks.  They never say no, and I like to do it.  I take pictures for a living, more or less.  So I am qualified.

The view of the Appalachian trail from Newfound Gap that morning.

Man that's CLEAR.

Kind of sad, too, knowing that as soon as I had had my fill, I'd be going home to the place I had run from just a week earlier.  And returning home, I found that we will be spending next week at or above 100 for the entire week.  Our nightly low temps are 82-85.  yay.  But speaking of hot, Girls in Gatlinburg certainly know how to beat the heat.

My little earth mother...

I am too old for these little flower child types, but not too old to hang out of a moving car and snap a photo for posterity.  Or posterior, something like that.  If the girls at Elkmont had been wearing skirts like these, they all would have been burnt at the stake.  Moving cars........who knows.  She may have STOPPED to get an ice cream cone.  Thank goodness I'll never know, because THAT photo would have been more than I could take, I think. 

But that's not the real beauty in the Smokies.  There is only ONE reason to hike 5 miles up a mountain when you're in the kind of shape I am in.  Either girls like the above-mentioned at the top waiting for me, or views like this.  The best thing about the Alum Cave trail route to the summit of Mt. LeConte is the ever-increasing height above the surrounding terrain.  You can look UP and see that you are nowhere near the top, but you can look OUT and see that you are getting pretty high up there. 

Like i said, this hike killed me.  But the views (and the breaks to enjoy them) lift you up a bit so you WANT to continue.  At this point my clothes are soaked and my nephew has a small circle of sweat under each arm.  I wanted to throw him off the mountain.  But I guess I am glad he has the guns to get to the top.  And in recuperative power, I kicked his butt the next day, when he said I would be ruined.  I was not ruined until several days later, when he was not looking.

And I did not trample these two rare flowers, either.  These are 'endangered', whatever that really means when you are a flower.  I guess it's the same as any other species, but flowers do not seem to be under threat from anything but lack of water and sunlight, so up here, to me, what's the problem?  Collection maybe.  Being stepped on maybe.  I wish the purple flower had been expanded.  I wonder what it looks like?