Driving Through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 4k Video

Filmed on Wednesday, May 3, 2023, I drive through the Great Smoky Mountains National Forest to see what's going on. I start at Cherokee, North Carolina and finish at Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

If you want to control the camera and take a look around, check out my 360° video:    • Driving Through the Great Smoky Mountains ...  

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is an American national park in the southeastern United States, with parts in North Carolina and Tennessee. The park straddles the ridge line of the Great Smoky Mountains, part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which are a division of the larger Appalachian Mountain chain.

The park contains some of the highest mountains in eastern North America, including Clingmans Dome, Mount Guyot, and Mount Le Conte. The border between the two states runs northeast to southwest through the center of the park. The Appalachian Trail passes through the center of the park on its route from Georgia to Maine.

With 14.1 million visitors in 2021, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited national park in the United States.

The park encompasses 522,419 acres, making it one of the largest protected areas in the eastern United States. The park is internationally recognized for its mountains, waterfalls, biodiversity, and forests. In addition, the park also preserves multiple historical structures that were part of communities occupied by early European-American settlers of the area.

The park was chartered by the United States Congress in 1934, and officially dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940. The Great Smoky Mountains was the first national park having land and other costs paid in part with federal funds; previous parks were funded wholly with state money or private funds.

As the most visited national park in the United States, the Great Smoky Mountains National Park anchors a large tourism industry based in Sevier County, Tennessee adjacent to the park. Major attractions include Dollywood, the second-most visited tourist attraction in Tennessee. Tourism to the park contributes an estimated $2.5 billion annually into the local economy.

For thousands of years, this region was occupied by successive cultures of indigenous peoples. The historic Cherokee had their homeland here, and occupied numerous towns in the river valleys on both sides of the Appalachian Mountains. Their first encounters with Europeans were as traders, mostly coming from the colonial Carolinas and Virginia.

European Americans did not begin to settle here until the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Particularly because of their pressure to acquire land in the Deep South, in 1830 President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, beginning the process that eventually resulted in the forced removal of all Indian tribes east of the Mississippi River to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

As white settlers arrived, entrepreneurs developed logging as a major industry in the mountains. By 1909 logging was at its peak and by 1920 about two-thirds of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park area had been logged or burned by fires from logging operations.

Because cut-and-run-style clearcutting was destroying the natural beauty of the area, by the 20th century visitors and locals banded together to raise money for preservation of the land. The U.S. National Park Service wanted a park in the eastern United States, but did not have much money to establish one. David C. Chapman; a Knoxville, Tennessee, business leader; was appointed in 1925 to head a commission to establish a national park here. Congress authorized the park in 1926, but there was no nucleus of federally owned land around which to develop it. John D. Rockefeller Jr. contributed $5 million, the U.S. government added $2 million, and private citizens from Tennessee and North Carolina pitched in to assemble the land for the park, piece by piece.

Slowly, mountain homesteaders, miners, and loggers were evicted from the land. Farms and timbering operations were abolished to establish the protected areas of the park. Ben W. Hooper, a former governor of Tennessee, was the principal land purchasing agent for the park, which was officially established on June 15, 1934.

Park officials count more than 200 species of birds, 50 species of fish, 39 species of reptiles, and 43 species of amphibians, including many lungless salamanders. The park is an important site for salamanders. The park has a noteworthy black bear population, numbering about 1,500. An attempt to reintroduce red wolves into the park in 1991 failed drastically, forcing the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services to remove the wolves from the area in 1998. Elk were reintroduced to the park in 2001, three years after the FWS removed the red wolves from the area.

It is also home to species of mammals such as the raccoon, bobcat, two species of fox, river otter, woodchuck, beaver, two species of squirrel, opossum, coyote, white-tailed deer, chipmunk, two species of skunk, and bats.