Is it common knowledge that Dollywood – a family-friendly Vegas surrogate that targets the countrified Ned Flanders demographic – sits just outside the northern entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park?  I was expecting to pass through sparsely-populated farmland as I approached the park from Interstate 40 and instead found myself confronted by a seemingly endless sprawl of cheap hotels, miniature golf courses, and huge billboards advertising a live nightly “Hatfields vs. McCoys” comedy show.

Once the Dollywood gauntlet had been run, however, there was a dramatic transition into a beautiful green wilderness of dense forests, small picturesque waterfalls, and mountain ridges stretching out to the horizon in hazy layers.  I drove straight up to Clingman’s Dome, the highest point in the park, for sunset photos.

The next day I hiked to Grotto Falls.  The trail was more popular than I anticipated, and so many people were tromping around the primary falls that I couldn’t get a clean photograph.  I decided to set up my tripod at a smaller waterfall just a short walk downstream.

After exploring more of the park I left through the southern entrance and continued on to Columbia, South Carolina.  From there it was just a short drive to Congaree National Park, which had only been a National Monument until its promotion in 2003.  I wasn’t expecting much and was pleasantly surprised.  Congaree is a relatively small park, but there were only a handful of other visitors and I had the trails almost entirely to myself.

Congaree’s raw, teeming plant and animal life somehow amplified the park’s already-powerful sense of solitude.  The throbbing drone of countless insects filled the air.  Massive water tupelo and Bald-cypress trees rose from the swampy ground, creating a canopy that blocked the intense summer sun and kept the trails pleasantly cool.  I saw turtles, blue-tailed skinks, wild hogs, and a Red-bellied Watersnake, but I wasn’t lucky enough to spot any of the river otters that sometimes frolic in Cedar Creek and Weston Lake.