#314 Smokemount Campground north of Cherokee

We found a site at Smokemont and it was gorgeous but they are non-electric, non water so your kind to got to be prepared. We had not known it at the time but as we went up the mountain and got settled in the weather called for like three days of torrential rain so that does put a damper on things a little bit. I picked up a couple of rain suits so they would be the equivalent to ponchos if we wanted to walk it would be okay.

When we were first going up to Smokemont we were passing by Cherokee and there was a couple of really beautiful elk crossing the road and they were just gorgeous with a lot of velvet. They would probably become pretty big racks actually maybe six to eight points but they were just so pretty.

I found it interesting that everybody was stopping and gawking so much that there was a police officer making people keep moving so it was an elk situation.

I had heard about Elks being in the area and I wondered is there a time or a place you can see them.

We were told that if you went from the campground down to the visitor center there's a really big field out there and they like to come out in the evenings and forage.

This was really great advice because we went down there and we saw quite a few maybe 3 to 10 off and on foraging about on the roadside and I just think they're beautiful.

On one of these excursions, I started getting really close to one and took lots of pictures.

There was another Elk encounter in Cherokee where we watched a handful of them crossing the river. They were on this side of the river and then they kind of got a little spooked and hit the river and it was just great to watch those guys crossing the river and I got some really good pictures of that.

They seemed very powerful and majestic to me.

I've become pretty interested in finding out if I could go to a Cherokee worship service.

I sort of figured that before the Europeans came they had a religion and that they were probably Cherokee people who still practiced it but where do you go? Do they do it on Sunday and so forth.

I thought I would ask maybe the people at the visitor center but that wasn't super easy and they were having like an exposition type thing at the visitor center of Cherokee. It was outdoors and their people doing crafts and stuff and selling their wares

I started a conversation with a lady who looked native to me. I know there's some risk of that like sorta can be insulting if you say hey, you're an Indian, I got a question for you. You got to be careful how you go about these things.

I sheepishly just said to her, Hi how are you doing I don't want to assume anything but I was going to say is, are you a native to the area and so forth?

She said that's okay yes, I'm Cherokee and everything's fine. I said I just wanted too not be a know-it-all or presumptuous.

Sometimes I can have an instant relationship with a person and she was immediately kind to me. I just said I was wondering if I could ask you a question how about religion and such.

If there was a really truly Cherokee experience, I would love to do that but it seems like wherever I look around there's Cherokee Methodist or Cherokee Catholic Cherokee Baptist or Cherokee Pentecostal but isn't there just a kind of a Cherokee type Church that worship in the old ways.

She said not that I really know of but I go to the Cherokee non-denominational across the river there and you're welcome to join us.

I was very tempted to and I thought about it and all but I got to tell you I really just kind of look like straight up regular all everyday Baptist by another name. I just didn't really want that so it seemed like there was no Cherokee religious church I could go to learn the creator ways.

I kind of assumed it's out there but I don't know where I'm going to keep my ears open.

To our amazement there was a UU Church in Franklin North Carolina. It was probably 45 minutes to an hour south but we decided to go to that service and then I believe it was homecoming that Sunday at my sisters church. We figured we could go by and say hello and maybe have some lunch.

That's exactly what we did and I would say we enjoyed it but you experience, service was a little weird.

I feel like our presence sort of spooked them a little bit because they decided to not have a normal service. They just had a business meeting for the whole hour. I hope it became obvious to them at some point that we would rather leave. We did and we were pretty disappointed if there wasn't an actual UU service.

We sat in on the hour-long business meeting for as long as we could but after up 15-20 minutes, I think we thought we were going to die and we left.

We were intercepted by a nice lady on the way out and she apologized for the nature of today's service and she said that our presence had made them aware of that maybe they shouldn't blow it off because God forbid you might have visitors come by now and then. She gave us a little quick tour downstairs of what all they had accomplished. I suggested in the future why don't you do your business meeting right after the service but not instead of the service because yeah that was kind of lame.

Later we went to Sheila's church at Watauga Baptist and had a nice visit with sister and she's just the best and later we went back to smokemont backup in Cherokee Country.

On one of our excursions, we went up deep into the national park and just toured it all over the place and drove down the winding roads to see all the scenes. I took some pretty nice pictures but it was kind of uneventful and yet beautiful but that was kind of a day.

We looked at the various roads and suggestions of drives and in some cases it would be a 4 to 6 hour drive all the way out to the western part maybe four hours back towards Bryson City and then two or three hours back to Cherokee. We didn't do all of that driving but maybe someday we will. It was a whole lot of driving and very little of civilization in the Smoky Mountain National Park that doesn't mean anything wrong with that but might be better just RV about some point instead of trying to see it day trips.

One day we were riding down the main road towards the visitor center and we saw an old meal and we thought it might be a nice hike to check things out The name of it was the Mingus Mill.

We walked down towards it and it was unattended but very interesting. There was a healthy creek flowing by and they intercepted it with a three-sided wooden channel and they directed the water away from the creek towards the mill. I tried to take pictures to show how it functions here.

It's not a water wheel like many we have seen. Looking down below we realized there there's a big metal bulb with a turbine inside so they push the water through there at a high flow rate and it spins the turbine down low which spins the shaft up to the grounding part upstairs. We just thought that was all very interesting and part of a nice day in the Smokey Mountains