A few days before Christmas, Greg Harrell and I exited I-40 onto US 321 near Newport and drove through the hamlet of Cosby. Before reaching Gatlinburg we crossed the Middle Prong of the Little Pigeon River and turned into the park at the Greenbrier sign. The narrow dirt road was deserted as it often is in the off-season. In the 1920s and 30s, a modest hotel (The Greenbrier) had operated near the junction of Porters Creek and Middle Prong, near the spot where this narrow dirt road splits – left to Ramsey Cascade via the Middle Prong or right to the Porters Creek area. We went right.
This Greenbrier area, like virtually every other river valley in the park, was once well populated, home to about 800 people in 1934. I assume there were Porters and Ramseys – those being names of the main tributaries to the Middle Prong – but Whaley is the most common name in the small cemetery less than a mile up the Porters Creek Trail. There’s a headstone that says, simply: Mary Whaley, Born & Died, Aug. 11, 1909. Another says: Lillian E. Ownby, March 14, 1909, April 16, 1909. Times were always hard for these folks, but the tombstones show that 1909 was an especially hard year for the Whaleys, the Ownbys, and the other families that lived along Porters Creek.
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The sky was cloudy, threatening rain or snow, with the temperature hovering around freezing. Dressing for such cold weather hikes is always a bit frustrating. You are cold and it feels good to wear a light fleece jacket, but you also know that in about 10 minutes you’ll be too warm for a light fleece. It’s not a problem to stop and stuff your jacket into your pack, but stopping so soon after starting always creates a sense of incompetence. You are trying to get off to a good, quick start, but here you are, half a mile up the trail, stopping to adjust your equipment. Even though the stop takes about one minute – hardly a major setback in your schedule – it just feels unnecessary. Nevertheless, that’s what we did.
About a mile up the trail, near its intersection with Brushy Mountain Trail, sits an old cabin, built in the mid 1930s, that once belonged to the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club. This hiking club was responsible for scouting some of the trails in this portion of the park. In fact, it was reading excerpts of Harvey Broome’s hiking journals that kindled my interest in this Porters Creek trip. Today, if things went well, we would not be blazing a new trail; we would be following in the footsteps of the members of this hiking club who hiked this route a generation ago. And, on these trips they usually spent the night in this old cabin that still stands as a testament to their lives and their passion for these mountains, especially this Greenbrier area. Yes, the CCC built many of the Smokies’ trails, but the SMHC scouted and blazed many of the routes that those trails would follow.
The Porters Creek Trail follows the course of the river – occasionally rising a hundred feet above it then dropping down next to it – so it ascends gradually for its four miles to the Porters Flats campsite. Along the way Greg and I were both impressed by the size of the river – it’s not what most people would call large, but by Smokies backcountry standards it’s sizable. Both of us being trout fishermen, we pay a little extra attention whenever we walk along a Smokies stream. We’d have to return in the spring with our fly rods.
It took us about an hour and a half to reach the backcountry campsite at the end of the trail. It looks fairly well used – more so than I had expected. Since this is a dead end trail, I would have expected it to receive light attention, but apparently that is not the case. In fact, at the end of the day as we returned from our hike, there were several tents set up and four backpacks hanging from the bear-proof cables strung between the trees.
Okay, now that we were at the campsite at the end of the trail, it was time to shift gears and think about what we would do next. The main ridgecrest was about 2,000 feet above us, calling our names. [To be continued]
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