Les Jones

East Tennessee > Gregory's Bald Azalea Backpacking Trip (Great Smoky Mountains National Park)

Two summers ago I went on a backpacking trip to Gregory's Bald with the Gregories. It was a memorial trip to honor the passing of my friend Jay Gregory's grandfather, Kara Gregory.

The family name isn't a coincidence. Kara was one of the last people alive who remembered living in the Cades Cove section of what's now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park before it became a park and the families were forced to leave. The Gregory family herded their sheep to the bald in the summer months to graze. Kara has been interviewed for a number of books about the history of Blount County and the park, and appeared several times on WBIR's The Heartland Series.

The trip was at the end of June and coincided with the azaleas blooming up on the bald. The blackberries and blueberries would be fully ripe a few weeks later.

The shortest route up to Gregory's Bald is to go through Cades Cove and take Forge Creek Road to Parsons Branch Road, which is a one-way primitive road. Parsons Branch takes you to a high pass where you can park a few cars and walk four miles to camp site 13 with minimal elevation gain. The bald is about a quarter mile beyond that. Parsons Branch was washed out from a spring flood in 2004, so we drove to the trailhead on Forge Creek Road and hiked in the six mile route to the bald and then the camp site, gaining about 2600 feet of elevation on the way.

I spent a very cold night on camp site 13 back around 1988. I had read Colin Fletcher's The Complete Walker. He sang the praises of sold backpacking, and I planned my first solo trip for spring break.

My girlfriend dropped me off at Twenty Mile Creek Ranger Station. The first night there were people in camp and it rained. The Eureka tent I owned weighed eight pounds, so I had left it at home and carried just the nylon rainfly, which I strung between two trees with rope.

The second night at camp site 13 there was no one else in camp and it was dreadfully cold. At that elevation and that temperature, my butane stove barely cooked some Lipton noodles to the crunchy state. The campfire I made with dampwood required constant tending. I finally turned in. For shelter I draped the nylon rainfly over the fork of a large fallen tree similar to the one in the "breaking camp" pictures, with the corner dropped down to form a flap.

The next morning I lifted the flap of my shelter to find a world of white. It had snowed overnight. My water bottle had frozen. I broke through the ice with a Swiss Army Knife and made hot chocolate in my sleeping bag looking out over the frozen landscape.

I spent the last night at Mollie's Ridge Shelter. My sheltermates were three firefighters from Nashville. The temperature dropped into the teens and I was more miserable than ever, my cotton clothes having become more and more saturated with moisture. The next morning I hiked out to Cades Cove where my sister picked me up for the trip back to Maryville. I've now forsaken cotton clothes and pure butane stoves in winter.

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