This is an advanced backpacking trip to some of Tennessee’s best and most beautiful hiking trails over Memorial Day weekend. Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) is the most visited national park in the entire country. Among other things this means that registration is a bit more restricted than many other places we go.
, and hike about 22.5 miles over the next 2 days, including a mile or two along the famed Appalachian Trail. We’ll spend our first night at site 13, and our second night at site 113, returning back to the Twenty Mile Trailhead on Monday.
Tentative Notes (for future reference)
Registration for any backcountry site with GSMNP opens 30 days out, and with Memorial day being a popular weekend for people to be out we want to be ready to make a reservation on Apr 26. Our RSVP will be open through the month of April so that we know how many spots we need to reserve. Group sizes are limited to 8, so we need to know how many people are going before we register with the park. If we have 8 people register, we’ll have one crew of 8. If we have 12 people register we’ll probably do 2 crews of 6. If we have 16 people register we’ll do 2 crews of 8. And so on. The nice thing about this is that there’s not a strict limit on how many people can sign up. The challenging thing about this is we won’t know who’s in what crew until everyone registers and then we see what sites we’re able to get at GSMNP.
Several possible routes are mapped out below. Each trek will include a portion of the Appalachian Trail. When you register please note your preferred trek - actual trek assignments will be dependent on availability at registration time.
We have 3 Scouts who need to cook for various rank/positions. Since we have 2 full sets of meals, we’ll split up the cooking duties a bit so that everyone who needs to cook will be able to.