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Great Smoky Mountains National Park - Roaring Fork |
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Great Smoky Mountains Home
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Gatlinburg
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Cades Cove
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Newfound Gap
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Clingmans Dome
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Oconaluftee
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Cataloochee
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Sunset
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Roaring Fork Motor Natiral Trail has implied the beautiful view and driving challenge by its name.
The entrance and exit are located in Gatlinburg downtown but the road itself is winding a couple miles
to mountain hill then goes down. You don't need a four wheel drive vehicle to survive here
but be warned to expect a lot of steep uphill/downhill sections combine with sharp curves.
Fortunately the road is one-way so drivers don't need to worry about incoming traffic.
This road is closed in winter with good reason.
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We came here right after we came back from Cades Cove. We really should come here earlier
but the dilemma was that we didn't want to leave Cades Cove that soon either.
The only thing we could do was to see what we could. It was not totally dark when we reached
a summit so we could still catch the last glance at the setting sun.
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The motor trail is relatively short, only about 10 miles long. However there are
a lot of interesting spots on the road. Similar to Cades Cove, there are also early settlers'
homes and other buildings in this area. There are also some hiking trails and one of them leads to a fall.
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The sky got totally dark while I completed only about half of the journey. Of course there was nothing to see
in the dark yet we still had to complete the remaining journey. To make the driving more
challenging, the forest became foggy as the sky got dark. It was so exciting, maybe too exciting
that I was exhausted when we finally got back to Gatlinburg downtown.
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