5 Hidden Gems in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Spanning the border of North Carolina and Tennessee, Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most visited national park in the United States, and most of its visitors funnel toward the same few sights: Cades Cove, the lookout atop Kuwohi (the peak long known as Clingmans Dome), and the roughly 71 miles of the Appalachian Trail that follow the park's crest. Step away from the crowds, though, and the Smokies keep quieter rewards, some deep inside the park and some in the communities at its doorstep. They include a logging town reclaimed by forest, a stone springhouse that looks built for fairies, and a covered bridge older than the park itself. Here are five lesser-known corners of the Great Smokies worth seeking out.

Wears Valley

Wears Valley sits in Wear Cove along the park's northern edge, a rural community that locals call the peaceful side of the Smokies. Both the cove and the valley take their name from Samuel Wear (1753-1817), a Revolutionary War veteran who built a fort near the mouth of the cove in what is now Pigeon Forge; settlers began arriving in the 1790s. Today it is a quiet stretch of small farms, churches, antique shops, and cabin rentals strung along Wears Valley Road between Pigeon Forge and Townsend, with the Great Smoky Mountains rising to the south. The Metcalf Bottoms entrance to the park is minutes away, one of its less-trafficked gateways.

Elkmont Ghost Town

Just past the Sugarlands Visitor Center, the Elkmont Historic District is the closest thing the park has to a ghost town. Appalachian farming families first settled the area in the 1840s, but it boomed after 1908, when the Little River Lumber Company built a logging town and a railroad here. Once the timber ran out, a group of Knoxville businessmen turned Elkmont into an exclusive summer resort, complete with a clubhouse, the Wonderland Hotel, and rows of vacation cottages.

When the national park was established in 1934, cottage owners were offered lifetime leases rather than forced out all at once; the last of those leases expired in 1992. The Park Service now preserves around 19 of the structures, including the Levi Trentham cabin, built in 1830 and the oldest building in the district. Empty cabins, stone chimneys, and old foundations still line the Little River and Jakes Creek trails, and the quiet, half-reclaimed feel has earned Elkmont its share of ghost stories. In late spring it fills up for a different reason: the synchronous fireflies that blink in unison for a couple of weeks each year, one of only a few places in the country where the display happens.

Harrisburg Covered Bridge

Strictly speaking, this one sits outside the park, in the foothills near Sevierville, but it is too good a piece of Smokies history to skip. Completed in 1875, the Harrisburg Covered Bridge is one of only four covered bridges left in Tennessee. It spans 83 feet across the East Fork of the Little Pigeon River, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975, exactly a century after it was built. Repaired and restored several times over its nearly 150 years, including a major renovation in 2004, the single-lane bridge still carries traffic today.

House of the Fairies

Hidden off the Twin Creeks Trail, about a mile from Gatlinburg, the House of the Fairies is a small stone springhouse with a moss-covered arched doorway and a short flight of stairs leading up to its roof. It looks like something out of a folktale, which is how it earned its name, but its origins are well documented.

It was built around 1930 by Louis E. Voorheis, a Cincinnati businessman and inventor who assembled a 38-acre mountain retreat here, called Twin Creeks Orchard, between 1928 and 1944. Voorheis was fascinated by water, and he laced the property with a hydroelectric dam, a water-powered mill, gardens, and a pool; the springhouse was one more of his water features. Most of the estate is managed by the park today, and reaching the springhouse takes a short detour off the Twin Creeks Trail, past the science center the park runs on the old grounds.

Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail

The Roaring Fork Motor Nature Trail is a one-way loop of about 5.5 miles that begins just outside Gatlinburg and winds through old-growth forest, alongside a rushing mountain stream, and past some of the best-preserved homesteads in the park, including the Ephraim Bales and Alfred Reagan cabins. Near the end of the loop, a roadside cascade called the Place of a Thousand Drips spills down the rock right beside the car. The road is narrow and one-way, closed to buses and RVs, and open seasonally, roughly mid-April through late November.

Two of the park's most beloved waterfalls sit in this area. Grotto Falls, a 25-foot drop reached by a 2.6-mile round-trip walk on the Trillium Gap Trail, is the only waterfall in the Smokies you can actually walk behind. A little farther along Cherokee Orchard Road, the Rainbow Falls Trail climbs about 5.4 miles round-trip to Rainbow Falls, an 80-foot ribbon of water that is the park's highest single-drop waterfall, named for the rainbows that form in its mist on sunny afternoons. Whether you drive the loop or hike the spurs, it is one of the easiest ways to trade the park's traffic for its quiet.

Worth the Detour

None of these five turn up on the average postcard rack, and that is exactly the appeal. They reward the kind of visitor willing to park the car, take a side trail, or point the wheel down a back road instead of joining the line for the famous overlooks. Do that, and the most visited national park in the country starts to feel, for an afternoon, like it belongs to you.