The Smoky Mountain National Park has over 900 miles of hiking trails. At least that is how many are officially on park maps. there are many more, some are social trails, some are long forgotten and not maintained trails. Asbury Trail is the latter. The trail skirts the border of the park in the Cataloochee Valley area. Supposedly, it is named for Francis Asbury, the traveling Methodist Bishop who often visited the area. I am told this is the old Cattalucha Indian track and would have been the route into the valley.
The weathered sign beckoned me to step into the wood here. I followed the trail about two and a half miles before turning around.
Indian Cucumber Root in its Autumn outfit
Old property boundary
There is a very nice story about 13 acres of land here. A Floridian, Jason Preston often vacationed in the area and his family owned land nearby. When his grandmother died, he inherited 13 acres alongside the park. Rather than accept the developers' offers, he chose to sell the property at a bargain price to the Southern Appalachian Highland Conservancy. That is a mouthful. Suffice to say, it's SAHC most of the time. This took place earlier this year, 2022.
For the first mile or more, I was on single track trail before it transitioned an old road, lending some credibility to this possibly being the old Cattalucha Indian track.
There was a spot at which a undeveloped graded roadbed came right up to the trail but did not continue out of the park. I walked a short distance on this very wide roadbed, speculating as to what it might be. When I finished hiking, I met a park employee preparing to do some weed whacking on the Cataloochee Divide trail. Asking him what the road bed might be, he didn't have an answer but seemed intrigued. Then he said there were plans to build a road from the Valley out to I-40, a more direct and better road than the existing one. Perhaps that was what I saw.
No comments:
Post a Comment