Another hot, muggy day of hiking and not many animals and not many photos. For a mid-week morning there were lots of cars on the Cades Cove 11 mile auto loop. We did see one Black Bear which held up the one-lane traffic for a quarter mile at least. With our amazing experiences in SE Alaska on the Delphinus, this bear siting was actually a ho hum affair.
Cades Cove Loop: A "cove" in Smoky Mountain vernacular is a relatively flat valley between mountains or ridges. We have seen fields of sorghum and wondered what it was used for. The cane stalks are cut in the fall and stripped of their leaves and the cane juice is expressed from the stalks and boiled down into molasses.
Each year some 2 million visitors come to drive through Cades Cove.
Chestnuts were hugely important to humans as well as many animals, especially bears who used the nuts to layer their bodies with fat before denning in the fall. Unfortunately, an Asiatic fungus was unintentionally brought to the East Coast early in the 20th Century and by 1940 essentially all of the chestnuts in the Smokies were dead. Bears then had to substitute bitter acorns which are less nutritious.
Earlier National Parks had been established on lands already owned by the Federal Government. All Great Smokies land was privately owned before it was bought by the park.
Black Bear
Bear is King of the Mountain. A healthy adult bear can vanquish the best of any other species in the park. Though he occasionally kills animals and eats carrion when he finds it, the bear's biggest volume of animal food is yellow jackets and yellow jacket larvae.
The BirdMobile in Great Smoky Mts NP
We saw several riders careening down 50-60 degree downgrades at an ungodly speed.
Monofilament is problem everywhere
Lindsay crossing a stream on our 4 mile evening hike as the dusk was claiming the last rays of sunlight.
Rain Lilies in our yard
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