Dara told me last weekend that she was up for another 8-10-mile hike, so I picked out what I thought would be a great one this time of year. The Laurel Falls trail (at least to the falls themselves) is one of the heaviest-used trails in the Smokies. I imagine that the Metcalf Bottoms trail and the Little Brier Gap trail, at least to the Walker Sisters cabin, is also pretty heavily used. Both of those sections are relatively easy walking, and you get to the "big attraction" of the trail within a mile or so from the road. In other words, there's no way in heck I'm doing either of those trails in the height of tourist season, so I thought it would be great to knock them out (plus some additional mileage) on a cold winter day. Generally, a great plan.
The problem last weekend was that we got quite a bit of snow in the mountains on Friday and Saturday, and when I woke up Sunday morning and checked the Smokies Road Info, I learned that Little River Road (basically, where both of our trailheads were located) was closed. I had (stupidly) failed to plan a backup hike in case that occurred, so I texted Dara and told her to go back to bed because our hike was off.
We tried again this weekend, although there were fresh snow showers in the mountains on Friday, and both Little River Road and the Wear Cove Gap Road entrance to Metcalf Bottoms were closed on Saturday. This time I had planned an alternate hike in Cosby (because I learned my lesson last weekend), but luckily the roads opened just before we were leaving the house for our hike this morning, so we went with the original plan.
There was still snow on the ground on the trail, so we both wore our crampons. We didn't really need them for a good bit of the trail, but there were definitely some places where they were helpful. As I mentioned, the hike from the trailhead to Laurel Falls was pretty easy. The trail is actually paved (although the pavement is pretty rough in some places) to the falls. There are a lot of great wintertime views, and some places even have good summertime views, on the way to the falls.
There wasn't a ton of snow on this portion of the trail, but it got pretty icy in spots. I felt like it was either ice or mud. I had mud slung halfway up the back of my legs from my crampons.
We saw this awesome tree just before the falls. Just look how the roots have gone around the rocks and finally found their way to dirt. Nature is so freakin' amazing.
The falls themselves are pretty cool. There's an upper falls that dumps into a little pool in a flat area, and the trail actually crosses those pools on a footbridge. Then there's a lower falls that drops off below the trail.
You don't really get a great view of the whole falls until you keep going on the trail and climb a little bit above it.
The trail changes pretty abruptly once you get past the falls. It's no longer paved, and it starts a relatively steep climb. We climbed like that for about two more miles until we reached the junction with the Little Greenbrier trail. The trail got pretty snowy, and there were more good views.
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| Looking down into Wears Valley |
Once we got on the Little Greenbrier trail, we started back downhill. As we dropped lower in elevation, the snow got wetter, and it started sticking to the bottom of our crampons in balls. In case you've never tried to walk while standing on a hard-packed snowball the size of a baseball, it ain't as easy as it sounds. We kept having to scuff our feet on roots or whatever we could find (naturally, this portion of the trail is relatively root-free, which is something I wouldn't normally complain about), so we felt like we were doing weird buck-dancing steps down the side of the mountain. From Little Greenbrier, we turned on Little Brier Gap to continue down toward Metcalf Bottoms. The Walker Sisters cabin is off of Little Brier Gap (a short 0.1-mile side trail) and is really cool. I can't believe I've never been there before, but until recently (thanks, Covid!) I've really kind of avoided hiking in the Smokies due to all the people. Now I'm just having to get creative and find places/times to avoid the biggest crowds and just roll with it, because the Smokies are too amazing to ignore, and by gosh, I deserve to enjoy them, too.
So anyway, the Walker Sisters homestead is really nice as far as mountain homesteads go. The first thing you come upon is a springhouse.
Then you see the cabin itself, which is actually two cabins that were placed side-by-side so that they share the big porch. I thought it was awful fancy to have two chimneys! So, it's basically a 3-room cabin with a huge porch, and there's an upstairs loft accessible by a ladder. The tough-as-nails Walker sisters lived here until the last one died in the mid-60s, and I'm incredibly impressed when I think about what their daily lives must have been like.
There's also a corn crib and a lot of landscaping, including a bunch of boxwoods. Dara and I looked around imagining where their garden would've been; where they went to hunt for food; how they got any necessary supplies that they couldn't make themselves; etc.
After leaving there and continuing down the mountain, we came to Little Greenbrier school near the end of the Little Brier Gap trail. There's also a little cemetery by the school with lots of Walkers and Stinnetts, including a bunch of infants from both families. Most of the graves are marked with plain stones with no names, but it looks like someone (NPS, maybe, or maybe the families?) has come in and put in new, small stones with names on them in front of the old ones, which I think is nice just so these people's identities don't get lost when the last of the people with knowledge of the place pass on.
What is not nice is that virtually every inch of the school, including the building itself (inside and outside), desks, etc., is covered with crap people have felt the need to carve in it (usually their names or something equally stupid). WHY do people feel the need to deface stuff with their damn names or other stupid messages? This just makes my blood boil.
Anyway, the Metcalf Bottoms trail starts just behind the school and took us back to my car that we had dropped there earlier. This was a fun, relatively easy (the two-mile climb just above Laurel Falls being the exception to the "easy" part, but even that wasn't really difficult) hike with lots of cool sites to see. And this was the perfect day to hike it, as we didn't run into too many others on the trail. I bet not many people get to say they were the only people at Laurel Falls or the Walker Sisters cabin, but that's the position Dara and I found ourselves in today. There were a few other people at the school when we were there (we eyeballed them to make sure they weren't carving on stuff), but overall we had a good bit of isolation on the trail. It was a pretty great day!
Unduplicated Smokies miles: 140
Total Smokies miles: 169.3
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