Little River Trail

My wife and I hiked the Little River Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park yesterday. The Little River Trail is famous for the Elkmont Ghost Town which it goes through, but we actually skipped that part as we explored it pretty thoroughly last Fall.

The Little River Trail is “only” about 12 miles round trip with around 1,200 feet of elevation gain, basically flat by Smoky Mountain standards. It’s the kind of trail you pick when you want miles without the punishment. Or in our case, when your wife is coming off a sprained ankle and you’re trying to ease back into things without doing anything too stupid. Cue the foreshadowing.

We’re less than a month out from a trip out west for our 25th anniversary— No Doubt Concert at The Sphere, Dath Valley NP, Sequoia NP, Kings Canyon NP, Yosemite NP, Pinnacles NP, Pacific Coast Highway, Carmel by the Sea, Golden Gate Bridge, Point Reyes National Seashore, Redwood State and NP, and a few other stops along the way. I'm not really a No Doubt fan, but I've been wanting to see a concert at The Sphere since it opened, and since the date was so close to our anniversary, and since my wife was a big No Doubt in high school, I surprised her with tickets. Then I turned it into a national park road trip…

So yeah, we have a lot of hiking planned while we’re out there. The kind of hiking that doesn’t care how your ankle feels. So this was supposed to be a shakedown, get her legs moving again, see how things feel, build a little endurance. Not that I don’t need the miles, too.

It started out exactly how you’d want it to. Cool morning, mid-40s. Shorts and t-shirts, which always feels slightly irresponsible when you step out of the car in the mountains, but makes perfect sense ten minutes later.

The Little River was doing its thing the whole way. Steady flow, clear water, plenty of fishy-looking spots. I told myself I was “scouting” for trout, which is technically true, but really just meant I spent a lot of time staring at runs and fantasizing about coming back with a fly rod.

What slowed us down, though, was the wildflowers.

This is that in-between time in the Smokies where you’re transitioning out of the early ephemerals and into the mid-season bloom. The canopy is starting to fill in, but not all the way yet, so there’s still light hitting the forest floor. You can actually see what’s out there without crawling through rhododendron with a machete.

We kept stopping. Showy orchids (one of my favorites), golden alexanders, foamflower, trillium, trout lilies, violets, yellow lady slippers, wild geranium. It’s one of those times of year where you don’t have to look hard to start racking up the wildflower species.

Once you get past Huskey Branch Falls, you pretty much have the trail and the river to yourself, though you have to share space with the bears. We didn’t see any bears on this hike, but felt their presence.

Janet’s first fall came at a stream crossing about 5 miles in. One of those rocks that looks completely fine until it’s not. She just kind of slipped, stumbled and tipped over, but it was a hard fall. She sat there for a second, got up, mentioned that she thought she sprained her ankle again, brushed it off, and we kept going.

The second one was a little more… dramatic.

Somewhere around Moss Hollow on the way back towards the car, the trail kind of disappears into a narrow stretch along the side of the mountain. You’ve got the slope on one side, the river down below on the other, and a path that feels more like American Ninja Warrior than anything official. A little bit of scrambling, a little bit of tarzan.

We actually joked about it feeling like American Ninja Warrior right before she slipped again. We were coming down a 15’ incline that was about an 80-degree angle and a root she stood on for support stopped supporting, sending her sliding down to the bottom like she was stealing third base. And if she didn’t re-sprain her ankle on the first fall, she definitely re-sprained it then. But to her credit, she just hiked it off.

On the way, we picked up a couple lifer birds. Northern Parula and Swainson’s Warbler, which was a nice bonus.

The hike itself wasn’t hard. But it wasn’t nothing either.

Between the slower pace from stopping for flowers and birds, the falls, and just getting back into it, it felt like enough. Enough to remind you that even an “easy” trail in the Smokies still has a say in how you feel when you get up the next morning.

By the time we got back, we were ready to be done. In a good way. We ate a big plate of loaded nachos for dinner. Some ibuprofen and acetaminophen for her ankle for dessert. A little soreness, a little reassurance, and a better sense of where we’re at heading into this trip.