Hiking the Smokies

Me & Dad

This week, rather than simply doing nothing, I have been visiting east Tennessee - home of my dad, Mike Miller, and his wife Pam. My dad is a serious hiker who about a year ago completed hiking all 900 miles of trails in the Smoky Mountains. We hiked almost 20 miles this week and I have the blisters to prove it. Despite the fact that the weather was not great over the weekend, it ended up being a beautiful couple of days. Here are some photos I took with my cool new camera! Check out the serious water crossing (I passed on this one).

The Smokies are a very special place to me and my family because my grandparents had a summer home there in a place called Elkmont - near where we were hiking. My dad and his brothers spent most of their summers there. Elkmont is a community that existed prior to the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934. This park now attracts more than 9 million visitors per year and is the most visited of all the national parks. The families who lived in Elkmont when the park was created were granted a lease from the government which expired in 1992. You can read more about the history of Elkmont on this site: http://www.imagesbuilder.com/gsmnp/elkmont.html.

Anyway, the real shame is not that the houses had to be given back, because everyone knew that was going to happen - but that they are still there 15 years later. Believe it or not, the US Government has not been able to figure out what to do with all these houses. It got so bad that in 2005, the National Trust for Historic Preservation placed Elkmont on their list of the Eleven Most Endangered Places (http://www.nationaltrust.org/11Most/list.asp?i=156). We saw our old house this week, and very sadly it has continued to fall into a state of disrepair (it was a really cool house). There is some indication that certain homes are going to be restored - if they are in fact salvageable at this point. In the right hand picture, you can see where some new wood frame has been laid over a decaying roof. We are not sure what the deal is on this, but I'll post more when I hear. That's all for this week...

My Grandparents' House

New Roof?