Day 155: Into the Wild

The name of our first national park visit this morning says it all...Obed Wild and Scenic River. A small park, it encompasses a couple hundred acres surrounding a beautiful river gorge that varies from white water rapids to calm shallows. The road crosses bridges and passes by many trailheads. We hiked a little on two of them, our favorite leading out to a breath-taking overlook. It reminded us of Colorado's Black Canyon of the Gunnison.

The second park we visited was in the same vein...Big South Fork River and Recreational Park. Much larger than Obed, it offers lots of camping, horse trails and even wild boar hunting! We learned that a particular breed of Russian wild boar was brought into the area in the 1800s by a group of wealthy hunters (their former hog-hunting lodge is now a well-appointed camping hut on the park's trail system). The boars mated with farm pigs that roamed in the pasturelands; their descendants are these hybrid creatures that are pretty scary (but very yummy, we were told). Kendall still has a strange affection for all things "pig" and was quite pleased that this park featured her friends...we didn't explain the particulars. And Kelsey's passion for horses was sated by seeing so many of them along our drives. Her sharp intake of breath around nearly every corner, as she spotted another horse, had us smiling.

Tennessee is quite beautiful. It's a fiercely independent state, and there's an understood fact of three sub-states within its boundaries...west, middle and east. The eastern third, from which Andrew Johnson hailed, was strongly pro-Union in the crisis years leading to the Civil War. Its residents fought the Confederate-leaning political leaders in Nashville, and caused lots of trouble for the South's infrastructure by burning dozens of key railroad bridges. And a militia unit of East Tennesseans crossed the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky where they formed a Tennessee regiment for the Union Army.

We've enjoyed our brief stop here and look forward to tomorrow's return to Virginia. We'll drive up the eastern side of the Smokies, complimenting our drives on the western side a few weeks ago. My mom will join us on Thursday for a week, and we can hardly wait for the reunion and all the fun we'll have together, celebrating Thanksgiving and visiting her William&Mary stomping grounds. Assuming we get off to an early start tomorrow, we'll make another national park stop partway through our long day on the road. So I hope to have more to journal about than just milemarkers and the ongoing changes in the trees!

Photos:
(1-2) Obed
(3) The girls and I are on top of the large granite outcrop at one of Obed's overlooks. The park is famous for its rock-climbing, especially as it has so many pitches with overhangs such as this one...a steep and long vertical followed by a horizontal section before popping up over the top. Yikes!
(4) A handsome buck, camouflaged in the meadow, who didn't trust that our camera wasn't something more threatening...it is hunting season, after all.
(6) Big South Fork's roads, that twist and curve through gorges, gave us new views every few yards.
(8) Kendall's new friend in the visitor center
(9) the cause of Kelsey's self-induced asthma