Hiking in the Smokies

On day six of our Smoky Mountain vacation, we woke up and prepared to go home. Before beginning our long journey back home, there was one thing that we still wanted to do: hike the Laurel Falls Trail in the national park. We had been enjoying the beautiful mountain scenery all week long, but we had not spent much time in the park itself. The reason for this is that three of the more popular driving tours were closed (they were repaving the roads before the high season began), and that was about all that we could do with the kids in tow. I wanted to hike at least one trail, but seeing as how most of the trails were long and uphill, I had a hard time finding one that the kids could do. Finally, I found a great website that provided lots of information about the trails in the park, and I found a trail that I thought we could do. It was a 1.3 mile trail called Laurel Falls Trail. As the name implies, there was a waterfall at the end of the trail. So, after leaving the cabin on Saturday, we headed to the Laurel Falls trailhead.

The path was narrow and steep in some places, so we really had to watch Olivia to make sure that she stayed safe. Owen was in the stroller the whole time- we weren't even going to chance letting him walk up on his own. The trail toward the falls was all uphill, so I had to push Owen in that stroller uphill for 1.3 miles. I never realized what a chunck he was until I had to do this. At least the path was sort-of paved. I say "sort-of" because it looked like it had been paved many years ago and had not been re-paved since. It was bumpy. I got off easy, though. Brian was in charge of Olivia, and she decided that she was too tired to walk about halfway up the trail so Brian had to carry her part of the way.

Olivia did manage to walk all the way back down the mountain by herself on the return trip, though.

The payoff for our hiking efforts was a beautiful waterfall. You can see part of it in this picture, but it was actually much larger. Seeing the falls definitely made the hike worthwhile.
The kids didn't get to get down and play around the falls because there were still lots of steep drops in the area. Olivia did get down once because she wanted to "touch" the falls, and so Brian took her close enough so that she could. After spending some time at the falls, we hiked back to the car and drove home. All in all, we had a great time in the mountains, and we look forward to returning someday.