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

If all this sounds vaguely utopian, keep in mind that the so-called people's park emerged during the Great Depression, as a means to bring jobs to the region and to save the mountains from being destroyed by logging. The preserve was created out of thousands of parcels of private land that were sold (sometimes under duress) to the states by farmers, homesteaders and logging companies, and was partly financed by kids' "pennies for the park" campaigns and by a $5 million gift from John D. Rockefeller. Then everything was turned over to the feds — essentially free.

"This park came from the citizenry up," Miller says. "People have had ownership from the start."

When Tennessee gave them the deed to its section of Highway 441 in 1951, a no-entry-fee provision was included, "and there has never been a strong commitment to overturn it."

And if this next bit sounds familiar, it's because the park was developed as a result of the greatest federal stimulus package the country had ever seen, FDR's New Deal. In 1933, about 4,000 members of the newly formed Civilian Conservation Corps were recruited and were paid $30 a month ($25 was sent directly home to their families) to build bridges, roads, trails, campgrounds and picnic areas. Stimulate things, they did.

"People saw that a park would open up the area to tourism, and that has happened," says Miller, who adds that the park and its surrounding attractions now bring in more than $700 million to the region each year.

Those tourists have always recognized a bargain. From the day it opened, the park has been the most-visited national park, by a wide margin. In 1934 it drew 420,000, and over the past decade it has averaged about 9.3 million visitors annually. (Second-place Grand Canyon drew 4.4 million last year.)

The main reasons, Miller says, are that the area is within a day's drive of one-third of the country's population, and the good-weather seasons are long, lasting from spring to almost New Year's.

But that free-admission thing also has a little to do with it, he says. "People appreciate it, and they are aware that that (policy) results in undersourcing." That's why Friends of the Smokies has emerged as a strong, non-profit, multimillion-dollar fundraising group, and why donation boxes throughout the park collect $240,000 a year "mostly in dollar bills."

Once outside the park, however, the free ride ends abruptly. Capitalism and development abhor a vacuum, which explains why the chockablock towns near the border look like either the stuff of childhood fantasies or an urban planner's nightmare.

On the less dense North Carolina side, Harrah's Cherokee Casino & Hotel and Native American-themed attractions (including the outdoors drama Unto These Hills) are the draws.

But the bulk of visitors stay in the Tennessee towns of Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge and, increasingly, Sevierville. Jammed into the connecting 15-mile corridor are most of the hotel/motel/restaurant franchises known to man, along with about 10,000 pancake houses and a gazillion miniature golf courses.

Mom-and-pop cinderblock motels have been giving way to upscale time-share properties and rental chalets recently, but there still is an abundance of affordable lodging.

Hello, Dolly!

In between are major family-friendly attractions such as Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies, and outlet malls and gift shops that have adopted a post-hillbilly sensibility favoring carved yard gnomes and hand-crafted dulcimers over corncob pipes and slingshots.

Presiding over the Pigeon Forge tableaux is country queen Dolly Parton, who was raised 7 miles from the park and is serving as the 75th anniversary ambassador. Her sprawling 24-year-old mountain-themed Dollywood park is the state's most-visited paid attraction, drawing 2.5 million fans a year. Add her adjacent Splash Country water park and Dixie Stampede & Dinner Attraction, and she alone accounts for an ample 4 million paid admissions annually.

Parton, who has contributed substantial amounts of time and money to the park and the region, acknowledges that managing development while trying to protect the mountain culture she sings about is difficult.

"It's a double-edge sword, and I am probably as guilty of the same things as others," she says. "Progress is progress. We try to preserve the Smokies the best we can, but still it's very commercial. It tugs at your heart … but that's the way of business. You have to roll with it."

By far, the best way of rolling with this dilemma is to retreat into the less-visited nooks of the park and let the "midway of a county fair" images of Pigeon Forge recede, says Glen Cardwell, 78. His kin have lived in the area since the early 1800s, and he spent his first 17 years living inside what would become the park boundary. Today he lives just outside, but makes regular pilgrimages inside, down a gravel road to a spot where two streams collide magnificently at Greenbrier, once his home and now a picnic/recreational area.

"This is the inner sanctum of the universe as far as I'm concerned," he says during a recent visit. "Remember that the first idea for the park came from a doctor, not a politician, who said we need a place in southern Appalachia for restoration of mind, body and soul. … If the movement had not come to save the mountains, the impact on the ecology would have been disastrous."

It was the people who spoke up, he says. The free people.

TELL US: Have you been to Great Smoky Mountains National Park? Share your adventures in the comments.