We heard about the crowds in the Smokies. So where were they?

You can't hear about Great Smoky Mountains National Park without learning that it's the most visited National Park, and that trailheads fill up at the crack of dawn for the popular hikes, and that driving anywhere will take you extra time due to cars parked alongside the roads and constant traffic jams occurring due to slow drivers and wildlife sightings. The National Park Service is even planning to take action on the crowds by implementing a pay-to-park system starting in 2023, a controversial move for a park that was once proud to be completely free of charge. We visited the Smokies on the cusp of summer. Not the busiest time of year as foliage draws in lots of visitors, but we had two major events to contend with: Memorial Day Weekend and the Synchronous Fireflies season. Planning our activities was a challenge. Should we risk going to the busy touristy areas on the holiday weekend, or wait until a weekday? Should we even bother venturing into the park if it's not an off-time? What can we do that's off the beaten path? We arrived to the area the Wednesday before Memorial Day Weekend, which gave us time to scout things out. Every time we journeyed into town, we looked at the campgrounds and hotels. We checked the parking lots of the major attractions. We wanted to see how much they were all filling up as the weekend approached. What we saw was perplexing. Hotels and cabins with vacancy. Campgrounds with empty sites. Even our campground workers said they usually book up to 2 years in advance, but not for this year. Downtown Pigeon Forge read to us like a typical week, with no indication that the mark of "unofficial summer" was approaching. We had heard horror stories from multiple sources that, no matter what time of year you travel to Pigeon Forge, expect driving through town to take an extra 30-45 minutes. Besides a couple of long red lights, we were zipping north and south up Route 441 with no issues. By the time Memorial Day Weekend rolled around, we had decided to stop worrying and to plan whatever we wanted. This included a lot of the big Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg attractions, which you can read about in our previous blog posts. Everywhere we went where we expected a queue, we found ourselves with little-to-no wait time. The Great Smoky Mountain Wheel? 10 minutes. The Anakeesta chairlift? 15 minutes. Skylift Park? 0 minutes. Ober Gatlinburg? Well, the queue for the gondola looked like this:

Same went for the mountain coasters. Besides the 60-minute wait for the deadly single rail Anakeesta coaster that was surely an organizational problem and not a crowds problem, we had basically no wait on any of the mountain coasters. 10-15 minutes tops. Now, we won't say we were purposely doing all these activities at peak times. Of course we tried to be smart about it and go whenever it made the most sense. But we went to The Island at Pigeon Forge on the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend. We went to Anakeesta on Memorial Day. We went to Skylift Park in the middle of the day, and actually decided to do Anakeesta a second time that afternoon because we walked by and saw there was no line!

On our Pink Jeep Tour, we got into a discussion with our guide Len about the crowds, or lack thereof. Len said he had been noticing the same thing. Tour bookings were down, especially for Memorial Day Weekend. We wondered, what gives? Could it be the gas prices causing people to stick closer to home? Except, the Smokies is close to home for so many people, thanks to its vastness and central location to so many states. I theorized that perhaps COVID increased visitation so much that the locals had already gone, and the gas prices were keeping people who live further away from traveling. Or maybe all the crowd horror stories scared people off!

This crowdless twilight zone continued into the park itself. Driving by the popular trailheads, we never saw a parking lot at 100% capacity. Cars continued to park along the road, but when one car would arrive, others would be leaving. We never had any issue getting through the park roads, with the exception of one bear jam, which only lasted 10 minutes and contained a total of maybe 8 cars.

We drove Cades Cove loop, the holy grail of trafficky roads. The road looked like this:

And the parking lots looked like this:

We hiked Clingmans Dome and had almost the entire observation tower to ourselves, except for a handful of people right at the top. Nothing compared to the crowds we've seen in photos and have read about in travel articles. I was worried that taking my harp there would be a bust. Would we even be able to get photos without tons of people in the background? Why yes, yes we would.

Several days after driving the open segment of Foothills Parkway, I read an article talking about the crowds at the parkway overlooks. When we drove Foothills, we seldom came to an overlook that wasn't completely empty; at most, a couple parking spots were filled.

Then there is the famous Great Smoky Mountains National Park sign, a sign that people park way up the street from and walk to, to wait in a line for a half-hour and finally get the quintessential sign photo. We got pictures by the sign not once, but twice, with no wait either time. The second time was when we hiked the Gatlinburg Trail with Tanner, a trail that All Trails lists as a "very popular area, so you'll likely encounter other people while exploring." Sure, we encountered other people. Maybe about 15 in total, and most of them were hanging out right near the entrances on either end of the trail. The rest of the time was just us, enjoying the peaceful river.

We probably won't ever know for sure why we had this rare experience. We can assume that all those articles, videos, and posts weren't exaggerating about the crowds, because what would they gain from that? So we go back to our theory. Is this the counter-effect of an extremely busy past couple of years? Is this the result of everyone reading about the mayhem and deciding to avoid it? We hear about these human patterns. In National Parks, the common piece of advice is to "go morning or evening to avoid crowds." But if enough people heed that advice and start going at those times, then suddenly morning and evening become the times to avoid, and you're better off now going in the middle of the day! This started to become the case at Clingmans Dome. The advice became to go at sunset because it's less crowded and the views at sunset are spectacular. But when enough people decide to follow through with going at sunset, guess what happens! I mean, it didn't happen to us, but clearly we were just giving off aversive pheromones that kept everyone away. I told Anthony that, if our energetic vibe is that strongly repulsive, I'll take it in order to have a great birthday/holiday weekend and a whole lot of amazing, crowd-free experiences at some of the most dazzling places in our country.

Are we the best people to give advice on the crowds at Great Smoky Mountains National Park? Probably not. But we will say this: Don't assume that everything you read will be your experience. Go where you want to go, do what you want to do, and make those memories. We can't guarantee that your visit will be crowd-free, but we can guarantee that the only way you won't experience this wonderful place is by not going.