Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Laurel Falls in Great Smoky Mountains NP

Today we headed to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  We hiked the Laurel Falls Trail.
Laurel Falls is one of the most popular destinations in the park. 
Laurel Branch and the 80-foot high Laurel Falls are named for mountain laurel, an evergreen shrub which blooms along the trail and near the falls in May
 It appeared to me that the falls were not as abundant as they are sometimes, so I'm guessing the water levels must be low. 
They were really beautiful!  This is the upper falls.
Here you can see the upper falls and lower falls.  The upper falls are in the far left corner.
The lower falls from below:
I didn't go down to the lower falls.  Nathan and Aric did.  They ended up having lots of excitement down there.  I'll let Aric share it with you, which you can read on his blog here: Aric's Blog  

If you go back and look at the first picture, it will give you a hint of what they got pretty close to down there.

Living the life in Tennessee.

1 comments:

Tonya @ The Traveling Praters said...

We hiked to Laurel Falls the end of September- beginning of October- some years ago and it wasn't really what I would call abundant at that time either. Maybe spring would be the best time to view it, when the snow is melting?

I'm so happy that we didn't encounter any bears on our trip! As much as I think it would be cool to see one outside of the zoo, it would have to be from a very, very, very far distance for me not to freak out!

Blessings!:)