Recently, I had planned to visit Prov­i­dence Canyon for an overnight back­pack­ing trip by myself. It didn’t hap­pen. I learned a friend was headed up to Cades Cove in Ten­nessee about the same time as my trip and was asked to join. I had never been there so fig­ured it would be a wor­thy adventure.

The plan was three day visit and we would camp out for two nights in their camp­ground area. We would be able to bring as much gear as needed since we would be park­ing next to our tent area which can make it eas­ier when choos­ing what to bring.

The first day we arrive, it was a mild sixty-​five degrees with sunny skies. We setup our tent area and imme­di­ately headed on the ten mile loop of the park area. The loop runs one direc­tion, counter-​clockwise and it was towards the end of the loop we made a stop and I had to cap­ture the view of the moun­tains as seen above. The panorama photo was six shot stitched together to cap­ture the wide view of the moun­tains in the background.

While we were dri­ving the loop of the cove, we seen some old build­ings still left over from ages ago before the orig­i­nal set­tlers of the area were forced off their prop­erty unwill­ingly. There were many more but some burnt their homes in protest just before leav­ing. Def­i­nitely some sad­ness in the his­tory of the area but the beauty and unique wall of moun­tains that sur­round it almost con­vince you to over­look the past.