Great Smoky Mountains National Park
The Best Walks and Day Hikes in Cosby/Greenbrier
Take a trip through time on this little-traveled mild hike. Leave Greenbrier and pass many relics of settlers days, including old homesites on Rhododendron Creek replete with rock walls, wash tubs and more. Top over a low ridge to Injun Creek and a homesite that is now a backcountry campsite.
Brushy Mountain
Leave the formerly settled country of Greenbrier, passing a pioneer cemetery. Begin a steady climb to bisect several forest types to reach Trillium Gap, a grassy glade. Make the final climb to top out on Brushy Mountain, a heath bald of low laurel and rhododendron, for some fantastic views of Mount LeConte and environs.
Ramsay Cascade
This hike heads up a heavily forested cathedral, where the trees are old growth. Some of the trailside tulip trees are massive in girth. Keep up Ramsay Prong into lands that were neither settled nor saw a logger's axe, and come to the high fall that sends out quite a spray as it plunges into a pool below.
The Best Walks and Day Hikes in Fontana Lake Area
Shuckstack
This is a short, steep hike to a fire tower that is surprisingly lesser used, even though it is on the Appalachian Trail. Leave Fontana Dam, the highest in the East and a worthy destination in its own right, then trace the AT up a spiny ridge. Take the side trail to the tower and look around - Fontana Lake and the main crest of the Smokies are easily discernible. In every direction are waves of rugged ridges.
Andrews Bald
This is moderate hike leads downhill to a view. Travel along Forney Ridge through spruce-fir woods and emerge onto the highest bald in the Smokies at 5,800 feet. Its nearly always breezy up here. Andrews Bald is being kept open by the park service, as they are letting many of the others become reforested. The views here are mostly to the Carolina Mountains to the south.
Indian Creek Loop
This loop heads up a green Smoky Mountain valley on Deep Creek. It then continues up Indian Creek, past Indian Creek Falls, with its wide and deep pool. Beyond here, look for pioneer homesites. The forest changes composition as the loop makes Sunkota Ridge. Experience a dry pine-oak woods on the ridgetop that reveals another element of the biodiversity that makes the Smokies so special, before returning to Deep Creek.
