Great Smoky Mountains celebrates 75 years as the 'people's park'
GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS NATIONAL PARK -- Does Congress know what's going on over here?
When vacationers cruise past the welcoming signs along U.S. 441 at Cherokee, N.C., or Gatlinburg, Tenn., they naturally start looking for the booth where they'll cough up the $15-$25 entry fee, just like at every other top-tier national park. Only here, there are no booths. No khakied toll-takers. No admission charge.
(Don't say anything and just keep driving.)
In the country's most-visited national park, all 521,454 acres, 384 miles of roads and 100,000 life-forms are free for the exploring.
Free as the air you'll suck into your lungs when you climb to the observation tower atop 6,643-foot Clingmans Dome.
All 130 varieties of trees and 66 types of mammals, including 1,500 bears — free as the wispy blue fog that gives these peaks their name.
Nearly everything in this rich, majestic nature preserve is as free as the birds — more than 200 species of them, including the black-capped chickadees that flit around Newfound Gap.
This year, as the park celebrates the 75th anniversary of its creation by Congress, it remains footloose — 800 miles of hiking and horseback trails — and definitely fancy-free: Down-home mountain culture is permanently in vogue.
"It's a fairly affordable destination," says park spokesman Bob Miller, modestly.
Even once you're inside, it's hard to spend a dime. There's just one lodge (at Mount LeConte, where a 5-½ mile hike is the shortest way in, and its $110-a-night bed/meals deals are usually booked), no restaurants, no gas stations. You need only pull out your wallet at a couple of camp and souvenir stores and snack bars, and at the low-cost campgrounds and bicycle and horseback-riding concessions.
About the only thing that can be spent here is time, as in the two or three hours it might take during peak seasons to creep along the 11-mile loop road through the park's most popular section, Cades Cove. (No one said this lunch was entirely free.)
A New Deal project
