We left the house a about 9:40 a.m., a bit later than we had planned, and the trip to Cade’s Cove took longer than we thought. The road follows Little River, with sharp curves and overhanging rock walls making progress slow. The scenery is grand, though, and we stopped a couple of times to take photos and admire it.
The Cade’s Cove Loop is an 11-mile one-way drive along a narrow road. Several stops along the way highlight restored homes, churches, and other structures from the time when Cade’s Cove was a thriving community. The literature warns that the drive can be slow, but we soon found ourselves sitting still.
After a while during which we had only inched forward, we finally realized that we were sitting in an animal jam! We got used to these in Yellowstone, where bison and elk and bears and wolves draw crowds. This time it was a bear that had stopped traffic. Ken managed to snap a quick photo as we passed.
We came to an interesting restored church. It has two front doors, which usually indicates that the congregation were separated by gender. In this case it's just because the church borrowed plans from another church.
We pulled out at the trailhead for Abram’s Falls and drove in through a meadow to the parking lot. We crossed a bridge and started on our 2.5 mile hike in to the falls.
The falls were lovely, and we found a nice wide flat rock to have our picnic lunch on.
Leaving Abram’s Falls trailhead, we came to another jam, but this one was being managed by park personnel, so the traffic moved a bit faster. Ken jumped out to get a few quick photos of the two bear cubs up in a tree that had caused the jam. Then he had to walk quite a way to the first place I was able to pull over.
Next was a stop at the Cade’s Cove Visitor Center and other attractions, including a molasses making demonstration, an operating grist mill, and a mountain music demo on the porch.
As we neared the end of the loop, we saw a car in front of us pull over and people pointing at a young bear moving through the field. We stopped too and got a few photos before it moved out of sight. We noticed that all the bears we had seen seemed small, but that may be because they are black bears rather than the grizzlies we saw at Yellowstone.
On the way home we stopped at “the Sinks,” which is just off the highway. Despite warnings about the serious danger of drowning, we watched as a couple of young men leapt from a rock overlooking the pool at the base of the falls.
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