Smokies Day 1

We arrived in Townsend mid afternoon and relaxed in our hotel room. We decided to take a drive to the Park. This year is the 75Th year the park was established. We took the loop road and immediately saw some big gobblers. One of them had a 12 inch long beard. As we drove around the loop road, Paul kept on looking for wildlife and occasionally almost ran of the road. We visited the Visitor's Center and looked around. Paul bought our Calendars for next year. We finally saw some deer as we approached Hyatt road. One was a small button buck. The deer are starting to grow their antlers back. We came upon a jam and quickly discovered it was a "bear jam". We continued around since we couldn't see the bear by the time we got up to the spot.



As we continued on from the Visitors Center, we decided to try Parson's Branch Road. I wanted to take a picture of an Iris. It was pretty and purple. Paul stayed in the car while I took the picture. When I got finished, he was driving down the road slowly, butt hole! I walked to the car, luckily he stayed put this time. We continued on as far as we could go. The road was closed again due to storm damage. Will we ever get to go down Parsons Branch Road? Every time we come up to the Smokies it is closed due to storm damage. Last year, we didn't make it and the road was open.

As we were leaving Parson's Branch Road, Paul saw a bear. It was a pretty big bear near the creek in a lot of brush. We were able to watch it eat for awhile but we couldn't get any pictures. We tried but all that came out as a black blob. As continued around the loop road and getting near the end, we were passing by Sparks Lane when I looked back up the hill on Sparks Lane. I saw a HUGE bear. Paul quickly backed up (luckily there was no one right behind us...) and went down the Lane.

The big black bear crossed the road and then a few minutes later a cub, no two cubs, wait no three cubs followed momma bear. The momma bear got on to her two hind legs and looked up the bank to see if there was any danger. She shepherded her cubs up the bank. We were able to get one decent picture of the cubs crossing the road. The momma bear was the biggest bear I have ever seen and it was the closest I have ever gotten to a bear. We shot a few other shot of the momma bear but they were blurry since I used the sunset setting and didn't realize that I had to keep the camera absolutely still.



We finished the rest of the loop road without any other fun encounters. We were both really hungry at that point and were ready to get back to get a Subway sandwich. We were behind a car at the stop sign near the camp store. I was muttering that they needed to just go ahead and turn there was no one coming. I turned to the left when we got up to the stop sign and then noticed that there was a deer about 3 feet away from our car. So that was what they were looking at instead of driving.